Matt and I gathered our film gear and met a taxi
right outside the ship where Pedro and Bianca were waiting for us. They had
hired a taxi for the day and were ready to search the wetlands of Southern
Vietnam for a plant that would fit their water purification set-up. The taxi
took off and we excitedly shared about the adventures that we had been on
during our days apart. We sang along to music and the taxi driver danced
a little bit. Everything was hunky dorey!
Then...after about 45 minutes of driving, we asked
our non-english speaking driver how much longer. He said something in
Vietnamese, then tried to do some sort of hand signals. Then, he pulled
out his phone and typed in 11. "Do you think we'll be there in about
10 minutes?" No...we would be there at 11am. Swish pan to the
clock: it was 9:30am. "Oh."
So, it turned out that Pedro had decided to go to
My Tho which is southwest of Ho Chi Minh City. About 2.5 hours away.
We're always down for whatever as a documentary film crew, so we just
kept filming and went along for the ride.
With such a long taxi ride, a bathroom break was in
order. The driver stopped off on the side of the road where a little
lunch shop with a covered patio and about 25 hammocks resided. Pedro and
Matt went to get beverages while Bianca and I headed to check out the
facilities. Around the back of the dilapidated building, through the
rubble piles and mud, we found a tiled walled. There was a small door and
a raised squat toilet, so we made ourselves at home.
Pedro noticed right away that there wasn’t proper sewage disposal at the
place, and realized that it could be the perfect place to hunt for the plant he
was looking for. He followed the
dribbles of bathroom waste down to a nearby pond where a bunch of cattail-like
plants were thriving. As he
expected, they were only thriving in this one area where the brown- and
gray-water from the building was going, and decided to take a few samples back
for the students on the ship and for further research. He began plucking out three plants out
of the soggy, brown mess and rinsing them off at the other end of the
pond. Mind you, these plants are
about 7-feet tall.
Our friendly cab driver went into the hammock establishment and got us
some plastic bags to put the root side of the plants in and delicately carried
them to the cab and placed them in the trunk. Little did he know the smell that this would result in
later…
We got back on the road with a happy Pedro and made our way through the
motorcycles and trucks to My Tho.
The cab driver wasn’t going fast enough for Pedro’s taste, so he
proceeded to push on the driver’s leg to go faster than 60km/h. The cab driver was so patient with us
and found it funny. He pointed to
the side of the road and said, “police.”
Must be the only English word he knows. We all understood and gave the guy a break.
We rolled into My Tho around 11:30am and were dropped off at a Makong
Delta tour shop. After much
haggling, Pedro talked them down from $25 a person to $19 a person for the four
of us to charter a boat down the delta to search for the plants. He argued the man into giving us 2.5
hours instead of the standard 2-hour tour, and felt happy as we loaded onto a
motorized boat across the big river.
Now, what Pedro didn’t know was that he had just paid for the most
touristy tour there is on the Makong Delta. The loaded us into the motorized boat that took us to the
first of four tourist-trap islands where they stranded us in little shops and
huts that made fun little items for a little bit, then came back to get us to
take a boat to the next little spot.
The places were really fun and would have been a relaxing place to play
with bees, drink honey tea with lime, hold a python, eat yummy fruits and
hut-made coconut taffy, but Pedro was bent on getting one of the boats to take
us aside to look for these plants.
Of course, this led to some hilarious encounters where he opened up his
computer to the local tour operators (one being a 16-year-old boy) and showed
them a picture of the plant species to see if they’d be able to help us.
It was such a beautiful location and there were so many fun things to do
at each spot that we eventually lost ourselves in the tourist game and found
ourselves in the coconut candy hut with a vat of snake wine in front of
us. Pedro and Matt looked over the
bottles of yellow liquid with floating snakes in them that had scorpions in
their mouths and decided it would be a good idea to stick that yellow broth
into their tummies.
Our little tour guide, which we called Tye because we couldn’t pronounce
his real Vietnamese name, opened a large jar full of the liquid and a large,
coiled up python (dead, of course) and dipped a shot glass in and handed it to
Pedro and Matt. Both drank it down
pleasantly surprised. There is not
enough Cipro on this earth to make me drink that stuff, so Bianca and I very
rudely declined.
The rest of our tour was pleasant, but it ingeniously ended around
2:00pm at a lunch stop where a single plate of fish and rice was 1 million
dong. We were hungry, but not
about to pay that much for rice, so we opted out of lunch.
The boat took us back to the main part of town where we found our cab
driver who took us to a snack station before driving us back to the 2.5 hours
to Ho Chi Minh City. We feasted on
the equivalent of Pringles, some sesame seed crisps and honey-coated cashews.
Along the way, Matt spotted a rice paddy with three women dressed in
traditional hats and had our cab driver pull over so he could get a shot. It was quite epic.
Pedro and Bianca dropped us off at the ship and went off to enjoy the
rest of their time together in Vietnam.
Little did we know, Pedro had a ring stashed away and proposed later
that night. Eeek! She said, “yes!” Yay!
We were pretty darn hungry after our late lunch snack and met up with
the rest of the film team who had just gotten back from their Cambodia trip to
go out for one last dinner in Vietnam.
We went to a little sidewalk place that we had eaten at before and
decided to try some new dishes. We
got the usual garlic rice and yellow noodles, but added some garlic escargot
(snails), sour beef and roast pigeon.
The snails were massive and too much of a snail texture for me. The sour beef was wonderful, and the
pigeon was surprisingly appetizing.
It was greasy like duck but had the taste of pork. I’d eat one of those dirty little birds
again if I had the chance.
We wrapped up dinner with a Saigon beer toast and headed back to the
ship where we crashed into bed exhausted.
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