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Oh dear. I fear these LONG blogs are becoming a habit. The last one I warned about you getting a cup of tea. This time, how about cooking dinner also. I'm expecting 100s of comments soon from you all to tell me to stop waffling. To be fair, Cambodia and Vietnam are two countries with incredibly interesting histories. After I leave Vietnam, the history lessons will hopefully disappear and a nice, simple blogs will be left. Until then, brace yourselves, and enjoy. PS - lots of photos this time, as the connection here is mega-quick :)
Of rivers and war
Simon Wadsworth2006-09-04 16:01:05
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Oh dear. I fear these LONG blogs are becoming a habit. The last one I warned about you getting a cup of tea. This time, how about cooking dinner also. I'm expecting 100s of comments soon from you all to tell me to stop waffling. To be fair, Cambodia and Vietnam are two countries with incredibly interesting histories. After I leave Vietnam, the history lessons will hopefully disappear and a nice, simple blogs will be left. Until then, brace yourselves, and enjoy. PS - lots of photos this time, as the connection here is mega-quick :)
Welcome to the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, home of rice, rice and more rice. At 40,000km2, it's one of the world's largest deltas, yet is still expanding by around 100m every year from the silt, most of which has been washed 4500km downstream from the Tibetan Plateau. The Mekong is so large, it even has 2 daily tides, and yes, there's a lot of rice. At 83million people, Vietnam is the 13th most populous country, yet the rice harvested in the Mekong Delta alone is enough to feed every single last person, with leftovers too, packed in doggy bags and shipped to China, Europe, America - well, everywhere really, since only Thailand ships more rice around the globe than Vietnam. It's a laborious process: every seed is manually and individually planted, then later uprooted and transplanted on holiday to another field to avoid root rot, while irrigation involves water simply transferred by baskets - and not a piece of machinery in sight (unless you count the multitude of women everywhere, who do this work, but I doubt immensely that women's rights campaigners would be too happy with that statement).
I spent a far too brief (as these things always are) 3 days doing a tour of the Delta, as a means of getting from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh. Although I'm not a big fan of tourist-style tours, it's very difficult and more expensive to travel around this region independently (and it makes crossing the border
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See photographs from:
Vietnam Gallery
