Would you drink that?
- Ruth Mcbride
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Day 7 Avalon Saigon River Cruise on the Mekong Delta
This morning we had our last Sampan ride of the cruise. Our early morning excursion brought us to Vinh Long to a workshop. We got to experience some traditional Vietnamese foods and drink at this ‘one stop shop’ on the Mekong River.
We disembarked at what look like a covered open air building which had various stations set up inside. Our first stop was to learn how edible rice paper was made. Rice paper spring rolls are served frequently as an appetizer in Vietnam and they can be cold, or deep fried. The fillings vary too from crispy, fresh vegetables and mint in fresh rolls, to pork or chicken mixed with thin slices of carrots, green papaya and fish sauce in deep fried spring rolls.
Traditional rice paper is made from soaking white rice overnight, boiling it and then crushing it until a white juice comes out of the rice. The rice juice is then poured over a stone slab with a silicone, non stick cover on it, over a fire. After the rice juice is spread out with a spoon, in a very thin round layer, a bamboo cover is put over the rice to heat it up. It didn’t take more than about 20 seconds before the lady took a thin wooden dowel a little bigger and flatter on the sides than a chopstick and slowly and gently folded the rice paper onto a drying rack, to hang and let cool down.
The next stop was something very interesting! As I was watching the rice paper demonstration I was also looking at the jars on the next counter because there was NO WAY I was going to try what came next!
Snake venom rice wine!
Dating back to 771BC, the consumption of snake wine is believed to have benefits in traditional Chinese medicine. Drinking the wine is supposed to promote health and prosperity.
The first step in soaking the snakes before moving them over to the glass jars. Apparently there is a recipe for this snake wine and there needs to be a certain ‘blend’ of venomous snakes in the rice wine concoction to be left to ferment for 3 years before consumption!
Richard’s sample of snake rice wine.
We had the option to try rice wine or snake wine. I decided not to try anything, but Richard tried the snake wine and he said it tasted a bit medicinal. About half the people on our cruise tried the snake wine.
The next station we were taken to in this little complex was the popped rice area.
In the wok is black sand being heated over the fire. The man kept stoking the fire by adding more brown rice as fuel to the fire underneath the wok. Brown rice was added to the hot wok once the sand was very hot, with a small amount of liquid.
Next thing we knew, there was popped rice everywhere!
To get rid of the black sand and unpopped rice, the popped rice is thrown into a hanging mesh strainer.
A coconut sugar and malt caramel was being boiled at the next station. Once the caramel was ready, the popped rice was addded to and stirred up to coat the popped rice.
The popped rice was spread in a form and then cut to be packaged into small packages for sale. You can see the notches on along the sides of the form and two workers took large wood sticks and cut the rice into blocks for packaging.
Packaging the popped corn.
Sealing the bags of popped rice with a flame on the plastic.
The process of making popped rice is very labour intensive but apparently this facility supplies the school kids nearby with popped rice who love having it as a snack. I’m a butter and salt kind of person on my popcorn frankly, but I think I could get used to popped rice as an alternative to corn!
After seeing how popped rice was made, we then moved over to a station where a man was making coconut candy out of fresh coconuts and condensed milk.
Fresh shredded coconut made by taking the green skin off the coconut with this sharp spike and using a grinder type device inside the coconut to shred it.
The coconut is then pressed and pressed to get the juice out of it, which is then added to a boiling pot with sweetened condensed milk and malt and boiled to reach a point where it caramelizes. Once the candy has caramalized, then it is poured into strip molds, where it hardens.
Once the candy is hard, it is cut and wrapped in individual pieces with some wax paper on the inside of the paper so it doesn’t stick, stacked and then packaged for sale. There were different flavours of this candy being made like coconut coffee, coconut banana, and coconut pineapple.
After we had visited all the stations we were invited to sit down at some tables that had a covered selection of items which were for purchase. We were also served jasmine tea with our sweets.
I’m not sure what everything was but we tasted it and if we liked it, we bought it! I do know the candied ginger in the foreground was delicious and I picked up 4 packages of it as well as 4 packages of jasmine tea. The prices were very good with items costing 5 for $10USD and if you bought 5 items, you got an extra package for free.
After about an hour wandering through the various stations, having some tea and sweets and looking at souvenir items, it was time to board our waiting Sampan to take us back to the Avalon Saigon. I did buy a small bottle of snake wine for a very good friend of mine who asked me to pick up a bottle for his collection of ‘oddities’.
The snake wine I purchased has a small cobra inside it, but it is labelled “For display only. Not for consumption.”
After we left the workshop facility, we entered a canal instead of going back to the Avalon Saigon the way we had come. We determined that the ship must have repositioned while we were on shore and that is why we were having a scenic Sampan ride through a canal.
The canal we went down had a lot nicer homes and seemed to be much more developed that some of the other places that we had been to on our trip.
River homes but nicer than we had seen previously on our travels.
Passing another Sampan.
The Avalon Saigon was still moving when we pulled up to it. It was an interesting embarkation to the ship as the sampan was also moving! Definitely not for the faint of heart, but the crew, Guide and Cruise Director were available to assist us hop up to the moving ship.
We had the rest of the day to leisurely pack up our cabin into our suitcases, as we needed to have our bags outside our cabin at 7am the next morning for disembarkation in Saigon. Our luggage was going directly to our hotel, while we were going to be met with a bus to get to the start of our walking tour in Ho Chi Minh City.
We found out that we would be docking downtown Saigon overnight. Our Tour Director Ha showed us where Viking, Uniworld and all of the other larger ships (3 deck high ships) have to disembark because they cannot get under one low bridge on the way to Saigon. What this means is that these tour companies have to charter a bus and at the end of their Mekong River Cruise, they get to enjoy a 2 hour bus ride in traffic into Saigon! We are so glad we are on a small ship and we do not have to deal with long bus rides at the end of our river cruise!
At 6pm in the Panorama Lounge our Tour Director Ha played a slide show of photos he had taken of our group over the number of days we’ve been with him since Hanoi. He has a good eye for photography, so it was nice to see his shots where he not only took photos of us, but of the local people and the beautiful scenery too. We gave him our email address and he said he would send us the YouTube link for the slideshow once he edits it properly.
After the slide show, the entire crew came to say goodbye to us. There were 28 crew and 30 passengers, so we really had a very good guest to crew ratio! The crew were all introduced and then they sang a song for us and had some guests got up and danced with the crew before our last dinner on board.
Frankly we were getting very excited to be arriving in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in the evening since we had never seen the city lit up at night before! Everyone was going out to the front of the ship to take videos and photos of the skyline and it was a really neat experience to be able to see the city from the river at night for our sail in.
We headed to our last dinner of the cruise on the Avalon Saigon. Thank goodness the ship was NOT serving any snake wine at dinner! Our dinner was probably the best we have had on the ship with beef tenderloin on the menu tonight!
It is hard to believe that our river cruise and vacation are coming to an end, but it does feel like we have been away from home for a very long time. I’m so glad we chose Avalon for this Mekong Delta river cruise given my aversion to sitting on buses in traffic. It would have been a real drag at the end of our cruise to have to sit on a bus for a few hours (or more depending on traffic) to finally reach Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon in the dark. I wonder where Uniworld and Viking fed people that last night? Anyway, not our problem as we enjoyed our last night on the cruise ship Avalon Saigon.
Comments