Floating Markets at Cantho in the Mekong Delta

I took yet another boat trip, this time with a couple of English guys, setting off at five thirty in the morning, to get to the floating markets at their busiest. Little boats laden with pineapples, melons, potatoes, cabbages, mangoes, etc all cluster together at the edge of the river. Boats of every size come to buy from them. Little boats sell hot coffee, bananas and snacks. Tourists arrive in boats of all sizes and buy fruit, pasties and great round crispy pancakes, their boats wedged in among the floating market boats, taking photos. Vietnamese women row little boats standing up. It is dawn and a hive of activity. Some of the boats leave as the sun comes up.

We continued to a  place where we got out to watch rice-noodle making by hand. The wet mixture was spread onto a round flat griddle, covered with a lid, left a few seconds to cook, then removed and placed on a bamboo rack to dry. The dried round flat pancakes are pushed through a machine that slices them into thin strips, about the thickness of a rubber band. The women employed in this tedious, repetitive work chatted non-stop to relieve the boredom.

We continued on to another floating market, where we stayed, wedged in, until the boats began to disperse. Then our boatman took us to a riverside restaurant, where we happily ordered lunch, before looking at our watches and realising that it was eleven o'clock. Oh well, we've been up since five without breakfast. Seems like a good time to eat, we thought. Women came and massaged our backs and shoulders, without a word. then they asked us for fifty thousand dong each. We refused to pay. then the restaurant tried to overcharge us and also added the massage to the bill. We paid for our food and drink and left.

The boatman took the boat into a part of the waterway where mangroves grew. The water was full of rubbish and he had to keep stopping to disentangle the propeller from the plastic bags that wrapped themselves around it.The mangroves didn't look healthy.

After a while we turned into a canal with cleaner looking water and healthier looking mangroves. But they were not like the mangroves I remember from the  Everglades in Florida, where they are properly protected. People had chopped branches off to stop them spreading too far into the channel, branches hanging down did not quite touch the water and those sticking up out of the mud were bare and leafless. Some of the trees had whole patches of leafless branches.

Last night I met a young German woman studying mangroves in Vietnam as her PhD project. She told me that people damaged the mangroves by walking in the mud where the new shoots were growing, in order to collect mussles and shellfish. Her project was to find out whether these people were local to the area, why they came there and all sorts of other things about their lives, then to think of ways in which to communicate with them about the damage they were doing to the environment that provided them with their living. But somehow I don't think the mangroves we saw were damaged by people collecting shellfish. I have a suspicion that pollution may have been the cause.