When I was a child, we learnt a song in school that went: “planting rice is never fun, bent from morn till set of sun …” I remember singing this on road trips in Malaysia as we passed by field after field of rice paddies and the occasional water buffalo. Today though, these views have been replaced by oil palm plantations, their endless rows of palms marching inexorably into the distance. Those childhood drives through rice paddies came to mind in the Mekong Delta as we passed by jade-green rice fields. The cultivation of rice is just one of the agricultural riches that we owe to the great Mekong, Southeast Asia’s longest river.
The Mekong, Southeast Asia’s longest river, runs for 2700 miles through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, emptying into the South China Sea in the delta. It’s the lifeline of millions of people in the region and beyond, and you truly get a glimpse into the bounty and might of this river on a visit to the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam. Here, the river finally reaches the sea through the delta lands, crisscrossed by numerous channels and tributaries – a rich agricultural landscape where gave me a deep appreciation of the source of the food we eat every day. In addition to the paddy fields, there are lush fruit orchards (oranges, dragon fruit, durian, mangosteen, coconut and more). The area is also famous for the floating markets.
We had a motorcycle tour through the villages. As we wound our way through the paths, we heard loud sounds of chirping swallows – but they weren’t coming from real birds. The cultivation of bird’s nest has become quite the rage here because of the profits to be made, and farmers have built tall barns for swifts to nest in. To attract the swallows, the farmers broadcast the calls of the swifts on outdoor sound systems.
We saw rice fields up close, the bikes carefully navigating narrow paths between the paddies, the sun beating down on our shoulders. In the midday heat, dragonflies floated overhead. We passed by monkey bridges spanning ditches among the cultivated fields – I have no doubt that crossing these simple wooden structures truly requires the agility of a monkey. Needless to say, we just stopped for a photo-op and didn’t even attempt a crossing.
Riding down a path, we came across an old woman counting a batch of coconuts, squatting on the ground among the coconut trees, tossing the fruits one by one from one pile to another. Suddenly we heard a mobile phone ringing whereupon she casually pulled out a mobile phone from her pocket and answered it. After a brief conversation, she squatted down and resumed her count as if the interruption never happened!
We met some local women planting rice, bare legs half-submerged in the water. Gamely posing for photographs and laughing, they bantered good-naturedly with our young tour guide, asking if he was looking for a wife and proposing their sisters, daughters or even themselves as prospective brides. These are the indomitable daughters of the delta. Planting rice may not be fun in the heat and humidity of south Vietnam, but they still took time out to greet us strangers merrily. Or maybe, our appearance gave them with a welcome break from their labours. I wondered if their daughters and grand-daughters would continue with this back-breaking work, or if these women would prefer their children to take on less laborious jobs. In the future, who would cultivate rice – our staple food?
Lunch was a home-cooked meal in a Vietnamese home, with spring rolls, pork, vegetables and a sour fish soup, complete with very large chunks of fish. Vietnamese houses always have a front porch, which is very useful in the hot summer as the family can gather there to catch the breeze. The front yards are always swept clean while the front room in the house also occasionally doubles up for motorcycle parking!
The two main towns in the delta region are My Tho, which hosts thousands of tourists embarking on cruises on this part of the Upper Mekong, with the boats passing the cultivated islands named after Vietnamese mythical animals: dragon, unicorn, phoenix and turtle. We transferred to a smaller boat at Ben Tre, where we chugged through a tranquil, narrow channel of the river, lined with trees – these channels are described as “Amazon-like” in tourist brochures. The final stop was a coconut plantation where we learnt about coconut rats – large rodents which climb up the trees to get to the juicy fruit, which the farmers keep away by nailing metal plates on the coconut trunks, as the rats will not be able to climb up the metal plates. I remembered once again the usefulness of the coconut tree: fruit for eating or to be made into sweets, juice for drinking, the shell for carving into objects, and the leaves for the roof of your house. And yes, there are plenty of opportunities to buy some coconut souvenirs here.
It was a long day, and we headed to the biggest town in the delta, Can Tho, for the night, passing through the spectacular, Mekong-spanning 8331m-long Rach Mieu suspension bridge which was completed in 2008.
To see the floating markets, it’s necessary to stay overnight in the region – we were already on an arrow-boat and heading out to the markets at 6 am. Unfortunately it was a festival day so the markets weren’t as bustling as they normally were. These markets capture the agricultural richness of the region. Each boat had a long pole at its bow, with specific vegetables tied to the pole indicating the produce it was carrying. Transferring larger vegetables like cabbages to the buyer’s boat is simple: the crew form a line and toss the cabbages from one person to the next until it reaches the boat. Small boats selling coffee and breakfast plied between the larger boats and tourist boats.
The traders of the floating market spend weeks at a time on the river – a way of life that has its own rhythms according to the seasons. From here, the fruits and vegetables make their way to markets around the country, ferried to their destinations by truck, motorbike and even bicycle. Boats from here sail all the way to Ho Chi Minh City. This is a way of life that has gone on for generations, and is likely to continue for a while longer. And along the river, people still live in wooden houses, and use the river water for washing or for their plants. The Mekong is life.
Leaving the market, our boat turned into a network of smaller tributaries and we passed quietly through a lush green landscape, passing the occasional village. It was 7 am, still early, but already time for the morning news and daily propaganda radio broadcasts amplified in the villages through outdoor speakers. Accompanied by this morning soundtrack, people went about their daily business, riding motorbikes and bicycles on narrow roads and paths and across bridges in this peaceful watery land. Women still transported goods the traditional way, on baskets suspended on either end of a wooden pole balanced across their shoulders, wearing the traditional conical bamboo hats to protect them from the sun. From the narrow tributaries, we suddenly emerged into a wider channel and came across fishermen (and women) in small boats. Time to capture some signature shots of life on the Mekong.
I imagined the Mekong as a network of veins, arteries and capillaries, bringing teeming life onto the earth and sustaining the lives of people, plants, and the very land here. Nature provides and human ingenuity over the generations has harnessed the power of the river for life and civilisation.
We also learnt that sadly, the Mekong is changing, and possibly not for the better. Further upstream, stretches of the river have been dammed for hydroelectricity, with effects on the river’s route downstream, its biodiversity, and ultimately the lives of people living along the mighty river. It’s not certain what the future will bring, and what damage we’re doing to these rich lands.
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