Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Week 9.5: Ben Tre (Mekong Delta)
We left HCMC for a long weekend, exchanging crowds, abundant street food, street art, public transit, & noise for peace, the rustle of palm fronds, quiet boat rides, and scenic bike rides. As Kepfram has noted, our time in Vietnam is coming to a close, so we wanted to make sure we got a taste of rural life in the south as well as urban.
Though the day we arrived there was torrential rain, but the monsoon season is ending in this region of SE Asia, and we actually had very little rain while visiting the Delta - still plenty of flooding, though, when the tide comes in!
The bikes available seem to be typical for those at homestays on our budget - rusty and creaky, with questionable brakes and difficult to adjust seats - but we made them work and went exploring: lots of coconut plantations featuring canals between the rows of trees (to allow harvest by boat), winding narrow cement paved cycle/motorbike tracks between houses and farms and riverways in various states of repair, a coconut candy workshop, lots of roadside stalls selling fresh produce or prepared foods, many many territorial but relatively harmless dogs.... The most fun was biking though flooded streets at high tide!
While our homestay is happy to offer longer and more extensive tours, they seemed out of our budget, so we explored the region by bike instead and only took a short (1 hour) sampan ride from the dock on the property along the local tributary, and a couple of ferry rides between the mainland and the neighboring islands in the wider river.
Labels: Vietnam
Ellie, 10:27 AM
