A few years ago I covered the roof over my back room with shade cloth, to soften the sound of the rain. When it comes down in the Mekong Delta, it comes down hard, loud enough on a tin roof to be unbearable, for about twenty minutes, and then it simply stops. On the last…
I was three days out of gallbladder surgery, still moving like a man twice my age, looking like death warmed up, when I asked my friend who’d come to fetch me from Hoàn Mỹ Cửu Long hospital in Cần Thơ to stop for a cà phê sữa before we drove home. He pulled off the…
The first time I really noticed it, I was cycling a canal road off the Maspero here in Sóc Trăng. An uncle and two friends sat on the bank with lines in the water, waiting patiently on dinner. A few meters off, a slick of rubbish sat caught against the bank, the kind of thing…
The light was still low and gold when I took this, early enough that the far bank was only just warming up. Across the water from my balcony, the neighbourhood on the other side was waking the quiet way river towns wake, before the rest of the country bothers. Wooden boats moored along the bank,…
Where Is the Mekong Delta? You can feel you’ve arrived before any map tells you. The land goes flat, flatter than seems natural, and the water starts turning up everywhere: in canals beside the road, in the wide brown rivers the bridges cross, in the flooded fields that mirror the sky. The air thickens. Somewhere…
How to Visit the Mekong Delta Most people arrive at the Mekong Delta the wrong way, and it isn’t their fault. The whole tourism machine is built to sell it as a thing you do in a day, a box you tick between Saigon and the next flight. So the question people ask is “how…
Is the Mekong Delta Worth Visiting? An Honest Answer From Someone Who Lives Here The coach leaves Saigon at eight in the morning, packed with people who were standing in District 1 traffic an hour earlier. Two hours later the same people are stepping onto a wooden boat, blinking, a little unsure what they are…
The engines cut off before you see the market. That is the first thing you notice. The long-tail boats come down the canal with their motors running, then somewhere near the confluence the sound drops away and the vendors pole the last stretch by hand, and the whole thing goes quiet in a way that…
Picture a billboard in the middle of Phnom Penh. A foreign face, probably white, probably smiling in the way that suggests enthusiasm and approachability in equal measure, advertising a summer camp at a local language center. The copy is in Khmer. The face is not. That image is the honest version of what a foreign…
Somewhere on TikTok right now, someone is packing a bag. They have watched enough videos to know that Vietnam is cheap, beautiful, and full of people living their best lives on a thousand dollars a month. They know this because the person in the video told them so, usually from a rooftop in Hội An…
