- Home
- 80 Days
- Pole to Pole
- Full Circle
- Hemingway
- Sahara
- Himalaya
- New Europe
- 80 Days Revisited
- Brazil
- Photo Gallery
- Keyword Search
- Photo Search
- Geography
- Accommodation
- Activity
- History
- Nature
- Person
- Transport
- Advanced Search
- The Chatter Box
- Chat Room
- Competition
- Polls
- Register
- Bookshop
- Bibliography
- Links
- Instructions
Full Circle
Day 87: Saigon to My Tho
At the town of My Tho we take an early lunch while we wait for the Mekong ferry. The tourist board restaurant has a menu which promises such delights as Eel, Frog, Snake (pounded), Tortoise, Swid and Teared Chicken Into Small Pieces.Cross-river ferries are a great focus of life. It's as though you are standing on a street corner that suddenly sails away. I find myself crossing the Mekong with four trucks, a Mercedes hearse with a handsome yellow casket inside it, motor bikers wearing reversed 'Lakers' and 'Raiders' baseball caps, a bus with a Buddist shrine on the dashboard and a boy in a Guinness T-shirt asleep on the luggage rack, a group of chattering women wearing black pantaloons and straw hats, and an old lady carrying a bag of green apples from one side of her shoulder pole and a live cockerel on the other.
The river is broad, brown and sluggish like the Yangtze. It rises two and a half thousand miles away in Tibet. At the height of its annual flood it shifts thirty-eight thousandcubic metres of soil every second. Thanks to the Mekong, Vietnam is expanding at the rate of two hundred feet a year thanks to grains of Tibet, chunks of China and Burma, swathes of Laos and great lumps of Cambodia.
Choose another day from Full Circle
PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 87
- Country/sea: Vietnam
- Place: My Tho
- Book page no: 127
Bookmarks will keep your place in one or more series. But you'll need to register and/or log in.
){kind=link}