Our day began bright and early with coffee and croissants as the sun came up. We hopped into our local boats and puttered out to a very interesting floating market. Our local Vietnamese guides talked about how the market works as we watched small boats bobbing among the larger boats purchasing anything from pineapples to melons. We continued on to a fish farm, where we were welcomed onto the floating home/farm. Thousands of fish are held in a net pen below the house, while the owners live above with their dogs and fish food processers. Waving goodbye to our hosts we motored over to shore. The local town was packed full of people – people riding motorbikes at high velocity (some of them with live or gutted pigs dangling off the back), people haggling over produce and meat in the market, people clogging every square inch of the streets. The important holiday of Tet is coming up in a few days, and everyone here is scampering about in frenetic preparation. We joined the fray for a lively "trishaw" tour of town. A trishaw is a three-wheeled cart pulled behind a bicycle. We sat in the little carts and were wheeled about (occasionally at very high speeds through incredible traffic) by our cyclists, who whooped and hollered to one another and passersby. All in all it was a rather exciting experience. After joining the masses in tromping through the marketplace and investigating the local temple, we called it a morning and returned to the ship for breakfast – a meal which we felt was well earned by that time.
The rest of the morning was spent cruising downstream and enjoying Tai Chi. In the afternoon we had a lecture from our cultural expert Paula Swart on the influence of
The sun set in a splash of pink during cocktail hour, and after dinner we will watch "The Quiet American."
