The big reason that tours of the Mekong Delta exist are the Cần Thơ floating markets. As I understand it, in the days before bridges across the delta’s tributaries (and distributaries), people with produce from upstream and people from villages on either side of the river downstream would meet in the middle to trade.

Of course with prosperity has come bridges, which is gradually lessening the need for the floating markets. Judging by the gridlock of 20-seat tourist boats making the circuit (of which we were one), I got the sense that one day this will be a floating market in spirit only, not necessity. That said, I was happy to have the chance.

From our homestay we were shuttled by boat to meet back up with our tour group. It was before 8, the sun was still low. I enjoyed the variety of houses on stilts by the side of the river. It felt voyeuristic peeking into people’s lives early in the morning.

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I mentioned that we spent nearly two weeks in Ho Chi Minh City trying to figure out where next, but I didn’t really get into how we came up with the itinerary that resulted.

I wanted to take a train up the coast of Vietnam from HCMC to Hanoi, but I also wanted to return to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat with Stephanie. Since we didn’t want to backtrack, doing both was not possible. Sure, we could have booked a round trip ticket to Siem Reap, but part of the puzzle has been finding a route that moves us forward. It’s something we’ve discovered to be really important for our psychological well-being: a sense of progress.

During our time in HCMC, we stumbled upon some ads for tours of the Mekong Delta, which proved to be the key to the puzzle. The three-day tour offered an option to end in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, getting there by boat no less, rather than returning to HCMC by bus. It had everything we were looking for: alternative form of transportation, Cambodia, and forward motion. After a few days rest in Phnom Penh, I knew we could continue by boat to Siem Reap and see Angkor Wat. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I found a cheap direct flight from Siem Reap to Đà Nẵng, Vietnam (hooray for our multiple entry visa!), where we could pick up the sleeper train to Hanoi after visiting Hội An.

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Handy map from the BBC on where not to go next:

Guess we’re not taking a boat from Mumbai to Nairobi…

When we were planning the trip (without really planning it), we had no clue when (or if) we’d get to Vietnam, but as it was high on our list and required procuring a visa before leaving the US, we opted for a three month, multiple-entry visa that started on January 1. We flew from Iloilo City to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) via Manila on January 26th. Bullseye. We had over two months remaining on our visa.

The flight was short and uneventful. Unless you’re looking at a map, you might not realize that HCMC is only 2 hours and 15 minutes from Manila by air.

We’d booked a hotel for a week, but had no plans after that. We needed some time to recover from our whirlwind three weeks in the Philippines, from the fact that we’d been traveling for five straight months, and from a series of unanticipated ailments that would befall us that week. Without getting into too many details, we both developed annoying fungal infections, due in part to the regimen of antibiotics we’d started as prophylaxis against malaria (and possibly due to sub-par personal hygiene…?), and I managed to eat something wrong on our first full day in Vietnam and tossed my cookies that night. Suffice it to say, we slowed down and were slowed down.

We also ran up against the persistent “where next” problem. This is a topic I’ve wanted to write about on multiple occasions, but have been so swamped just trying to keep up with what we’re doing that I never have the mental space to write about how we’re doing. Maybe I won’t fully until after the trip is over, and its lingering effects begin to be felt. This will have to do for now.

As much fun as it is to dream about traveling the world, one of the things I’ve come to realize now that we’re actually doing it is how exhausting it is to constantly ask ourselves: what are we doing today, what are we doing tomorrow, what are we doing next week, where are we going next, where are we going to sleep, where are we going to eat, what do I want to do, what do you want to do, what do we want to do…?

Even if we answer some of the big questions, for a week, or a month even, and put them aside, eventually time catches up with us. And unlike normal life, we can’t just put if off or ignore it. We must know where we are sleeping tonight. If we don’t know, all else fades into the background until we do know. And if we don’t know where we’re sleeping tomorrow night, it makes it really hard to enjoy today. If we’re preoccupied thinking about the future, then we’re not able to enjoy the present.

I envision this as a sort of “Traveler’s Hierarchy of Needs” (after Maslow):

When we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, we’d reached the end of a series of plans (plane flights, really) that we’d put together in early December, and those niggling questions finally caught back up with us. Even though we had a hotel for a week, we didn’t have any clue as to what or where next. This unknown filled us with a sort of dread. Either we were going to stop traveling altogether (a rather draconian way to avoid the questions), or we had to come up with an itinerary again for the next few months.

So that’s what we did in HCMC. Between meals, blogging about the Philippines, and applications of anti-fungal ointment, while the Tết Festival (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) celebrations swirled around us, we bunkered down in our hotel room and researched. It felt like a vacation from traveling. We watched TV! It took us nearly two weeks, but by the end, we’d sketched out a week-by-week plan for the rest of trip.

Of course what we actually choose to do or not do within those weeks can be decided on the ground, and where we stay doesn’t have to be determined more than a week or so in advance, but at least we don’t have to constantly ask, “ok, where next?” and have THE WHOLE WORLD as a solution set. To a certain degree it does mean we’re locking ourselves into a plan, at least as far as the plane tickets we’ve already purchased (though everything is flexible—at a price), but I’m starting to see this as a healthy form of embracing constraints.

For now I’ll share our route through continental Southeast Asia, which should carry us through the end of March. After that things get a bit fuzzier. Here’s how it looks: Ho Chi Minh City > Mekong Delta > Phnom Penh > Siem Reap > Đà Nẵng/Huế/Hội An > Hanoi/Hạ Long Bay > Luang Prabang > Chiang Mai > Ko Pha Ngan (just Stephanie—more on that later). We’re currently in Châu Đốc, Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta right across the border from Cambodia. Tomorrow we take a boat to Phnom Penh. More on HCMC/Saigon up next.

After spending one night in Iloilo City, we drove with Jeoffrey and Fatima up to his hometown of San Dionisio (san-din-E-she-o), about 100km north. The trip took over two hours as we passed through countless small villages. We also made several stops along the way, loading up with fresh fruits, vegetables, and even live catfish. We were commended for bringing the good weather with us: the skies were deep blue with big dramatic clouds.

We planned to spend three nights at Jeoffrey’s house, before returning to Iloilo for the Dinagyang Festival. He inherited the pre-war house from his grandparents (his grandmother is still alive and living there), and is slowly in the process of renovating it in the gaps between his seafaring contracts. It’s very much a work in progress. The original wood-framed kitchen had recently been torn down and replaced with a safer, yet still-unfinished concrete structure (walls, ceilings, counters and all). Most of the actual cooking happened outside over an open fire under a bamboo structure. We were invited to come back in 3 years (ok, maybe 5) to see the house when all the renovations should be complete.

In addition to Jeoffrey, Fatima, and his grandmother living there, they also employed a husband and wife with three young children who lived on-site to oversee the day-to-day needs of the house (cooking, cleaning, laundry, maintenance), as well as a late-teen who ran errands. It was a strange juxtaposition, being in a house that had clearly deteriorated over the years, and yet being served on like royalty. I’m not used to having other people cook and clean for me, but it made sense, given how hard it was to do those things without labor-saving devices like washing machines and dishwashers. It seemed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties, and they were very much treated like part of the family.

For a change, we were the only foreigners around, which though amusing to us, was all the more surprising to the locals, who weren’t used to seeing white people walk in their midst. Dropped jaws and double-takes were common. Schoolkids giggled, waved, and occasionally practiced their English. We had become the talk of the town. Jeoffrey’s mom told us that the people who saw us kept remarking “They’re so young!”, which confused us at first, but essentially meant that of the few Americans they do see, the majority tend to be much older (due in part to the US military bases stationed in the Philippines that were closed in the early 90s). Most people seemed happy to show us around, and I’d like to think it gave them a sense of pride knowing that two outsiders had come all this way just to visit their town.