Mekong Delta & Floating Markets

The country's two main cultivated areas are the Red River Delta in the north and the Mekong Delta in the south. The latter has produced one of the world's great deltas, composed of fine silt that has washed downstream for millions of years. After winding its way from its source in Tibet, it is the where Mekong meets the sea in southernmost Vietnam. The whole area is covered with fields where farmers grow all different kinds fruits and vegetable. The Mekong Delta vibrates with colour, bright-green rice shoots, yellow and electric-pink incense sticks drying along roadsides. The rhythm of life along Mekong byways buzzes with slow but constant energy.
I took the chance of a private tour to get a glimpse of the life of Vietnam's agricultural workforce, which feeds the nation on this life-sustaining river. The boat took me very early morning at 5:30 down the river to the first market. It is amazing how the whole system works, everything on water. Small and big boats filled with loads of merchandise have to find their way to make the best deal. It was very interesting as we could get very close to the people.

History of Vietnam

In 1964, after Hanoi ordered North Vietnamese Army units to infiltrate the South, the situation for the Saigon regime became desperate. In 1965 the USA committed its first combat troops, soon joined by soldiers from South Korea, Australia, Thailand and New Zealand. As Vietnam celebrated the Lunar New Year in 1968, the Communist guerrilla launched a deadly surprise offensive, marking a crucial turning point of the war. Many Americans, who had for years believed their government's insistence that the USA was winning, started demanding a negotiated end to the war. The Paris Agreements, signed in 1973, provided for a cease-fire, the total withdrawal of US combat forces and the release of American prisoners of war.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991, Vietnam and Western nations sought rapprochement. The 1990s brought foreign investment and Asean membership. The USA established diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995, and in 2000, Bill Clinton became the first US president to visit northern Vietnam. Even today, the Communist Party is still very much in charge but capitalism is the ideology of choice and action. There are the rules and then there is the national pastime of getting around them. Foreign investors are setting up joint ventures with Vietnamese companies, cultural exchange is exerting international influence over fashion, technology and a new generation, and Vietnam is speeding towards the future with its politics and desires in a delicate balance.
The Vietnamese take passionate pride in their national identity and they have their entire history to back them up. Having defended their sovereignty as a nation from the Chinese to the French, the people's determination and optimism reflect the collective strength and sense of self that keep Vietnam bouncing back.

Floating village

Have you ever seen a floating village? Neither have I until yesterday when I went with my Tuk Tuk driver to one end of Tonle Sap lake. The boat took me along a small river that has its end in this lake. The water level was very low and it reaches a 10 meters higher one during rainy season. Therefore most of the landscape will be unseen and the trees are also completely in covered by water. It was most remarkable when we drove towards the village, as I could not imagined it before. The people here live their lives on water! There are floating schools, churches, volleyball halls, even the fruit and vegetable markets are on water. The constructs are quite different and vary a lot. On one hand you can discover lots of small wooden houses and on the other lots of people tend to live on their boats.

Angkor

The temples of Angkor, capital of Cambodia's ancient Khmer empire, are the perfect fusion of creative ambition and spiritual devotion. Between the 9th and 13th centuries the Cambodians strove to better their ancestors in size, scale and symmetry, culminating in the world's largest religious building, Angkor Wat. The hundreds of temples surviving today are but the sacred skeleton of the vast political, religious and social centre of an empire that stretched from Burma to Vietnam: a city which at its zenith boasted a population of one million when London was scrawny town of 50'000 inhabitants. Angkor is the heart and soul of the Kingdom of Cambodia, a source of inspiration and national pride to all Khmers as they struggle to rebuild their lives after the years of terror and trauma. Today, the temples are a point of pilgrimage of all Cambodians and no tourist will want to miss their extravagant beauty when passing through the region. In fact I have been visiting the region for the last 2 1/1 days and the most stunning temples are Angkor Wat, Bayon and Ta Prohm as they are all very different to one another.
Angkor is everywhere: on the flag, the national beer, hotel and guesthouse names, cigarettes - it's anything and everything. A symbol of nationhood and fierce pride, it's a fingers-up to the world, stating no matter how bad things have gotten lately, Cambodians built Angkor and it doesn't get better than that.

History of Cambodia

The good, the bad and the ugly is the easiest way to sum up the history of Cambodia. Things were good in the early years, culminating the vast Angkor Empire, unrivalled in the region over three centuries of dominance. From the 13th Century the bad set in as ascendant neighbours steadily chipped away at Cambodian territory. In the 20th century, the late 1950s and early 1960s were Cambodia's golden years, as the economy prospered while neighbouring countries grappled with domestic insurgencies. From 1969 Cambodia was sucked into the Vietnam conflict. The US secretly began carpet-bombing suspected communist base camps in Cambodia and shortly after the 1970 coup, American and South Vietnamese troops invaded the country to root out Vietnamese communist forces. They failed and only pushed Cambodia's communists and their Vietnamese allies deep into Cambodia's interior. It turned downright more ugly, as a brutal civil war culminated in the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 - 79. Almost two million Cambodians died between during that period. There are stories of endless personal tragedy, of dead brothers, mothers and babies, from which most of Cambodians have never been able to recover. Such suffering takes generations to heal. In 1991 the warring sides met in Paris and signed a peace accord, which enabled UN-administered elections in 1993. A new constitution was drawn up and adopted.

Hmong village & Tat Kuang Si

Actually the variety of tours you can undertake here in Luang Prabang is not very big. All Tuk Tuk drivers want to take you to the waterfalls so I did it one day with Alison, Julie and Dino. On the way our driver stopped at a native Hmong village. The Hmong are one of the many ethnic minorities in Laos. Most of their villages are in the mountains of northern Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, but pressures for land has driven some villages down to the valley floor. The Hmong are traditionally farmers, growing sticky rice in the wet season and corn, garlic and other hardy crops in the cool, dry season from November to March. Their main cash crop government was, until recently, opium, mostly used for the production of heroin. Officially outlawed by the Laotian government in the last decade, it's suppression is not yet complete. They would clear an area of forest by controlled burning and plant their crop. This is actually happening at the moment, see the pic of the fire in one of the last posts. They practice the oldest religion in the world, animism, a belief in sentient spirits in all things. Their priests, or shaman, can communicate with this spirit world and with the ancestor spirits of the Hmong, to ensure a harmonious existence through sacrifices and prayers. I bought a package of Mentos candies before we went there and I gave them to the crowd of kids that was suddenly around me. It was most remarkable how they were pushing me for more candies.
After this we took off to the waterfalls that are located 32 km south of Luang Prabang. It features a wide, multitiered waterfall tumbling over limestone formations into a series of cool, turquoise-green pools. For us a great opportunity to jump into the cool water after being heated up by the hot weather.