An Overnight trip to the Mekong Delta and Cai Rang Floating Market
This tour wasn't what I expected, so I may sound a little critical of some parts of it. It was an OK tour to take if you have plenty of time in Ho Chi Minh City. There were several different stops along the way that are kind of neat to see, but unlike most tours, I wouldn't say this one had a true "main event." Well, it does have two, actually, but they are very underwhelming.
This tour essentially combines two popular tours in the area: the Mekong Delta and the Cai Rang floating market. The Mekong Delta is only about an hour away from Ho Chi Minh City, and Cai Rang is about three hours. For the two-day tour, with pretty much everything included (food and hotel), it is 2.2 million VND ($85).
I thought Cai Rang sounded really neat, but it is just a morning thing, so to get there you need to leave Ho Chi Minh City by 4:00 AM. If you are dead set on seeing this, I would do the two-day tour.
Now, this tour started off with something that kind of pissed me off. And I did something a little petty about it.
See, the weekend I went on this tour was the weekend of Vietnam's Independence Day, so the locals get several days off. Normally, I think this tour likely has mostly international tourists and the guides speak English. On this tour, it was almost all Vietnamese people. There were only me and two French girls who spoke English.
Now, I've been on many tours that have just locals and aren't designed for English speakers, and that is absolutely fine with me. BUT this tour guide did speak English and the tour was advertised as such. Instead, this lazy ass came to me and the girls and said since it was almost all Vietnamese people, that was the only language he would be speaking, and to just ask if we had any questions.
As we are leaving the city, he is speaking for almost half an hour straight in just Vietnamese, pointing out sights. This is where I said I was kind of petty. I honestly didn't care about just buildings and fields outside of Ho Chi Minh City from the bus window, I was half asleep and listening to a podcast anyway, but it just irked the shit out of me that he had the balls to basically say, "Even though I can and you are paying for it, I just don't feel like speaking in both languages."
I texted the person I booked the tour through and asked if the tour was supposed to be bilingual. She said, "Of course it is! I'll contact the guide and find out why."
I could literally see him pause mid-sentence to check a text message on his phone. And then he immediately switched to English.
The tour office must have specifically told him it was me who complained, because he called me out by name and mimed for me to remove my headphones so I could hear him. For the next two days, anytime he switched to English, he addressed me specifically, even though there were the two other girls who also spoke English. Everyone on the trip knew my name by the end because he said it at least 50 times.
He actually turned out to be a great guide, very friendly and knowledgeable. We just had a little hiccup at the beginning.
After the stop for breakfast, your first real stop on the tour is the Vĩnh Tràng Pagoda, and it was pretty impressive. I don't know much about Buddhism, but this place has some extremely large statues of Buddha.
There are some vendors selling snacks outside if you didn't grab a bite at the truck stop, and they are much cheaper here, too.
Next, you get to the Mekong River and take the first of many boat rides this weekend.
I was a little disappointed here, but not really because of the tour itself, I was just expecting something different. I know the Mekong Delta was a major part of the Vietnam War, and I was hoping there would be information on it, but they didn't even mention it.
You take a short ride across the river where they discuss the importance of the river to farming and how people used to live here. It was all very interesting, just not what I was hoping for.
Now, if you read my write-ups about other tours I have taken here, you'd know they all include a sales pitch, and this is no different.
After you take a ride on the river, you stop at a place for a couple of commercial breaks. First will be a demonstration and a sample of some drink made with honey. It was a tasty little drink, but then they offer a lot of overpriced honey for sale.
There is a small hive of bees at the entrance (the manmade boxes, not the natural ones), and you can pose for a picture holding a removable slat full of bees. If you have allergies or are just scared of them, BEE warned, because there are tons of bees flying all over this area. Didn't see anyone get stung, though.
Next, you get a canoe ride down a narrow canal. This is advertised as the main part of the trip, but it honestly wasn't anything special.
It is about a 15-minute ride down a really narrow canal that is packed with boats. It is a scenic enough ride, but the pics hype it up more than what it actually is. If you want to take the one-day trip, consider this as just a sum of its parts and not a can't-miss destination.
Again, it is only about an hour away, so everything together is probably worth the day if you have the time, but there is nothing on this part that will absolutely wow you.
Next, you get another commercial break and visit a place where they make coconut candy. Coconuts are a major crop in Vietnam and in this area.
I do not like coconut flavor whatsoever, I actually hate it. But the candy they made here was pretty good, and it was fresh and warm. I don't know how great it would be after it cooled off, but fresh off the stove, it was damn good.
Now it's lunchtime. I wasn't a fan of this. It is family-style, and I never really like those shared meals or forced office potlucks.
And the reason I wasn't a fan isn't for the usual reasons. I imagine a lot of Westerners might be a little squeamish about it because there are no serving spoons (except for the rice), meaning you are pretty much digging into shared dishes with strangers using your own chopsticks. Probably not the most sanitary thing, but I didn't mind that part.
I actually thought the display was cool as fuck, even though that's the second thing that would probably scare off a Western diner.
I have just never been a fan of fish in general, especially when it isn't filleted and is full of bones. I don't think fish tastes that great anyway, but the work of fighting around bones makes it wholly unappetizing to me. Plus, you just have a tiny plate and bowl, so you aren't really getting your whole meal in one go, just a few bites at a time.
Also, I felt a little self-conscious. Remember what I said about strangers digging around in shared food with the same utensil they are eating with? Well, I still kinda suck at using chopsticks, so I was rooting around and tearing up the fish way more than everyone else. Then I'd finally grab a piece, drop it, and have to pick it back up.
I did meet a very nice Vietnamese girl on the tour named Anh, who was vacationing with her mom. She spoke English, took pity on me, and pretty much served me my meals for the rest of the tour.
Next, you take another path to head back and get on a motorboat to return to the vessel that took you across the Mekong River. There is another place to do crocodile fishing like you could at Can Gio but I didn't like this at all. The crocs at Can Gio were out in the wild; here, there were many, many more, but all crammed into one closed-off pit.
Don't pay these guys to feed the crocs here.
I think this is normally where the tour of the Mekong Delta would end and go back to Saigon, but this was a two-nighter and we now had a two hour bus ride to Can Tho.
You get a little break when you get there, but the day still isn't over.
You should arrive in Can Tho around 5 PM, and depending on where your hotel is, you should get there just in time to see the night market opening up.
I was the only solo traveler and I had a different hotel than everyone else on the trip. It was really close to our next adventure and the night market, so after I dropped off my stuff I went exploring. I had a few beers and tried a few snacks in the area.
At around 7:30 PM, they will pick you up and take you to the river where the night market is, and you will go on a dinner cruise.
Even if you aren't within walking distance, you will have time to get a taxi from your hotel and come here before to meet the group, or stay after the cruise.
I didn't really care for the dinner cruise. It was a neat experience, I suppose, but it was very crowded.
It is three floors and almost all tables. Unless you happen to get seated at the front, there is no space to go to the front of the boat and limited space along the sides to enjoy the views of the river.
They do have a few singers who rotate between floors. Anh told me a little bit about some of the songs they were singing, which included some traditional folk songs and love songs. They also do a simple but cute magic show.
The next morning, you get up and meet around 7:30 AM for the final boat ride of the trip to the Cai Rang marketplace.
It is a peaceful 30-minute ride down the river to the market. Quick suggestion: sit on the right side of the boat if you can. That is the side I was sitting on, and even though you approach with the market on your left, it is fine because you will see it on the lap back. But I noticed that with the rising sun, it was SIGNIFICANTLY hotter on that side.
Lucky for me, you don't make an entire 30-minute ride back anyway. You just pass the market and then get dropped off after a 5-minute ride at another dock.
The market was another section I was slightly disappointed with, but it was just me not understanding quite what it was.
I mean, honestly, I don't know what I expected. Maybe long docks with boats parked next to them, but that wasn't it. And I was wondering how the hell they make money if they are selling just to people with boats, a relative luxury anywhere in the world.
The answer is, besides the smaller boats selling to tourists, it is largely a wholesale market, with boats being the river equivalent of a pickup truck used to buy a shitload of produce and take it back to a store.
The vendors have a brilliant and simple solution for advertising their wares: they hang a tall bamboo pole with a pineapple or whatever produce they are selling attached to the top, so buyers can easily tell from a distance which boat is selling what.
You do get a chance to get off the boat and buy some stuff, but this section seemed like it was geared just to tourists. I don't really know if anything was overpriced because I didn't know what most of it was or what it should cost.
There was a whole shitload of dried fish that I wouldn't have been opposed to tasting, but I had no idea if it was like beef jerky you could just eat straight away or if it still had to be cooked.
Next, you cross the river, unload the boat, and head to the bus to visit another pagoda.
While the first one you went to on day one was nice, it felt kitschy compared to this one. This place was very nice, with a beautiful setup, and felt far more like a genuine place of worship than the other, which felt like a tourist attraction.
After the pagoda you head to My Khanh Tourist village. It was cute and this is where you will have lunch.
It is like a miniature theme park. It has go-karts, bumper cars and a slide. You have about two hours to spend here, and I would have actually liked a little more time.
Lunch is like the last two group meals but I'd say it was the best meal on the trip, although I still would have rather had just my own bowl of noodles or something.
My favorite food on the whole trip was these little fried minnows. They were seriously delicious and a great snack. Anh said they were good with beer and I can definitely see that. Scary to look at with eyeballs and bones but they were a non-issue. Not even remotely hard to eat.
The final stop on the tour was the Purple House (Can Nha Mau Tim). This was just a neat oddity. It is also the one spot that isn't included in the tour price. It is 40,000 VND ($1.50) to enter but that also includes a tea or juice. That is pretty much worth the price of admission anyway.
This place is a quirky place that has random stuff in all different shades of purple. It is like some roadside attraction you'd see in the middle of nowhere in the states. It's surprisingly large but nothing really special, but also pretty neat at the same time.
Definitely worth the cost of admission, especially when the alternative is just waiting on the bus.
So that is pretty much everything on the two day trip to the Mekong Delta. It has around a dozen activities total. None of them are can't miss activities. If you have a limited time in Ho Chi Minh City I would probably skip this tour, but if you have spare weekend it isn't bad. It's worth the money but maybe not the time.
Although it sounds a little contradictory because I'm talking about time available, but I wouldn't take either the single day trip to Mekong or Cai Rang. Both seem lacking. Mekong is "meh" and Cai Rang is probably not worth a three hour drive and a 4AM wake up call but both together made for an enjoyable weekend.
Good story, boring adventure, but an adventure non the less.