Chapter the Fifteenth - in which M proclaims his virility

Tuesday 14 October: We are escorted this morning by a different guide. We have arranged this trip through Delta Adventure Tours and, with some blatent product  placement, might I recommend them to anyone visiting Vietnam. The guides have all been brilliant and we are handed lovingly between them like precious cargo. Our new guide takes us out on the river to see the floating market, which is refreshingly not at all a tourist affair. It's like a wholesale food market on the water. The sellers buy their goods from the farmers and then live for a few days in the tiny living spaces of their boats on the river until they have sold all their stock. The buyers are generally buying to sell on the land markets or for use in the restaurants. Our guide tells us that originally the goods were exchanged more directly, each farmer bringing their wares and swapping them with others, though now this is more a money based system. Even so, some people still use the older bartering system. I am reminded, though it is hugely simplistic, of the old adage 'when will mankind realise that they can't eat money?'

A child dances, precarious, on the prow of one of the boats and an old man, asleep in his hammock, raises a hand gently in greeting as we pass.

A row of little thatched houses adorns the river bank and it looks like a picture postcard of rural Vietnam. Next to them are a series of very small shacks made of corrugated iron and held together with rags. Existence in those looks like it probably is, a grim fight for survival. It is so easy, here, to characterise the relative poverty of the countryside as a kind of haven, like the pastoral ideals we see painted in the UK. In these, generously busomed woman stroll through meadows or milk cattle and young men sleep peacefully next to squeaky clean haystacks. The quiet simplicity can seem like a dream you hope to retire to. Something a banker might do around thirty, when he's earned enough money. In Vietnam the pastoral ideals are characterised usually, by a child riding a water buffalo and playing the flute. But the only water buffalo we have seen was rather skinny, and tied tightly by a fraying rope through his nostrils. Real poverty simply isn't pretty. 

We pass boats piled high with rice husks, on their way to the brick kilns. Nothing is wasted. The lunar calendar helps riverside dwellers to predict flooding and mud from the bottom of the river is used to heighten the banks in preparation. 

Later, when we visit more local industry, rice popping, rice wine making, rice paper and more coconut candy, we see more evidence that nothing is wasted. The rice is popped in hot sand from the river, husks fed to the pigs and the waste from each process used somehow in the next. Do we do this in the west in our factory processes? Did we lose the skill when we grew richer? Or am I once again in danger of mythologising poverty?

Near the rice wine, there is a jar full of what look like cigarette butts. 

"What is that?" We ask innocently.

"Rice wine with snake penis." explains our guide casually. "to enhance performance. Like Viagra."

She turns to M, who is rather regretting being the only male in our four person group, "You would like to try?"

"No thank you" says M, with immense dignity. "I don't need it." 

And quite right too. We are all very impressed. Though he does rather swagger about after that.

I wonder how many snakes have to sacrifice their sex life to make one tourist good in bed.

We try coconut candy again. We tell our guide the story about the rice paper the day before and she laughs. When she hands us the sweets to try I am once again confounded. The paper on the outer layer is translucent. It looks like rice paper.

"You have to take off the paper" says our guide twinkling at us and nudging me and laughing. I take this to mean she is teasing us for trying to peel off the rice paper the day before so I laugh back and pop the whole thingvinto my mouth. She is shocked. This time, apparently, it actually is paper. Hilarity ensues. Everyone else, M included, has correctly removed their paper. I spit out my mouthful with as much dignity as I can muster, into the garden. When I return M is practically mopping his eyes with amusement. Honestly. Ever since he was offered that snake penis he has become quite incorrigible.

We take another boat to another idyllic home stay where we eat lunch and M and I avail ourselves of the free bone-rattling push bikes to cycle around the peaceful island roads. 

We rejoin the rest of the tour group and the previous guide on the main land and clamber back into the bus for the long drive to Chau Doc. Dirk insists that the bus contains 'too many people'. There are eleven of us and twelve seats. After much more along these lines the tour guide, who has the patience of a saint, offers his seat in the front to Dirk. This drama concluded to most people's vague satisfaction we arrive at Chau Doc where we spend the night in a much less glamorous hotel. (Think air conditioning which freezes you and then breaks so you can't turn it off, mosquito nets you can't hang and rags on the stairs.) Dirk has a field day. We think the place has a charm of its own though, and it boasts an unbroken view of the river.

I fall asleep huddled up to M (for warmth of course - nothing to do with the sex organs of reptiles) and with images from the day still bright in my mind.

A sudden commotion in the leafy grounds of the home stay which turns out to be caused by a panicked hen, waddling in alarm and squawking indignantly, pursued by a very excited dog.

A man fishing in the river with a standard rod and line. Another man a few metres down, doing the same with a bamboo and a piece of string.

Boys in school uniform looking up from an outdoor game of billiards to shout hello to us in accented English.

A group of old men squatting on a long low table made of woven palm leaf, playing a complicated looking game of cards.

A packed ferry from island to mainland, filled with bikes and one abandoned and incongruous looking TV.

Crocodiles lying on top of one another in the sun on a crocodile farm. A menu in the restaurant attached to it, recalling the Monty Python sketch in which everything contains spam. Only substitute spam with crocodile meat.

A man, bare chested in a conical hat, working in a rice paddy beneath a pink sun.

A family huddled cosily beneath a mosquito net in a floating house on the river.

Lights on the water.

A gekko's shed skin on a sanitary bin in a toilet. Only in the end it turned out to be a leaf.