Vietnam 2025 – The Mighty Mekong River – Part One

And so the highlight of our trip begins.

After four fantastic days in Ho Chi Minh City and the surrounding areas it was time to depart the big smoke and take a short drive of around an hour and a half to the port town of My Tho to embark on APT’s Luxury River Cruise ship the “Mekong Serenity” for our 8 day trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

The Mekong River is the third longest river in Asia, traversing over 4,900kms starting in the north in Tibet, then coursing through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and ending in South Vietnam where it exits the Magnificent Mekong Delta food belt into the South China Sea.

What a beast of a river it is, providing over 80% of fish alone that is eaten in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Along with rice fields, sugar cane, fruit, vegetables and other animal life the Mekong Delta and River supplies food and work opportunities for over 60 million people.

Historically everyone has had a hand in ownership of parts of the river – Chinese, Khmer, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese to name just a few. It’s a fascinating resource for most of the Asian region.

The “Mekong Serenity” is gorgeous and luxurious. Quite small for a river ship, with only 44 cabins accommodating just 88 people.

However in this sailing there are only 45 guests and 44 crew members ! One crew member for each guest.

Most cabins are pretty much the same on the ship with balconies and full sliding doors to take advantage of the gorgeous scenery passing at every moment, they are very spacious and beautifully appointed.

As we are in the middle of the rainy season, the colour of the River is brown due to the silt being washed into the river from outlying mountains following the regular rain. Apparently in the dry season the water is a blue/green hue.

There are a number of bars, restaurants, lounges on board with a gym which I will not set foot inside of and a beautiful swimming pool with a bar and cafe around it.

And a roof top sundeck and walking track

Every room or gathering area is just pure luxury.

Another huge benefit is once on board you don’t spend one cent. All inclusive means just that. All food, drinks including beer, wine, soft drink, juices, coffees, cocktails, entertainment, day tours covered. And there’s no limit to how much or little you eat or drink. Superb.

We had a nice welcome aboard to meet the Captain and the crew before dinner and it was a really nice touch.

Dinner was just awesome – we’d met some lovely people during the day and had pre dinner drinks with them and joined up for a five course feast. Way too much food but too good to pass up.

Wines from France and Chile and Italy were pouring like water and a choice of maybe a dozen local beers.

The crew are so much fun and so attentive to your needs. I think I’ve found a new best friend – Sunny. He straight away took a liking to me calling him “mate” so now every time he sees me he puts on the strangest “Aussie” accent and calls me Mr Steve Mate. They all call Karen “Madame” which she thinks is very cool

After a most wonderful breakfast, we headed out for our first Mekong Village adventure. yesterday afternoon we sailed about 50kms up river and anchored just off the tiny town of Cai Be which was to be our first shore visit.

With only 45 passengers we split into small groups and boarded local sanpans for the 10-15 minute trip from ship to shore.

Cai Be is not a large village with a very relaxed lifestyle with the local community dealing in fresh fruit and fishing.

We first visited the local Catholic Church which was built by the Germans in the early 20th Century and stands today proud of its short history and constant use.

We moved on to some local food stuff makers which was an eye opener.

Making rice wine with the added bonus of snake oil, scorpion, frog. Mmmm mmmmmmm

Apparently all for restorative purposes. I’m gonna pass on this one.

Then we visited a small family owned business that makes rice paper and “pop rice” which ends up generally as dried noodles.

The rice paper process is so laborious and quite specific –

Brilliant to watch.

The pop rice is something else. they heat black sand in a huge wok and then throw dried yellow rice into the mix, the extreme heat from the sand causes to rice to “pop”. Then it’s put through a number of sieves and set up to block out and package up for sale.

Back to the mother ship for lunch and another 40kms upstream to passenger the first bridge in Vietnam to span the Mekong – as recently as 1996 – and it was built and funded by Australia.

Little further and we stopped at the larger market town of Sa Dec.

Many surrounding farming and fishing communities bring their fresh produce daily to this amazingly large wet and dry market place for sale. It’s a reasonably large village with a huge market. People come from miles around to purchase on behalf of their family, village, shops of communities and its next level.

The fresh vegetables are gorgeous. Every colour in the rainbow and as fresh as can be.

I could eat it all.

Then the wet market – well, maybe not so much …

Live seafood- fish, prawns, squid – live frogs, rats (which we didn’t see), snails and all kinds of meat being cut up on the street side, all kinds of meat and chicken including feet and heads. Wow.

I know it’s how they live and we respect that, but it was a bit traumatic.

We ended the day at a gorgeous place of worship – Cap Dai Temple Sa Dec and it was beautiful.

This temple combines many influences across several religions which all works perfectly in harmony and beauty.

The Hung Thuy Le Ancient house was just gorgeous

It’s an ancient family home made famous by its owner Huyhn Thuy Le and french writer Marguerite Duras. It was built by Le’s father in 1895 and was handed down through the years and remains one of the last family homes along the Sa Dec waterfront still in original condition. It’s magnificent.

A long day ended with a withering rain storm typical of the Mekong Delta in the rainy season – you seriously couldn’t see 100metres so the Samoan back to the ship was interesting – and wet.

Pre dinner drinks, a five course meal with ridiculously good wines and better dinner company ended a brilliant day.

We continued north along this magnificent waterway until we transferred into a Samoan and diverted up a tributary until we reached the gorgeous river village of Tan Chau. We walked along the river banks exploring local houses, fields and market gardens. Crops in this area predominantly papaya and chilli however pretty much anything grows in this fertile soil.

A local family invited us into their home and spoke about how they spend their days farming and vending.

Then some fun started – we climbed into rickshaws to be driven/ridden around the town until we visited a traditional cane mat factory and a silk weaving house.