Good Morning Vietnam - Mekong Delta

June 1, 2012: I woke up yesterday morning in a floating hotel in the Mekong /Delta. The day before yesterday I had taken a boat from Phnom Penh, Cambodia down to the border with Vietnam then (once through the border formalities) continued to the Vietnamese town of Chau Doc.

Chau Doc is a bustling riverside town a stone’s throw away from the Cambodian border. The town does not seem to get a lot of western tourists other than the backpack traveler crowd using the river border crossing between Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Ho Chi Min City (aka Saigon) Vietnam. Upon arriving at the floating hotel I dumped my bag in my room and hired a pedi-cab for a one hour tour of the city. It was great! I just love exploring new places and seeing what makes a place tick. I think my pedi-cab was pretty pleased to have me as a fare… I think because I gave him a pretty handsome fee ($1.50) for the hour. 

After a reasonable night’s sleep and a very early breakfast I went out on a short visit to a fish farm which in addition to Catfish surprisingly raises both Sea Bass and Snapper. I say surprising because Sea Bass and Snapper are also raised in the ocean fish farm pens in Malaysia that I visited a few weeks ago. I thought those two species were exclusively marine but I obviously have some more learning to do about fish farming in Asia.

The fishing industry in Vietnam has been booming (to say the least) in the past 20 years. In fact with a twenty four-fold increase in fishery exports since the 1990’s, Vietnam now ranks among the top ten seafood exporters in the world. Much of the growth in production can be attributed to continued expansion in aquaculture, which increased from a 30 percent share of the sector in 1990 to 52 percent in 2010. In 2010 fishery production created more than 5 billion US dollars in export revenue, about half of which came directly from fish farming.

Catfish are the ‘money fish’ of the Vietnamese aquaculture industry in the Mekong Delta accounting for close to 25% of the total export earnings. Shrimp is the big one though as it contributes over 40% to the fisheries exports for Vietnam. The farming of shrimp is a whole other story of ecological devastation with the massive conversion of mangrove forests to create shrimp farms. But… that is another story.

After the visit to the fish farm I spent the rest of the morning exploring the river and also stopped to see a Cham village which was filled with gorgeous smiling faces!

The Cham people are an ethnic group of South-east Asia. Some Cham are Hindu and others are Muslim. The village I visited in northern Vietnam was Muslim (complete with a large mosque). They are a minority in Vietnam as the majority of residents are Buddhist.

The Cham are remnants of the Kingdom of Champa (7th to 18th centuries) and there are pockets of this ethnic group in Cambodia and Vietnam with a small number in Thailand.

On my short visit they were incredibly open and friendly.