The good news is that my weekend trip to the Mekong Delta was absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic, and a definite highlight of my trip so far. The bad news is . . . I don't have pictures.
Well, that's not quite right. I do have pictures, an absolute wealth of them. And I must say a lot of them are pretty darn beautiful. But for some reason (Karma? Fate? The wrath of God?) the SD card on which they reside is no longer functioning. Or maybe it's the computer; I'm not quite sure. See, the problem is that when I stick the SD card into the little slot, the computer doesn't recognize that it's been inserted. Nothing happens. The card doesn't appear on the "My Computer" screen. I'm currently researching ways to fix this, but haven't found much. Some sources suggest that heat can warp SD cards, which leaves the data intact but renders the card itself useless, because it can't be detected. I certainly hope that isn't the case.
I still have to test the card on another computer, which I should be able to do tomorrow. If it works, I'll make a new entry full of pictures for you guys. If it doesn't, I guess you'll have to wait until I get home . . . to look at them on my tiny camera screen. Believe me, I'm as disappointed as you are. I'm really proud of these pictures; I think some of them are some of the finest I've ever taken, and I really wanted to share them with you, my wonderful readership, especially since I've left you so picture-deprived. But this is life, I suppose.
So enough bad news. Now onto the Mekong Delta trip itself, which is very good news indeed.
I woke up at 5 o'clock on Saturday morning. I took a shower, put together a bag of necessities, and met my three friends outside the house at 6. The rest of the morning was spent traveling to the city of Can Tho, which is the main hub of the Mekong Delta region. Now, I had been informed beforehand that this trip would take about three hours. I am fairly certain it was at least five. It felt twice as long. Let's just say traveling by motorbike is basically like traveling in a car, only slower, a lot windier, and not nearly as comfortable.
Thankfully the weather was glorious, and by glorious, I mean mid-sixties and overcast the whole day, with no rain. There was also some fascinating scenery along the way. It's easy to forget, living in the city, that the country of Vietnam is basically a big jungle. After all, the only signs of this in Saigon are a few palm trees here and there and the heat. It's remarkable, then, when leaving the city, how quickly you find find yourself in what is basically . . . a big jungle. A wall of palm trees lines either side of the road, punctuated by the occasional tiny village or lotus field. We stopped at what I suppose you could call a roadside cafe (a roof made of palm branches propped up with big sticks, with hammocks underneath to sit on) and ordered coconuts. The woman took us out back, grabbed a long stick with a hook on the end, and yanked them right out of the tree. Then she cut off the tops, stuck in straws, and handed them over. Coconuts are really pretty good.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to get many good pictures of the country, since we were moving and didn't really have time to stop.
Poverty is rampant in the city; in the country, it is omnipresent. The most common building materials are corrugated iron, scrapwood, and bedsheets. You see whole villages like this, propped up over the rice fields on little stilts. Whenever the highway crosses a river, there's a little fishing community built right on the water's edge. The houses all have porches jutting out over the water, where the boats come to load and unload.
The city of Can Tho itself is more or less indistinguishable from Saigon, to the point where if you took a picture of each place and asked a Vietnamese native which was which, I doubt they'd be able to answer. We found a hotel and rented one room for the night. There was another guy in the group, so we shared a bed; the two girls shared the other one.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. It was only about noon by the time we arrived in Can Tho. We had lunch immediately, and then set off for a nearby temple, which is apparently one of the oldest in Vietnam. It had some really neat architecture, and the Buddhist iconography inside was spectacular. Unfortunately I can't really describe any of it, and even if I could, it would hardly be an adequate substitute for actually seeing the stuff. This is where a functional SD card would come in handy.
Aha! Indeed it would.
The next stop was the Bang Lang Stork Sanctuary. It was about an hour's drive away from Can Tho, so we arrived around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, which it turns out is the best time to visit because dusk is when the storks all fly back to roost. To get to the sanctuary we had to drive deep into the jungle on a tiny, incredibly bumpy dirt path, and cross these terrifyingly skinny little stone bridges with no railing whatsoever. It was definitely worth it. It was astounding.
You can hear the storks from a long way off, but it isn't until you get there and kill the motor that you get the full impact. It's overwhelming. The air is filled with squawking. The trees are white with . . . well, you know. We went up a rickety spiral staircase to an observation deck, from which you could see out over the tops of the trees. The trees were completely covered in a layer of flapping, squawking stork.
Trust me, this is a lot cooler when you actually see it.
And now you can!
Anyway, since it was getting dark, many of my pictures of the stork sanctuary didn't turn out particularly well. But there are still a couple good ones, and I did manage to get a video. We came down the staircase and had dinner right at the sanctuary, which was probably my coolest dining experience in Vietnam so far. You'll never guess what they serve there. That's right, stork! A woman brought out a little grill and a plate of various stork, uh, pieces, including the heat and feet. At one point the power went out, so she set a few candles out on the table. There are few things more romantic than a candlelit meal of stork feet in the middle of the jungle, with a cloud of insects buzzing around your head.
After that we drove home and went to bed, because we were tired. I am also tired right now, so I think I'll go to bed, and save the next installment for tomorrow. No, this is not a pathetic device to raise my number of entries for November. Okay, it is. But I truly am tired. I think if I continued to write, the rest of my story would take a noticeable dip in quality, and I don't want to shortchange you guys like that. But before I sign off, I'd like to close with another bit of good news:
Tonight I bought my bus ticket to Angkor Wat!
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