Mekong Delta & another lazy day in Saigon

I've gotten a tad behind, which Ewen is very happy about as he thinks its usually him that's behind. iv been sick the past two days so haven't been bothered to update this blog.
so far have tried Vietnamese panadol and Vietnamese paracetamol codeine with no success. hopefully i feel better tomorrow though because we are flying to Cambodia!!!!
so yesterday we went on a tour to the Mekong Delta, we had booked our tour through Viator as we got a gift voucher for Christmas, the website said it would have a maximum of 15 people on the tour which sounded great to us after 38 people on the Cu Chi Tunnels tour.
the bus was about 20 minutes late picking us up and we were starting to get worried they had forgotten us, luckily the woman at our hotel called the company for us and sorted everything out.
from the moment we met our tour guide he was infatuated with Ewen, he thought he looked exactly like Harry Potter and insisted on calling him Harry Potter all day and taking photos of them together to show his friends, who, apparently, would be very jealous!!
Here is Ewen posing with our tour guide, Ewen even used a chopstick as a make shift wand....
but I'm getting off track, so it turned out there was only four people on the tour including us. the other two were a south African couple who were traveling a little differently to us, staying in a 4 star hotel and they didn't seem to appreciate our tales of seeing dogs for sale at markets and eating crickets.... turns out they were vegetarians.
the drive down took about an hour and a half and i slept for most of it as I'd woken up feeling a bit sick.
our first stop was at a boat dock where we got on a boat (surprise surprise) that took us to a Coconut Candy Factory (if you could call it a factory... it didn't have any walls...)


Above is a photo of our boat and above that photo is a view of the Mekong taken from our boat

The other picture is the dock that we came in on to get to the coconut candy factory.
It was very interesting to learn about how the candy is made, pretty much all by hand, from impaling the coconuts on stakes to get them open, to scraping out the coconut flakes to boiling them, etc etc.
we were given some free samples and ended up buying two packets of the stuff.
The factory line of rolling out the candy, smashing it into pieces and individuall wrapping them in rice paper and then wrappers.
the factory also had an interesting display of souviners for sale, including these genuine crocodile skin shoes which i thought Dad would love but i'm a bit sceptical on whether or not I would get them back into Australia.
Next up was a ride on a trailer attached to a motorbike, during this ride we saw a rather large brown snake on the path, i was already worried but when the driver and tour guide looked worried i got even more worried! thankfully we drove for at least 10 more minutes so we put some distance between us and the snake. turns out that snakes here are pretty dam poisonous with some killing you within 20 minutes of been bitten, our tour guide told me that one particular breed of snake in Vietnam starts from 80kg only getting bigger and bigger!! he said that snake here is a bit of a delicacy so there are snake farms where they feed the snakes extra food to make them even bigger, he told us this was crazy and very dangerous!!!
we stopped off to try some fresh fruit; pineapple (so good!), mango and i think orange (but it tasted like grapefruit... kind of). after the fruit tasting our guide encouraged everyone to get into hammocks and have a nap, turned out he had been up late at the movies and was a bit tired, we spent about 30 minutes lying around which was nice and relaxing.

then it was back into the trailer to go to a restaurant for lunch

lunch was included in the price of the tour and included about 5 different courses! the first one was this fish which the waitress scraped meat off to make spring rolls for us which turned out to be really tasty, we also had prawns, chicken soup, fried spring rolls, and something that none of us could recognise, perhaps fried onions...

after lunch we got into a long narrow row boat for a leisurely float down a narrow part of the Mekong to get us back to our bigger boat.

on the boat ride back to the bus we had the opportunity to try some coconut juice straight from the coconut itself, only Ewen and the tour guide took up this offer but i had a taste of Ewen's and it wasn't bad, would have been much nicer it was cold though.


this is one of many floating houses we saw, some of them even have pet dogs living on them.
we got back to Saigon around 4pm and i went straight to sleep for 3 hours, poor Ewen was starving when i finally woke up so we went and had a quick tea then i went back to sleep.
today we haven't done much, went to a market this morning, then to the post office to mail home another package of souvenirs and unwanted things from our packs.
one thing i did see today was a shop that appeared to be the equivalent of Ann Gedy (the baby in the flowerpot woman) however over here you can get photos of your baby superimposed inside a melon.... sorry i didn't get a photo of this but i wish i did!!