Photos: Lyle Such
Camera: Canon 5d Mkiv, DJI Mavic Pro
Writing: Thu Buu
Coconuts! Coconuts! And more coconuts! From above, we realized how coconut trees dominate the landscape of this area. Coconut trees grow tall very quickly, but it takes about three years to bear fruit. A tree is good for about fifteen years. No wonder a disproportionate part of this region’s economy rely on coconut products.
There are three types of coconuts grown in this region. The little yellow ones are not so good or so special. The green kind is best for its sweet juice, for drinking it straight from within the shell. The brown coconut is used for making food products such as candy and oil. We had no idea about the many uses of the coconut tree.
At this one-man coconut factory, this guy uses a spear to separate the fibrous covering from the hard coconut shell. He separates about 2000 coconuts a day. The fibrous part is burned for fire and heat. Ally and I learned the important island survival skill of splitting a coconut and not losing all its juice. We had to hit the middle of the coconut with the blunt side of the knife with deliberate force. After each hit, we had to rotate the coconut a little. After about the third or fourth smack, the coconut cracked open in half.
The hard coconut shell is then burned and ground into powder to be mixed into cosmetics products. The following day, Ally bought a tube of mascara made with brunt coconut shells as part of its ingredient.
Coconut leaves are excellent as thatch. They’re also regularly used in crafting to create baskets, toys and hats among many other items.
Fifty feet away from the one-man coconut factory was a brick-making factory comprised of two kilns. Each kiln holds about 10,000 bricks. The clay for the brick is taken from another part of the country, but it gets molded here. Rice husks are the main fuel agent to fire these kilns.
This is a family owned noodle-making factory. After the rice mixture is stirred, it is then spread onto large rectangular bamboo trays and laid out in the sun for about three days to dry. These ladies were peeling the dried sheets and stacking them into a pile. Twice a week, the factory runs the machine to shred the sheets into noodles.
After lunch, we got onto bikes for a short ride to Co Sau’s place. She makes coconut flavored banh trang with sesame seeds on her earthen oven. They were light, fluffy and crunchy. They were delicious with tea, which was offered everywhere we went. Tea would be poured so fast we didn’t even have time to object. We all had a chance to practice making banh trang. Pouring the mixture was easy, but transferring the congealed sheet onto the bamboo tray for drying and still maintaining a perfect circle in the process was a bit tricky.
That night, we stayed at Co Trinh’s homestay right on the bank of the river. Sticky with sweat and covered with mosquito repellant, we jumped into the river for a bath. Using the life jackets to keep us afloat, we stayed close to the gazebo because the current in the middle of the river was strong. Quy and Hang decided not to join us in the river. As night approached, we wandered the garden looking for fireflies flickering among the treetops. My idea of a romantic evening.
I noticed how low the river seemed, baring naked the legs of the stilt homes along the river’s bank. At first, I attributed it to low tide, but even as the day progressed, the water level did not seem to raise much. Kiet explained the dire situation of the poor and voiceless people in this area. In the name of progress (bought with large sums of money), the communist government allows companies to pump sand from the bottom of the river to build new homes in other places without a care as to its destructive results, endangering the properties and livelihoods of the poor living in these stilt homes. The depletion of sand has compromised the foundation of many of these stilt homes. Many are starting to lean sideways at precarious angles and will likely fall over in the near future. And there’s nothing the local people can do about it. Kiet laments, “It’s a one party system. The Justice department is the same as the Legislative and the Executive departments.” No matter how “broken” we complain our democratic system is, it’s still better than being under Communist rule. That’s for sure.
Another special part of life on the delta was the floating market. It is now a ghost of what it had been before, barely a handful of boats with actual products to sell. We saw a few houseboats bobbing on the river, not enough to comprise a thriving community.
When modern bridges were built, land transportation became so convenient that many floating boat merchants gave up their former life on the river and set themselves in stalls at the base of the bridge. We were witnessing the end of a whole way of life.
This boat full of fruits for sell is mainly here to serve tourists like us. The tamarind I bought wasn’t even a local produce; it came from Thailand.
We made a short stop to visit a local fish sauce and soy sauce maker. The products here are only good enough for regional use. The quality is not high enough for international sells. They also make fermented tofu.
We biked around Con Tan Phong visiting many family owned factories and businesses. Baskets and vases weaved from dried river lilies, luc binh. Thatch made from coconut palm leaves. Hats weaved from buffalo weed. Hats made from metal molds. This lady used the veins of banana leaves to weave hammocks. Beautiful lacy eggroll wrappers made by poking holes in the bottom of tin cans and a few quick twists of the hand over a hot wok. Kiet bought some wrappers, and we rolled eggrolls with it for dinner that night. All in all, resourceful is the word that comes to mind when describing the economy of this area.
The best part of this island was its abundance fruit trees and orchards. Along our bike route, we saw vu sua trees full of ripe round fruits, jackfruit trees laden with giant pokey fruits from the trunk all the way up to the branches. We even saw the stinky durian fruit tree in its flowering stage with one tiny fruit dangling from a flimsy looking branch. I wonder how a thin looking tree like that can carry the weight of a full grown durian fruit?
We passed by a chom-chom, rambutan, orchard. Kiet asked if we could pick from the trees, and the owner pleasantly agreed to let us have some fun. $20,000 dong per kilo. The orchard came complete with tall bamboo ladders so Tuan could climb to the top and pick the very ripest fruits for us to enjoy. Fresh chom-chom is so juicy, sweet and crunchy. The white fruit comes off the pit with ease, unlike the store-bought ones I’ve had my whole life.
We love tropical fruits, and most of us had never seen these fruits on a tree before. This was so much fun. We were in fruit heaven. Now I’m a tropical fruit snob, and this experience will spoil the enjoyment of tropical fruits for me for a long time.
The owners of these boats probably thought we were crazy because we told them we’d only go on the boats if they let us do the rowing. At first, rowing with double oars was difficult. We ran into a few tree branches. The trick is actually in the stance and finding a rhythm. Once we got those two points down, we were rowing like pros, except for Hang. Her boat kept turning sideways. It was much more fun than just sitting there and letting others row for us.
We stayed in Vinh Long for the night, and our reception included a private performance of local folk music, tan co gio duyen and cai luong.
We helped prepare our dinner that night. Once again, there was too much on the menu, but the host wouldn’t agree on cutting back some dishes. We had eggrolls, and banh xeo among a dining table full of other dishes, which we barely even touched.
The drinks special was the most delicious, creamy and fresh soursop smoothy hand-crafted from the biggest soursop I had ever seen. It was bigger than my head. I professionally operated on the fruit, deftly peeling the skin and extracting the seeds using a pair of forks. Yummm. It was the best soursop smoothy I have ever slurped.
It was a night of specials; special musical performance, special dinner, special drink, and a special guest for tea after dinner, this green katydid. It took Tuan, Lyle, and I about half an hour to capture it for this picture and some footage.
The next morning, we set off to explore Vinh Long on bikes. The cement roads were a little narrow for us, especially on old bikes stuck on the wrong gear. A few of us had close calls with the ditches on the sides of the paths.
We stopped at this corner stand for fresh pressed sugar cane juice with a squeeze of cumquat. Delicious and refreshing. As we waited, Kiet and Tuan tried to gather the tiny red trung ga fruit from the tree that was providing us shade. The fragrance of the fruit was so familiar to me, but I couldn’t seem to place it.
Peddling along, we spotted a couple trees overflowing with ripe logans. We had to have some. The owner invited us in and encouraged us to help ourselves with his fruit trees. He taught us how to identify ripe fruits. Look for a depression at the top of each fruit where the stem is.
The owner was very interested in Lyle. He said that because Lyle is so big and strong, he would be great at carrying logan baskets from the field. So how about that Lyle, drop your job and become a field hand in Viet Nam? You can have all the logan your heart desires.
Sitting on the porch of a friendly logan farmer’s house sucking on sweet freshly picked tropical fruits and enjoying each others’ company seems like such a quintessential Southern Vietnamese thing to do.
Kiet really wanted to go to this amusement park because he had heard of the da dieu, ostriches there, and he’d never seen a live one before. The amusement park was a strange place. There was a depressing set of cages, resembling a zoo, with forlorn looking animals trapped inside.
Apparently Lyle was the main attraction that day. Lyle and I were walking down the path when all of a sudden a couple of ladies, giddy with laughter, swooped in, grabbed him by the elbow, and pulled him away for a photo opportunity. Out of courtesy, they did turn to me and asked to “borrow” him for a quick moment or two. Soon, everyone in the group wanted a picture with the tall, white guy. Lyle sure did make their day.
The ostriches were used for giving rides. They looked wretched. Their feathers had fallen off where the saddle’s been placed. But to the locals here, this was a fun, unique experience. And for Kiet, it was his only chance of seeing one of these great animals in real life.
Across from the ostrich ride was the alligator pond. When I saw the gators’ mouths open in the air without moving, I thought they looked like plastic molds. But they were actually real gators just waiting for their chance to chomp at a piece of meat the park goers would dangle in front of their noses.
Rice wine is ubiquitous in Viet Nam. But rice wine fermented with poisonous creatures like scorpions and cobras are specialties rumored to possess medicinal healing powers. We thought it would be fun to bring some home as gifts, but U.S. customs would probably not approve.
