After our fairly late finish last night we had an early rise for breakfast and to start the day. And my what a day it’s been!
First off breakfast is a breakfast buffet and who doesn’t love one of those?! There’s no photo today because it was 6:30am and we’d forgotten there were two 6 o’clocks in the day, we’d left our wits in bed till post toast.
We met our tour guide and the rest of our tour group at 8am to head off for our day trip. It was about a 2hour journey from our hotel out to the Mekong Delta which is just outside of the city limits and extends over the south west of Vietnam. Our stop was on the Delta River about 3km from where it becomes the sea.
We took a boat over to an island which despite its size was home to about 6,000 people and a lot of fruit and bees. Upon arrival we were given a sampling of some oh-so-tasty fruit and the bees came to join in anyway.
We were also treated to some live local music while we enjoyed our sweet fruity feast.
Just as our hosts finished playing, Mother Nature decided to show us why its called the wetlands.
The weather didn’t detract from the experience though as we donned our “Hello, We’re Tourists” ponchos and soldiered on.
Our next stop was dessert. The bees earned their stake at our fruit when just round the corner from our dinner-with-entertainment, we were served fresh honey and jasmine tea, delish!
It was then time to hop across to the next island. The main trade here was coconuts, and it was coconuts galore! Including the wee tasters of fresh coconut candy which I certainly wasn’t going to say no to.
Along with our coconut candy we were also given small snifters of banana wine, and of course, coconut wine. Both of which would be put to excellent use as disinfectant. If we didn’t know any better I’d say that they were getting us ready for the next leg of the tour.
Tuk tuks.
Directly after our fast and furious tour across the rest of the island we were next shown to something a little more sedate.
Powered by one tiny lady stood at the back we mosied through the waterways and back to our original chariot.
We were then taken to our final stop on our tour of the islands of Mekong Delta: lunch!
As we boarded the boat one final time we were gifted some wonderful fresh coconut. The perfect digestif!
After the 2 hour drive back into Ho Chi Minh City (and a slight nap on the bus) our tour guide told us of some good places to see and so we struck out on our own for a couple of hours.
We mostly just wandered and tried to get a feel for the city, while trying to navigate the roads.
We managed to find our way back to the hotel and meet our group for dinner, we didn’t take the camera out with us this evening and instead focussed on the food and getting to know everyone. But we were taken to a street food market which is the type of place Shoreditch aspires to be. There were vendors with food from all different types of cuisines and we managed to find a myriad of veggie vietnamese cuisine, all of which was delicious!
And here we are at the end of another brilliant day, happy to get to bed. And start it all again tomorrow!
Hatti x
I think the church was built during the French Colonial times so there was a lot of french influence in the buildings. It seems to be the same in Phnom Penh too, some beautiful colonial french buildings dotted around 🙂 and yeh, the TukTuk definitely got a shifty on haha! xx
Wow again 😍 What a fantastic country. That church looks like the one in Aberdeen, just up the road from Rosemount 😀 It looks very European. The motorbike at the front of the tuck tuck looks a bit meaty 👍🏼
Wow! Lovely smiles:) x