Wide-Eyed Wanderer Adventures

Chapter 2 · The Mekong Trail

The Mellow Mekong Delta

6 February 2011

Offering nourishment to the passengers...
Cooking Ban Xeo - at a bus stop - the best kind!
I found many graves to be in people's back yards and flower gardens....
Death is not shunned here like it is in the West. Ancestors are honoured. 
Boys with toys - learning to slay dragons.
The little ones had everything - down to the drum and the weapons of dragon-slay!
A delightful alternative to the video-playing of the western kids....
Some kind of veggie drying all over the road.
The uber-casual bride.....
two Khmer ladies walking the boardwalk back and forth - theirs is the closeness one gets after decades of friendship.
Along the Mekong
Evening thoughts
Spiral inscents int he temple - huge red cones of musk and amber....
Washing cucumbers in Mekong - lettus floating away...
Mekong has a lot of lettuce floating down....
A tree has come.
Hats are good for more than the sun - they second as fans on a bus.
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Vinh Long - a sleepy Mekong island town....mellow as can be.

This is one of the truly few parts of Vietnam that enjoys a Jack-Johnson kind of pace. Yes, almost stoned. With the climate to match. It's delightful and the people have some of the brightest smiles I've seen. The relief here is to be seen as a human being vs. a walking white wallet [WWW, apparently, is an acronym for more than the cyber maze].

I've had some of the best Ban Xeo here in all of Vietnam - lotus roots inside an egg pancake hand-combined with some garden greens [innevitably - mint included] and wrapped in either rice paper or just a piece of lettuce for an on-the-spot spring roll to be dipped in some fish sauce concoction. REALLY yummy!

Most of the folks in this area are Khmer in origin, as the territory used to belong to Cambodia [and, thus, the Khmer empire earlier]. One can feel a drastic shift in the vibe - especially after the Saigon chaos.