Wow, what a country! We arrived a couple of days before our speaking assignment here. Funnily enough, they lost our luggage again (didn’t make the transfer in Hong Kong) and our hosts had the wrong date for our arrival so in the middle of the night we found an interesting hotel and hired a guide and we spent a wonderful couple of days on the Mekong Delta. With a cute Vietnamese guide we enjoyed four different boats, a fabulous bike ride through a remote village where we rode on six feet of pavement which turned out to be a three lane highway. There are 4 million motorbikes in Saigon alone and the number in the whole country is simply mind boggling. People passed within inches of us without batting an eye! We say kids playing marbles, gorgeous rice fields, a guy living with a flock of baby ducks, preparing to rid the rice fields of snails, commerce everywhere, even a few TVs in three roomed, dirt floored huts. At the end of the day, we got caught in a torrential rain storm and were laughing hysterically as we sloshed in our shoes. With no other clothes to change into except for a couple of extra shirts I had in my overnight bag, Richard wore one of my T shirts and we bought new shorts for him as these pants were literally dripping! There is such a barrage of new experiences coming every day that it is a hard to inhale it all!
Life on the Mekong Delta!
The floating markets were incredible. Climb aboard a "shop" and they’ll treat you to a pineapple!
The land markets were VERY interesting and breathtakingly pungent!
Beautiful, friendly people…also small!
