Past Midnight & Mekong Delta Madness
Hello, Bonjour, Hola, Sin Jaue!?(sp),
Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam. I just got back from a private tour of the Mekong Delta with a taxi moto driver. What’s cool is that after going on it, everything everyone ever wrote was true AND MORE. At the end, I even left a note and obvious a link to this here website.
Let’s just say it was something you’d never get on some hotel / tour office / whatever vendor. There was 4 of us, it was the the “Commonwealth” to as it had a few major players such as Canada (~1/3 it’s total land), Australia (Up there as well), England (Obvious). Ironically when you hear “Commonwealth” the largest player in terms of citizens is actually India with an extremely insane 1,000,000,000+.
Considering most of Canada is totally uninhabitable for most who are still enslaved to the old paradigm of labor for cash. As the the volume of those who earn exclusively from some mechanism that is totally devoid of time and space expands, demand for places that typically would seem “unthinkable” will begin to look QUITE desirable.
Digressing into an unknown tangent of real estate. I’m curious if you can purchase blocks of property that include a lake and it’s actual spring source drilled to whatever level is required legal to be “on your land”. After that, build a cottage and sell EXCLUSIVELY to extremely interesting people who have a means of arriving there. The most likely method would be a plane to some airport, another to a smaller than a float plane.
Ok, now that that’s done, you could sell water forever if you owned it. I had this idea about a half decade ago or more. Someone told me legally in Canada you cannot own a spring or something of that nature. That said, I have not looked it up or even thought it for a near half decade before typing this, here.
Back to a trip to the Mekong Delta in the Vietnam… First it’s really dirty, so dirty you wouldn’t want to swim in it unless your boat capsized and you had no other choice but to go in the water at last possible moment. People do everything in there from the most basic daily needs to a “boat & moto” shop on the side that has a floor covered black with oil that just drips. Garbage is definitely plentiful but not overwhelming. The smell is alright for the most part but at times you’d be smelling something rancid.
Going down the Mekong river is cool, the floating market in Bai Kai (sp?) is worth checking out. It’s a market but not really, just lots of people who sell egregious quantities of pineapple at rock bottom prices. Loving pineapple, this was alright. You check out all sorts of stuff along the way from coconut everything candy to snakes you hang out with. They also have this authentic old school Mekong band. They have instruments not seen elsewhere and gents who master them. They play some songs and then these ladies take turn with vocals in different songs. At the end, the ladies hand you roses, you roll some cash in there ~10,000-30,000 depending on what it did for ya and pass it to them.
You check out this local village of ~200 people who live on this island in the middle. It’s quite cool and in keeping with the whole “live anywhere if you don’t have to show up to work to get paid”. The people were really friendly and had some sick flat screen TV’s. Not all but some, obviously.
This place is truly out there from the city or anywhere really. Lots of places are still inhabitable due to potentially live munitions. We went with a crew of older moto taxi gents who were ~47-55 years old. Drive fast enough to keep up, pass the laggards, even start the “school” but NO unnecessary risks considering the ridiculousness of driving around this area on a moto. Saturday at 5:15 on not even a seriously main artery of the city was some crazy stuff a gent on the trip caught. I mean it’s just pure bedlam, drive and avoid.
A lady friend of mine was driving in Phnom Penh, It was quite insane. When she returns to Canada, people criticize her of driving slow. Germany has the autobahn and in Canada we have ~100 speed limit where ~120 is an often pace of traffic and people may go over that to pass part of the school moving, at a decent rate. Back home, people see a green light and JUST GO. I mean, running a red is consider “no mans land, bad news, no good, whatever.” Many places here, it’s just no mans land. People who are used to driving here automatically drive slower and are usually cautious at intersections. It’s really congested, extremely congested, those arteries are clogged.
What I do like is the fact that they have roundabouts, what drives me nuts and makes my mind want to explode while my blood boils(I don’t really care at all) is the fact that we have almost none. Ottawa has at most a handful of roundabouts, none more ridiculous than the one center of town. Anyways, it’s a 3 way in and a yield… Being used to the “regular roundabouts” if I should even have to qualify what one is. Anyways, I used to honk at people aggressively going around there and just flow like I owned the place. This one time, I honked this person to h3ll and it turned out this be this lady who freaked out point at the sign, last time I honked there.
I unplugged my battery hoping that miraculously this dead lousy battery is working again considering the charge said 47%, I was quite happy. Long story short it was getting low so I unplugged it hoping not to drill it to 0 again which could!? have been part of it’s demise and I lost a lot of text, let alone my train of thought.
It’s 5:17am and I’m going to bed after I push some photos on to this thing. Full Mekong Delta update to coming including but not limited to stuff that never crossed my mind until I got there. Moral of this diluted story is, if you’re going to go, get a private guide.
The other gents on the trip who had cameras and took these pics, full hat removal tip to thee.
