March 22 The Mekong Delta

It occurred to me that when our “Happy Tour” tour guide for a three-day
jaunt into the Mekong Delta told us his name was, “Jackie. Jackie Chan” that
there was some deep-seeded psychological drama going on inside the man with
the long, almost flipped-back black hair, long-sleeve pink shirt and black
pressed pants. He did, indeed, look like Jackie Chan. He was so enamored
with his own character that I hadn’t the heart to tell him that Jackie Chan
hadn’t looked like that for 30 years. And since his Vietnamese name was
unpronounceable to the western lip, “Jackie” served quite well.

The guide’s personal identity problems aside, the trip which started by bus
in Ho Chi Minh city and then criss-crossed two major Mekong rivers (North
and South), as well as dozens of canals of various sizes – more than made up
for the rather humdrum mood of the slow boat ride I had taken along the
Mekong to get into Laos. Here, life spilled from houses, down the muddy
banks and into the water. People fixing boats, sinking logs, collecting mud
and selling anything and everything were within arm’s reach. And Jackie, who
had grown up in  the area, knew where to go to make each Mekong trip unique
so we didn’t feel like we were the umpteenth tourist to take a photo of life
in action and kids still ran out to say hello as if they had never seen a
white person before.

Each day of the trip was either an exploration on land or water. Among the
most impressive and serene of the sights was a stretch of about two or three
kilometers of the river near the border town of Chau Doc that was home to an
entire floating fishing village. More than 3,000 people live in floating
houses with rowboats and motorboats as their means of transport and the
water between their houses as their grid of streets. For almost an hour, we
floated noiselessly through people’s “backyards” and watched them pull nets
from the water, make breakfast, feed their dogs, wash clothes, talk with
neighbors or just sit and watch us go by.