Mekong Day 1 - Part 2

Day 1, December 11

The name of our boat is the Mekong Melody and is made entirely of Teak. It's beautiful! Our two cabins, kitchen and crew quarters make up the bottom deck with an airy walkway on the port side. The upper deck has an outdoor dining room, captains wheel, two lounge chairs aft and two more on the bow. A bamboo canopy covers the dining area and captains wheel to provide much needed shade. Even I need a reprieve from the sweltering 90 degree, 75% humidity weather.

Playing a board game - Risk!

Captain Sheldon

We pulled anchor at 1:00pm heading for Sa Dec, a lively town in the Dong Thap province of the Mekong Delta region, passing by the famous Cai Be floating wholesale market. Robert and I settled onto the two aft lounge chairs with books in our hand and the sun on our face. It was absolutely fabulous.

Lounging on Deck

It was hard to read when you could watch Vietnamese life going by instead. We were cruising by home after home where little boys and girls would run to the waters edge yelling hello repeatedly at the top of their lungs and waving frenetically. We all giggled and responded in the same way.

House on the Riverbank

We were passing boats heading downstream and boats heading upstream. There were boats everywhere. A river highway. Some boats were water taxis carrying people and their bikes or motorbikes from one side to another. Others were huge barges dredging sand from the riverbed to sell, or carrying logs, bricks or barrels of petrol. There were boats with bags of rice, boats with coconut husks others with rice husks. Small narrow fishing boats with a crew of one. Another boat with two pigs. Boats carrying potted flowers and plants. And the larger variety of boats/barges double their homes. You see people cooking, eating, bathing off the side, doing laundry then hanging it to dry on a clothes line strung port to starboard off the back. All these boats big or small have one thing in common - COMMERCE!

Sand from dredging the riverbed

The Mekong River is a bustling, hard working, product producing region.

Fishing / Houseboat

Once in Sa Dec we disembarked to explore the night market. There was everything under the sun for sale. We tried more unusual, interesting, delicious local fruit, and fresh squeezed sugar cane juice. We also marveled at the variety of seafood and were flabbergasted at the price of prawns the size of sausages.
1kg = $2.00 USD. 1kg = 2.2lbs So $2.00 would buy 15 - 20 huge, beautiful, fresh, scrumptious prawns!


Next, our guide showed us a vendor and asked us to guess what he was selling. There were stacks and stacks of shirt size boxes with a cellophane cover displaying paper doll like outfits, jewelry, accessories, cars, houses and more. My guess - for little girls dress up. Wrong!


The Vietnamese believe, that what ever you burn among the living your dead ancestors receive in their afterlife. So, they throw a huge party on the anniversary of a family member's death, invite all the surviving family members, prepare tons of food, drink even more and burn boxed up cardboard material possessions. The more things they burn, including paper $100 USD bills, the better off your deceased family members will be. Burn baby burn.


This package was my choice. I came with a cardboard Visa card so I figured I could buy anything I wanted in this so called afterlife.



On our way back to the boat we passed a night school in session. Our guide told us that most children not only go to school during the day, which is half day, but again at night. He shared he did the same when he was a student. He figured they were learning English and asked if we wanted to go in to talk to the students, "they love to practice their English with people any chance they get", he said. Sure why not!

There was one classroom filled with about 20 high school boys and girls learning literature in Vietnamese and another with a handful of 10th grade girls studying English with their teacher for an upcoming test. Everyone was giggling, looking and saying who knows what about is in Vietnamese. That's always weird. I decided to said a few Vietnamese phrases I picked up along the way which caused more giggling. The teacher invited us to sit down and let them ask us questions in English. The teacher asked us to correct any pronunciation. Taylor proceeded to show one girl how to diagram a sentence and when he pointed out each part of speech she beat him to the punch. "Verb". "Noun". "Adjective". I think she'll do just fine on the test.



Sa Dec night scene