Chocolate & Longtail Boats

After breakfast 6 of us, led by Hui (Tuan’s son) set off on bikes for the Chocolate plantation. Down the decidedly rough road, past local shops and houses, towards one of the Mekong river’s many tributaries where we waited for the ferry to make its return journey. Bikes, scooters and people all piled aboard for the five minute journey … 1000 dong for foot passengers (50 cents); 2000 dong for bikes; 3000 for scooters. Even though we were jammed in like sardines, the scooter drivers were very considerate, and careful not to crowd us.

Off the other side, it was a short journey to the plantation. This was the first cacao farm in Vietnam. Father brought some seeds back from Thailand in the 1960s but no-one knew how the process of chocolate-making worked and the trees were almost destroyed, but they found a French cooking book (which they still have) and a business was built. https://vemekong.com/muoi-cuong-cacao-farm-can-tho/ Everything is still done by hand, with one exception – the grinding machine … as you can imagine grinding the dried cacao ‘nibs’ by hand would be grueling. We sampled cups of hot chocolate and then little cubes of the final chocolate. Oh my! An unbelievably smooth, rich, fruity, DARK chocolate! Now I can take or leave chocolate, but this stuff … I would eat every day!

The afternoons were too hot to do much of anything except laze about reading, taking a dip in the perfect temperature pool … or having a snooze. We should all suffer such hardships <grin>

A late afternoon zoom down the waterways now that’s the ticket. Tuan arranged for a ‘long tail’ boat for another couple and ourselves (imagine James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun racing down the waterways and cutting boats in half!) … no, not really, we went at a more leisurely speed. Vietnamese boats have a distinctive square upturned bow that allows easy shore access. This video gives you an idea of the different types of river boats. The barges are very wide, and you can see just how low some are in the water … barely any freeboard at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YHxef5Bv0 The long propeller shaft can be lifted to control speed or to avoid getting clogged by vegetation.

All along the river banks children called out “Hello” … or Xin Chow … and waved excitedly. Some showed off by leaping enthusiastically into the muddy water from the little hump-backed bridges that criss-crossed the tributaries. Yes, there was a lot of floating garbage, but the vegetation was lush and beautiful with brilliant splashes of red or yellow blossoms … and huge rafts of water hyacinths almost blocking some of the narrower streams.

As the sun began to sink we entered the wide Mekong itself …. huge laden barges surging up or down … small ferries plying people home … small fishing boats with (hopefully) a catch for dinner. We sat rocking gently back and forth, watching the light change from bright to pale orange behind a bank of clouds. Time for dinner.