Easter Mekong Tour, Vietnam

[Chanderjeet]

This is a fabulous pictorial tour of Vietnam. Thanks for posting these amazing pics, you are a good photographer and a good narrator.

[Josh69]

From Tra Vinh city I headed westwards. There was a backroad roughly paralleling the main highway, so I took that through a mainly rural area.

[Josh69]

Along that same road some young dude in an army uniform on a bicycle turned up, hearding some cows.

Cows meet monks meet army dude:

[Josh69]

Two guys in pith helmets, army uniforms and flip-flops , plus some slightly manky cows:

[kneeslider]

Looks a lot nicer then the times I was there in the 60's & early 70's, guess I should go back & pay a visit & apologize for my past behavior!

[Josh69]

The backroad eventually led back to the main highway and the BA OM POND. According to the Lonely Planet, "Known as Ao Ba Om (Square Lake), this is a spiritual site for the Khmers and a picnic and drinking spot for local Vietnamese"

Also a spot for wedding photographs. The bride checks out the photos, while the groom lights up a smoke:

[Josh69]

A guitar appears and the groom wanders off:

[Josh69]

I mentioned there are a lot of ethnic Khmers (Cambodians) in this area. Adjacent to the Ba Om Pond is the Ang Pagoda or Angkor Rek Borei in Khmer. This is typical Khmer (as opposed to Vietnamese) architecture.

[Josh69]

And the inside:

[Josh69]

Having a GPS gives me the confidence to take backroads which sort of seem like they are going in the right direction. Pre GPS days, I'd only go on main roads to avoid getting completely lost. In this case there was roughly 10km between where I started out and where wanted to end up on the highway with a blank blob on my paper (and scanned) map. No bother, I could see from the GPS screen that I was heading in the right direction. I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted on this forum about the benefits of a GPS though.

There was a lot of water about and I passed over 5 or 6 little bridges like this one:

[Josh69]

Thanks for all the replies so far, btw. And thanks for the replies from Veterans from the Vietnam War era too; I'm glad you like the trip report.

[Josh69]

This is on the road (ferry in this case) from Tra Vinh to Vinh Long. A lot of river crossing in the Mekong Delta are by small boat only big enough to take motorcycles. This is a larger version of the small boat ferries, you could maybe get one car on it if necessary, but in this case the traffic was all bikes.

I got a bit confused getting on this ferry as normally you buy a ticket before boarding; in this case you buy the tickets on board. Can't remember how much this one was, but the going rate is VND2,000 to VND4,000 (US$0.12-0.25). Occasionally higher if it is a very long crossing.

[Josh69]

A lot of Vietnamese women also wear printed pants and tops which to be honest look a lot like pyjamas. You can catch a glimpse of a red-green set worn by the lady in the blue helmet. I'll try to dig out another example later.

[NomadRip]

Great pictures!

[Josh69]

Now it was Easter Sunday. I like to go to Church at least 3 or 4 times a year and I couldn't quite remember the last time I did go, so when I saw a church about 500 metres off the main road......

Here it is. There are a suprising number of Churches in Vietnam: