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Cruising Vietnam’s Mekong Delta (Part 1)
What makes the Mekong Delta a must-visit destination to experience?
When it hits Vietnam, the Mekong slows to a crawl, creating a spectacular landscape of islands, paddies, stilted villages and unique cultures. And if the river isn’t hurrying, neither should you…
1. Khmer culture
My five-hour cargo-vessel voyage onwards to Tra Vinh Province showcased the vitality of river trade. There was a continuous slow armada of wooden vessels serving vibrant riverside markets, from canoes top-heavy with prickly red rambutans to barges large enough to hold containers. All of them had eyes painted on their bows to symbolise watchfulness against danger.
The ragged Tra Vinh peninsula juts into the sea like a dragon’s talon. I’d come to explore its ethnic-Khmer culture. Historically Cambodian Khmers populated the delta before being marginalised as Vietnam expanded its influence southwards in the 18th-century.
Around Tra Vinh, 142 Khmer pagodas host orders of orange-robed monks. At the 900-year-old Ang Pagoda, I recognised from my past Cambodian travels the sumptuousness of Khmer art: central wats with Technicolour murals chronicling Buddha’s life, multi-tiered roofs writhing with dragons, stairways of rearing seven-headed snakes.
Ca Day, a young women employed at Ang, told me that 300,000 Vietnamese-Khmer inhabit Tra Vinh Province. “My identity is split,” she said. “My parents are Khmer and I speak Khmer, but I consider myself Vietnamese because it’s all I’ve known.”
Pick of the pagodas is 350-year-old Hang Pagoda. Each evening, around 5pm, hundreds of storks launch skywards from the surrounding trees to create a swirling whiteout like an unlikely snow blizzard.
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