A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
We spent the night in Chau Doc, a town just a couple of hours (slow boat) or an hour (by fast boat) to the Cambodian border. We stayed in a nice little thatched roof bungalow complex not far out of town, about which I had two main complaints. First, there was no mosquito net. Frankly, I believe every fan-only hotel room in a malaria-inested area should provide a net as a matter of course. While I didn't notice many mosquitoes flying around, I did in fact notice several bites. Hopefully they weren't malarial, since I'm trying to put off starting the malaria drugs until after I get back from China. The other annoyance was that the room featured a fan on a timer, so it would turn off on its own after two hours or less. Believe me, it is not so cool at night that your average westerner can sleep without a fan. About five minutes after the fan went off, I would wake up sweating and uncomfortable. So basically I was up every two hours all night long.

In the morning we headed down to the riverside and boarded long, heavy, canoe-like boats each piloted by a scrawny Vietnamese cone-hatted woman standing upright in the back and rowing forward with very long oars. It's the first time I've seen this rowing technique, and it seemed to work pretty well. Our first destination was a "floating village" that basically adjoined the land-based portion of Chau Doc. Local residents live, travel and make a living on the river. Some "houses" are little more than boats with curtains and hammocks, while others are elaborate structures built on large wooden platforms atop empty fuel barrels. All space is utilized -- the houses are essential mini-fishfarms, with pens for growing fish between the barrels underneath, accessible for feeding through removable floor panels. Many of the structures sport a huge vat where they cook up a foul-smelling fish food made of bran, fish parts, and otehr nixious ingredients that are made into large sticky clay-like balls, and most have an apparatus on one side that provides artificial current through the farming pens for when the Mekong gets too slow to keep the fish alive. Fish farming is a precarious business for these delta residents, dependent on the current, weather, water level and the right mixture of food.

In this area of the delta, houses that are not floating are built on stilts. Over the course of a year the water level varies as much as 9 feet on average. The 2000 monsoons were disastrious, with a high water level of over 18 feet, burying most structures up to the roof and beyond. Many erected flagpoles atop their roofs to warn boats that their houses were just underneath the surface.

Our second and final stop on our rowboat ride was a riverside Cham village built entirely on stilts. My Son, the ruilts I visited up near Hoi An a few weeks ago, were built by Cham people, Hindus who came to the area two thousand years ago. These Mekong Cham, by contrast, came from Malaysia less than a thousand years ago. Hence, they are referred to as the "New Cham" in Vietnamese, to distinguish them from their central Vietnam counterparts. Although the two Cham groups are similar ethnically, culturally and religiously they differ greatly, as the Mekong version are devout Muslim polygamists.

Next stop, Cambodia!

© 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 8:03 PM