Trand De – travelled across the Mekong Delta

Trand De – travelled across the Mekong Delta

I’m in a faraway corner of Vietnam, away from the popular tourist destination. I haven’t seen a western face for a day now, since I left Saigon. I got a teenager driver who doesn’t speak a word in English, but he is very enthusiastic instead. He took me to have dinner and takes me to the port in the morning.

I’m heading to a small vietnamese island, that seem to offer a more relaxed time than Phu Quoc with the russian invasion. Con Dao is known among the Vietnamese tourists because of its history as a prison island, but its image is slowly changing. It operated as a prison island during the French colonial era, but during the Vietnam war it got extended… I’ll tell you about it later. The point is, that I’m heading here. I could fly here, but it’s a bit expensive, I rather check out the speed boat that was launched last August. It starts from Tran De, a tiny fishing village in the Mekong Delta. To get here is quite an adventure. There are direct buses from Saigon to most of the towns of the Delta, among them to Soc Trang. The planned travel time is 6 hrs, so even if you travel during the day, you get a ticket for a sleeper bus. I’m really not a giant, but I had to admit, the the fixed boxes for the sleeper seats are to small for me, so I was laying there in really funny poses. But luckily my ride took only 4,5 hours, with two rest stops, that is not bad. I was the only foreigner on the bus, nobody spoke English, so I have no clue about the information they shared via the loudspeaker.

Much has happened in those 4,5 hours: a liddle kiddo almost puked on me (but her mother jumped in between us saving me in the last moment), due to the self-entertainment efforts of some passengers I was listening to two different movies in vietnamese and a local hiphop record in the same time, plus I witnessed a nasty fight within a larger family. Well, I was a bit uneducated on vietnamese etiquette as well: I didn’t know that I have to remove my shoes already on the first steps before I enter to the sleeper bus.

The landscape during the travel was nothing extraordinary. It is an overpopulated area, the side of the road is a line of houses blocking the view to the agricultural areas and the rice fields. I’ve seen some green rice fields around Saigon, but further away in the Delta the just harvested the rice. There’s an insane amount of straw bale at the side of the road, they were packing the bags full of rice on little boats in the canals, and some of the crops were still drying on the driveways in front of the houses.

I quickly found the office of the speedboat company (Superdong) and bought my ticket for the next day. They offered a ticket to the shuttle bus that brings me to the pier, but I had no intention of staying in Soc Trang for the night, so that I get up super early before the boat trip. I wanted to catch a local bus to Tran De. They really didn’t think this was a good idea, but showed me the bus stop on the map and gave me a sheet with a message in vietnamese on it that I can show if anyone asks anything. The bus stop was easy to find and immediately I was surrounded by locals who wanted to help me. They didn’t understand why I wanted to go to the fishing village if no ship was leaving anymore on that day. They said the accommodations there are really bad. But if I want to go anyway, they have a friend who can take me for good money… I insisted waiting for the bus. We figured that the Hungarian-Vietnamese google translate is actually really funny, so we were all laughing a lot. I patiently waited for the bus (No. 4), but nobody knew the schedule, and of course there were no signs either.

My little support group was actually selling food in the bus stop – illegally. Whenever the police passed by, the pretended to move on with their food stalls, finally after the third warning they really packed and left. After 1,5 hours the bus finally arrived and I just hoped that it is taking me to the right place. This place is so remote, that it’s not even on maps.me. I spent an hour on the bus and then the dropped me at an intersection showing me the direction to walk.

I had no room booked in advance, as this village has no online presence. I knew about two guest houses from a blog post of a blogger living in Vietnam, so I planned to check them out. I’m sure that foreigners are not frequent in the village, I could feel it in the way they looked at me. I had some trouble finding the place, but finally an old lady helped me out, pucked me up with her bike and brought me to one of the guesthouses. So I had a space to stay. The last danger was to die of hunger. As nobody spoke English I tried to explain my need to eat in other ways. First they thought I wanted to wash my teeth, but soon they figured out the real issue. So the sun of my host volunteered to take me to a local eatery by bike. This was the point until I stayed vegetarian in Vietnam.

He brought me to the furthest place possible, and they didn’t ask what I wanted to eat, just served me the food: I ate what I got. On the way back home the kid wanted to explain something to me, but since the dinner didn’t improve my Vietnamese knowledge he wanted to use hand gestures as well… we almost crashed twice. But he reassured me to be there in the morning to take me to the pier. He was really proud of himself and I was just grateful for closing the day with a stomach full and with a nice pillow under my head.

Useful info

  • On the local bus in the city you put the money in a box, if you have big bills, the driver can break it for you. Once paid, you push a greet button to print your own ticket.
  • On the bus between owns you pay for an aid – who is often just a frequent traveller on that line – who walks to you and collects the money.
  • You are better of waiving down the buses as they don’t necessarily stop at every bus stop.
  • Almost everyone gets on the bus wearing a helmet, as they arrive to the bus station on a bike, and leave with a bike after they got off.
  • From the last week of February there’s another company running speed boats from Vung Tau to Con Dao (more info on that in my next post)

Prices

  • Saigon local bus from District 1. to the FUTA Bus Terminal: 6.000 VND (0,3 USD)
  • Saigon – Soc Trang Futa Bus ticket: 140.000 VND (6 USD)
  • Soc Trang – Tran De local bus: 25.000 VND (1,1 USD)
  • Room in Tran De: 200.000 VND (8,7 USD)