Today is Day 3 in Ho Chi Minh City and we spent the whole day on a private tour of the Mekong Delta. The weather was perfect, and the trip ‘eye opening’ in places. I am not a fan of tours you pay to go on to observe the culture and sights of other places only to find out that you’re taken somewhere to be ‘shown’ something but you’re really expected to ‘buy’ something. Even though this happened, the day was wonderful as the Vietnamese are such beautiful people.

OK, now I need to make a confession AND a correction.

My confession is that I took way too many photos today and will possibly include a few too many in this post. So apologies in advance.

The correction relates to my previous comment about how clean Vietnam is. Sadly I must report that the Mekong River and its banks are very polluted, mostly with plastic. Mick and I have seen this before in other countries, but it still is quite confronting.

We were collected at 7.45am from our accommodation by our guide (Sonny) and our captain (who I called Cher, but we were never introduced). He did a great job driving us the 80km south to our destination for lunch (Mỹ Tho, Tien Giang).

Our tour had several stops – and the degree of difficulty for entering and exiting the boat increased exponentially. Mick did extra well despite his rugby-impacted knees.

The first stop was a market where we wandered with our guide who was keen to point out all the fresh food, including fish and seafood.

There was a tray of fresh frogs for sale, but what I didn’t like was seeing the tray of recently skinned frogs that were still jerking in a small pool of juices. I did buy something here, a small handful of long black finger grapes. It wasn’t until I was back on the boat that I remembered I wasn’t going to eat anything that had not been washed. I rinsed them with some bottled water and enjoyed a few until our next stop.

We arrived at Coconut Kingdom and were taken for a ride in tuk tuks. We were grateful for this as there was another option for travelling through the area which involved some poorly-looking horses and carts. The last stop was a coconut sweet making factory where we were shown the processes used to hull the coconuts and make the caramel lollies. Here I did buy some of the products, and although Mick tasted the snake flavoured rice wine, I was thankful he was not tempted to buy anything.

Next stop was the Honey Kingdom where we were served honey flavoured tea that was mixed with bee pollen. We were also tempted with dried bananas, Royal Jelly and honey, before being led to a beautiful undercover area. For what we did not yet know.

We were seated at a table with lots of fresh fruit and were told in which order we should eat them and which ones we should dip in the chilli flavoured salt. The next part though was the big surprise. One by one, we had 6 different woman sing to us in Vietnamese.

Our guide later told us they were songs sung by the workers in the rice paddy fields. It was an amazing, if not awkward experience, and of course we were expected to tip. My son was flabbergasted when he saw me hand over a 500,000VND note plus some other smaller ones. He said later he could tell I enjoyed the experience but that size tip was more than they would have expected. He reckoned that was why they just kept on singing.

The most interesting thing I observed today and learnt about though was in relation to the way the Vietnamese people bury their family. We had spotted a largish graveyard from the boat where the graves were covered by a roof or a pagoda. When we visited the ‘kingdoms’ we spotted graves around the coconut plantations, and in some places these graves were in people’s backyards, or even front yards, like the single one in the photo.

Vietnamese people like to be close to the spirits of their dead ancestors. Our guide even told us that in some places, the people are buried beneath the homes. They will never sell their land as they want to be always near their ancestors. Another very surprising snippet was that in some locations the dead have a tube going down to the coffin so that food (fruit and vegetables only) can be dropped to the dead. This lasts for 100 days.

Before our stop for lunch we were taken by small boat back to our boat. This was when the challenge became quite difficult – getting into and out of the boats. There were dozens of these boats moving both directions in the canal and access was only via steps.

But we all made it safely.

We spotted a couple of Lady Buddhas on our trip – our guide told us she is the buddha of forgiveness as opposed to Happy Buddha (or Fat Buddha). Unsure if she was pulling our legs.

There were many homes like this along the river banks near Ho Chi Minh City. It reminded Mick and I very much of what we saw on a trip around Bangkok a few years ago. It is difficult to imagine living in these places.

Once we returned, Mick and I went for a swim and headed out to find something ‘light’ for dinner, and we hit the jackpot. We found a Spanish tapas bar across the street from our apartments.

Two very happy and tired travellers!

What’s in store for tomorrow?? Our son has booked us into a traditional cooking class. We’ve always threatened to do a class on our travels, but this will actually be our first.