For thirty years and for personal reasons I had imagined myself on a voyage by boat from Saigon up the Mekong River to Phenom Penh. Imagining boats on the river, I had envisioned arranging passage then exploring the fantastic world the river might have been with green foliage on the banks and photograpic fields beyond. I dreamt myself into such a voyage, or series of voyages and I was lost in the dream. Lost to realities I was unprepared to accept.
Naive of me but I carried that vision around with me in a bankers box stuffed between the sheaths of a mental manila file folder. To say I should have known better is hindsighted, but time's learning had no effect on that memory of a spectacular voyage. When a recent event altered my life I resolved to live out the dream. I had no idea that my preconception would be turned on its head.
As for what I thought Vietnam and the Mekong Delta would be like the battery of Hollywood war films did little to prepare me for what I would encounter. Very few times did I witness little brown people in dark cloth garments beneath triangular hats stooped low in the fields. As for violence once I felt slightly threatened while outside of Saigon and I believe that was more circumstantial than a reflection of the people involved.
While my assumptions were formed in the early eighties, back then I was trailing in the wake of a sea story decades old. Fifty years is a long time for any locale without war and economic boom to in their own rights dramatically alter what once was.
Times have changed. The government restructuring of the transportation system includes the construction of significant bridges over two wide branches of the river, at My Tho and at Can Tho. What formerly added hours of travel to transport harvests from the Delta to markets in Saigon and beyond are now subtracted from shipping times. I'm told this has resulted in the loss of need for boat travel.
A decline in the need for ferries has, I assume, effected all water travel in the Delta. On the rivers I saw coconut and rice on boats and small ships but the boat I traveled on from Ben Tre to Tra Vinh, withs its small hauling capacity, is likely to be replaced soon by trucks. Perhaps the reason the Hiep Loi remains in business to this day is for the remote area it covers and across bodies of water unrealistic to expect any commercial trucking company to service as affordable. Again, just an uneducated guess. I know that the cargo boats that once departed from the foot of Saigon's Nghi Dam street are indefinitely suspended because, as I was informed by the dock master of sorts, the combined need for water transportation and adventure tourism didn't warrant continued use- that's the way I'm interpreting "no more".
Water travel is one of many changes made to my prior notions of what I would find in Vietnam. It might not have been the most significant but it was something of a threshold that once crossed, when I came to realize the fact that river travel was not going to be a viable means of travel, I was forced to alter my plans.
The short ride through Saigon on the xe om really put the hook in me and in Ben Tre I found myself with an opportunity to rent a moto and explore the country. Abandoning the riverboat plan made possible many more experiences, or different experiences. I rode that moto for six hundred kilometers in twelve days across the lower provinces of the Delta and have the stories and photos to prove it was in many ways an important journey.
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