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Harsh life in a gentle river setting
In the high-tide season, a lot of people flock to
the Mekong Delta not only to drift on the swollen rivers but to know more of the
hardships and the lifestyle of people in the Delta.
Not boasting clear, blue water, the rivers of the Mekong Delta are a humble dark
red year round. The build-up of alluvium from way upstream enters the Delta and
gives the waters here their special color. While tourists like floating on
rivers to relax and forget daily worries, the rivers are house and a working
place for residents.
On vacation, tourists are keen to discover new things in new places, so they are
excited to take photos of boatmen, sellers on floating markets or residents
washing clothes and dishes or cooking in riverside-houses or in boat houses.
However, all these activities tell them that those are poor people with unlucky
fates as they have no house on solid land but live on a boat. Every day, before
sunrise, the boats, some from far-away places, drift to the floating market to
sell products.
When the sun rises high at mid-day, tourists find a restaurant to have lunch as
well as to flee the scorching heat, but the floating sellers still row under the
sun with their tired advertising cries.
Mekong Delta tours visit romantic canals shaded by endless groves of coconut
trees or mangroves and wonderful orchards. These canals link to various branches
of the great river and make for relaxing boat trips. The experience of drifting
on the canals is so great that many tourists forget their troubles in the peace
and quiet.
However, tourists who talk with the boatman may learn that he gets only VND5,000
for each short canal boat trip. They wear traditional clothes with a conical hat
and their smiles are always austere.
Most Delta tours also visit craft villages, coconut candy factories in Ben Tre
Province or pho and rice factories in Can Tho City. Pho (rice noodle soup) is
the pride of Vietnamese cuisine and most foreigners in Vietnam like it but few
of them know that making pho includes many meticulous phases, from mixing and
stressing the flour to steaming and drying it and then cutting it into pho.
“I really like Vietnamese food, especially pho, but I just learned that making
pho is not easy at all, and it needs prudence and diligence,” said Isa, a
tourist from Belgium.
“It seems that most people here are leading austere lives. Everyday, we eat rice
but this is the first time my heart sank down as I feel moved by the misery of
farmers here,” said Noortie, a girl from Holland.
We leave the Mekong Delta on a rainy afternoon by boat leading to the bus
station. Boats drift silently before our eyes. Somewhere, we hear the weak cries
of a female seller from a nearby boat, “Rau cai day, ca rot day (vegetables
here, carrots here).”
The utter calmness and the silent rain drops seem to intensify the stirring of
emotions that the river and its people instill in visitors.
Source: VietNamNet/SGT |
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