No Boat? No Girlfriend.

Saigon may well be the most hectic city I've ever experienced. Motorbikes swarm around cars by the millions. Heavy machinery goes about its business in the middle of the street. Markets sprawl in twisting mazes of thousands upon thousands of stalls. Men and women practice Rumba and tai chi in public parks by the score. Powerlines make Hanoi look organized. 

We spend a solid day sightseeing. We tour the Reunification Palace, a stong but elegant building styled after bamboo, a symbol of the south's surrender filled with ornate reception rooms, 70s pop furniture, and a drab, expansive bunker network housing room after room of ancient radio communication. We visit the post office, where high, arcing ceilings frame hand-painted murals of old international trade routes and deep brown polished wood still holds cubicles where transactions take place. We visit a lacquer workshop, where artisans grind duck shells and lay them into intricate patterns, to be cured by layer upon layer of finish over the course of several weeks' time. And we visit the War Remnants Museum, a striking, comprehensive tribute presented primarily through room upon room of photographs (supported by propaganda posters, torture devices and air crafts) that somehow manages to come off as fascinatingly, elegantly morbid. 

We take a taxi across town into the upscale sectors, where mega malls and Western comfort-companies (first time I've seen a 24-hour Fitness since leaving home) command prime real estate, and find our way to the only cinema in the city playing Star Wars (apparently it's not really a thing here... sorry Travis). 

We spend the next three days in the Mekong Delta, navigating Vietnam's southernmost region primarily via waterways. This is a place where transport relies heavily on boats ("No Honda, No Girlfriend" changes to "No Boat, No Girlfriend") and the Mekong churns slowly toward the sea, flat expanses of muddy water and floating hyacinth pushed onward by water flowing from mountains hundreds of miles upstream. Slender fingers branch from the main river, engulfing thousands of islands and miles upon miles of stilt houses and fruit orchards in a broad maze of smaller rivers and tidal canals.

Once we cross leave the city and cross the river on our first day we see fruit trees everywhere we look. Coconuts cluster high in palms and rambutan bunch by the thousands in canal-fed orchards. Mango, longen, pomelo and lime trees grow by the row in gardens, often supporting dragonfruit's cactus vines. Jackfruit trees stand tall, massive spiky green-yellow fruits drooping low. People do not spend money for food here, our guide tells us. Everything they need grows in their garden or swims in the river.

In a canal just outside the small city where we've left our van we visit a small factory where cakes and crackers and candies are produced from coconut and rice. Rice is used for everything here: the the grain is eaten, made into popped rice and crackers and cakes. Rice husk fuels production fires, literally spilling from rooms dedicated to its storage, shoveled into heavy brick stoves. Ships built specially to transport husks carry towering loads to factories up and down the Mekong.  Leftover ash serves as fertilizer, returning to fields and crops once again.

We continue into the island maze, navigating canals in a slender boat rowed by a petite woman weilding long double oars. Trees droop low over the water and orchards tower overhead as we pass people going about their daily business from houses built alongside a narrow sandy track lining the waterway. Eventually we pull alongside the bank, climbing past mudskippers to a house set in a sprawling garden full of fruit trees and squacking ducks. Our host spends the evening teaching us to make traditional southern pancakes, spreading batter, shrimp and mushrooms thin in massive woks over single-burner cook stoves. 

We begin heading north the next day, stopping into a fruit nursery on our way out of the canals and walking amongst row upon row of coconut shoots (still in the shell), roseapple trees, jackfruit trees and dragonfruit cacti. We also visit a monster operation of a ceramic factory set on the river bank, where brick kilns large enough to hold houses tower above corn husk storehouses and sprawling rooms where workers press clay into potted molds. Row upon row of Easter island heads stand drying in front bricks stacked ceiling-high, all waiting to be fired by the thousand before being exported. We spend the night in the delta city of Can Tho, walking a mid-street night market full of miniature potted cacti and watching an undulating light show on a massive suspension bridge spanning the river beneath our hotel. 

We wake early to visit the Cai Rang floating market, a bustling wholesale affair conducted from dozens of clustered boats thirty minutes' ride upriver from Can Tho. Men and women toss watermelons, pumpkins and tapioca between cargo boats piled full and clustered according to product, examples displayed high from the prow on bamboo poles to guide customers toward the appropriate boat.

We visit a rice noodle factory to see a woman spreading wide, crepe-like discs of batter made from rice and tapioca flour over a scorching fire fed by rice husks while her partner lays them over bamboo racks to dry in the sun. A third man feeds dried sheets through a machine, cutting them into slender noodles before wrapping and tying 5-kilo portions in paper to be shipped to market.

Later in the day as we head north, orchards and islands give way to rice fields. From our raised road we look out over young golden-green growth sectioned and fed by occasional canals, stretching flat to Cambodian mountains silhouetted on the horizon. Scarecrows constructed of bamboo and plastic ponchos dot the green expanse, and workers dwarfed by their surroundings bend low to tend young shoots in the afternoon haze. This is the rice bowl of Vietnam, our guide tells us.

We stop in the afternoon at Tra Su Bird sanctuary, a place originally planted in 2003 as a way to 

preserve paperbark and mangrove trees which has since attracted a stunning spectrum of wetland life. Our boat winds into a maze of blooming water hyacinth and paperbark trees from which birds rise by the dozen as we pass. Herons and egrets perch on low branches, anhingas sun themselves overhead, cerulean and crimson kingfishers wait amongst leafy clusters, and various other flocks circle above the trees. In a way it reminds me of home; it's the first time I've been in a wetland forest since arriving in Southeast Asia.

We reach a small dyke and change into a non-motorized paddle boat on other side, entering an etherial world. Young mangroves rise from the water in tangled brown masses of roots to funnel into slender trunks, twisting upward into branches scattered with songbird nests that join low overhead. Miniature water lilies shroud the water on which we travel, providing a platform from which birds pluck insects from the wetland's surface.

We spend the night near the Cambodian border in a hotel overlooking two rivers' confluence, watching a steady progression of boats as they navigate the waterways. Activity calms as day turns to dusk, lights in the fishing village lining the opposite shore reflected in the slow-moving water beneath a deep blue night.

We eat dinner in a highrise after returning to Saigon on our final day in Vietnam, watching the sun set over the earth's gentle curve from high above the city. The next morning we wake and I say goodbye to my parents. They leave for the airport to travel homeward, and I continue... forward.