We got picked up at 8 am (much too early) and had to drive about two hours out of the city into the countryside. We had some really nice people in our tour from Australia, so we had some good conversations on the way down there.
Before we got to the Delta we stopped at a local temple, where the people practice a local religion that is a mesh of all the major religions into one which is pretty interesting. The altar in the church even has a statue where the images of Buddah, Christ, Confucious, and Lao are all stacked on top of each other.
After we left the temple we finally made it to the river and got into a nice boat that we had for just the seven of us in our group. We cruised down the Mekong Delta for a while and up some little canals. It was awesome.
After cruising for a while we stopped for a little pit stop. We had some traditional honey tea and tropical fruits, along with some traditional music performances. The honey was really good, and they brought out part of the the bee hive and let us hold the bees.
After our morning snacks, we had a little tour of a coconut factory where they make this delicious coconut candy. We of course had to buy some, and then continued to eat it all day.
Next, we took a little horse trailer ride to another part of the river, where we got in smaller boats for a canal ride. Sadly at this point it started raining and little, even though up to this point in the day we had had beautiful weather. Thankfully the rain didn't last long and we were taken to our lunch spot.
I was totally skeptical about lunch, because with these day tours you never really know what you are going to get. We had paid a little more for this particular tour to have a nice one, and it really paid off throughout the day and lunch was so different. They served us a whole fried tilapia which was the craziest thing. They just dropped the whole fish in a deep-fryer. It was awesome. We used the fish to make spring rolls. They also had a ton of other food that was delicious. But the fish was just so interesting. Neither Joseph or I had seen anything like it before.
After lunch we rode some bikes around some rural towns.
After bikes we rode the boat back to the bus. By this point it was getting late in the day and I was exhausted.
But we made one more stop at a temple where they had some gigantic Buddha statues that were hilarious. We felt a little bad because everyone was totally into the Buddha statutes but we just thought they were funny.
We finally made it back to our hotel and were pretty beat from the day, but we had to go back to my tailor for one final fitting. Seeing my new clothes mostly finished was really fun.
This was one of the best days of the trip so far for sure.
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