Jessica's Travel Blog: Mekong Delta

Our next stop after Phú Quốc was a tour around the Mekong Delta. It wasn't the most amazing tour ever. Our guide didn't talk very much, and the weather was pretty rainy the whole time, which prevented us from doing some stuff. However, the Mekong is very beautiful and we got to spend a lot of time on river boats, which was pretty cool. The people were awesome, and we had a really run time hanging out with our tour group. Plus, we did a home-stay in a little river village where we got to make our own food with locals, learned how to purify river water, and went to a morning food market for the village.

The Mekong Delta region is the single largest exporter of rice in the world. The delta produces 25 million tons of rice a year. It also has a 20% of Vietnam's population in this 15,000 square-mile region. This is impressive considering most of the region is covered in rivers and rice paddies.

We visited two manufacturing businesses. One that makes rice noodles and one that makes coconut candy. These businesses were pretty small scale, but we got to see the manufacturing process.

The best part of the tour was the floating market. This is a functional market (apparently the ones in Thailand are just for tourists) where local farmers bring their produce on boats and local sellers buy in bulk to then take the produce to local markets (like the one in the small village we visited). It was pretty awesome to see people just approach each other by boat and load up boats with various fruits and produce.

Boy selling bananas

Pho on a boat.

Overall I would not recommend the Mekong Delta unless you have a lot of time in Vietnam. Our home stay was pretty fun, but more because of the other guests staying there. I did experience one of the cutest moments of our trip. This kitten was actually being taken care of by this dog who was nursing the kitten and letting her use it as a pillow. So cute!