The Mekong Delta, three days

At a glance

Duration

3 days, 2 nights

Party size

2 to 8, private

Starts

Ho Chi Minh City, hotel pick-up at 07:30

Ends

Ho Chi Minh City, or Can Tho airport

Effort

Easy — short walks, but low steps into small boats

From

USD 690 per person

Who this is for

The delta is not a sight. It is forty thousand square kilometres of river mud that feeds the country, cut into islands by nine river mouths and thousands of canals, where the road is often the least interesting way to get anywhere. Two nights is the minimum that lets you sleep in it twice and be on the water at the hour when the water is being worked. One night, which is what most operators sell, gets you a boat ride and a coconut sweet and a drive home.

Day 1 goes as far as Cai Be on the Tien river, about two and a half hours out of the city, and the night is spent with a family on the orchard islands opposite Vinh Long. Day 2 crosses to Can Tho, the delta’s only real city. Day 3 starts in the dark, because the Cai Rang wholesale market is a trading floor that opens around half past five and is materially finished by eight, and any itinerary that gets you there at nine has sold you a boat trip past a dozen parked barges.

This works best as an add-on rather than a first look at Vietnam — run it after four days in Ho Chi Minh City and you have a week that makes sense. If you want the far delta as well, Tra Vinh, Chau Doc and the Cambodian border country are in the five-day in-depth route. Background on the region is on the delta page.

Day by day

Day 1

The city to Cai Be, then a family house on the islands

Eating what the family eats, at the family’s table

Pick-up at 07:30 to get clear of the city before the worst of it. The expressway runs south-west past My Tho, which is 80 km and about two hours out, and we carry on to Cai Be, roughly another half hour. The landscape changes in stages: factories, then rice, then orchard, then water everywhere and houses turned to face it.

At Cai Be we take a private boat onto the Tien, one of the two main channels of the Mekong in Vietnam, past the church on the bank and the barges tied three deep. There is a standard version of this morning that involves a coconut-candy workshop, a honey tea stop and a snake-wine counter, all of which pay a commission to whoever brought you. We do not do the commission version. We stop at one working place — a rice-paper or candy operation that is actually producing for sale — you watch the process, and nobody stands over you with a basket. Late afternoon we cross to the orchard islands near Vinh Long and settle into a family house: mosquito nets, a fan or a simple air-conditioner, a shared or simple private bathroom, and dinner cooked by the family with you in the kitchen if you want to be. The money for the night goes to the household.

StayFamily homestay on the islands near Vinh Long — simple, clean, not a hotelMealsLunch, dinnerTravelAbout 110 km, 2 hours 30 from the cityOn foot3 km, flat, some of it on narrow orchard paths and monkey-bridge planks

Day 2

Canals in the morning, Can Tho in the afternoon

The rowed sampan in the narrow canals, before seven

Up when the house gets up, which is early — the roosters do not consult you. The first two hours are the best of the trip and cost almost nothing: a rowed sampan into the small canals behind the orchards, where the water is the width of the boat and the nipa palm closes over your head. Then breakfast, and a walk through the fruit gardens with whoever is picking that morning.

We cross back to the mainland and run down to Can Tho, about 40 km and an hour. The afternoon is the city rather than the countryside, which is a useful corrective: 1.2 million people, a university, a cable-stayed bridge two and a half kilometres long, and a nineteenth-century merchant house at Binh Thuy with French tiles and Vietnamese timber that shows exactly what delta money bought when the rice trade was at its peak. Evening on the Ninh Kieu quay, where the whole city walks after dark. Early night, because Day 3 starts at a quarter past five.

StayRiverside hotel in Can Tho, near the Ninh Kieu quayMealsBreakfast, lunchTravelAbout 40 km, 1 hour, plus short hops in Can ThoOn foot4 km across the day, flat

Day 3

Cai Rang before the light, then back to the city

On the water at 05:30, an hour before the tour boats arrive

Leave the hotel at 05:15 and board a private boat at the quay. Cai Rang is about six kilometres downstream and thirty to forty minutes away, and you arrive as it is getting light. This is a wholesale market: boats come in loaded with one crop each and sell it on to smaller traders, and what each boat is carrying is advertised by a sample tied to a tall bamboo pole on the bow. Nobody is performing. Trading runs from about half past five to eight and then it is over, which is the whole reason for the alarm clock. We buy breakfast from a boat that does nothing but noodle soup, and drink coffee handed across from another one.

The honest part, and it matters: Cai Rang is much smaller than it was ten years ago. Bridges replaced ferries, roads reached villages that used to be served only by water, and wholesalers moved their business onto trucks. Where there were several hundred boats there are now perhaps a hundred on a good morning, and by half past eight the tourist boats outnumber the trading ones. It is still worth doing and it is still real at six in the morning. It is not the photograph from the 1990s, and anyone selling you that photograph is lying. We are back at the hotel for a proper breakfast by eight, and on the road north by half past nine — 170 km and about three and a half hours to Ho Chi Minh City, arriving early afternoon.

Stay—MealsBreakfastTravel170 km, 3 hours 30 back to the cityOn foot1 km, plus stepping in and out of a low boat at the quay

What it costs

One of the two nights is a family house that costs a fraction of a hotel room, so the columns on this trip separate less than you might expect. What Excellent and Exceptional actually buy is the Can Tho night — a standard riverside hotel, a good four-star with a pool, or a river-view suite — plus, if you take the option, a small lodge near Vinh Long in place of the homestay. We list that as an upgrade because for some people it is one, and we would rather you chose it deliberately than found out on arrival that a homestay is a homestay.

The rest of the price is boats and road. Two private boats — the Tien river at Cai Be and the pre-dawn run to Cai Rang — are chartered for your party alone rather than shared, which is a large part of why the morning works. Party size does the rest: a party of eight splits the same vehicle and the same guide four ways more than a couple does. See what a Vietnam trip costs, and how to book for the sequence from enquiry to confirmation.

Included and not included

Pictures from this route

Who this trip is not for

The delta rewards a specific kind of traveller and disappoints everyone else.

• Anyone who will not get up at a quarter past five on the last morning. Cai Rang works between about 05:30 and 08:00 and not afterwards; a nine o’clock start turns the whole trip into a boat ride.
• Travellers expecting the floating market of the old photographs. It has shrunk by something like two thirds in a decade as bridges and trucks took the trade, and we say that here rather than after you have paid.
• Anyone who needs a private bathroom and reliable air-conditioning every night. Night one is a family house; if that is not for you, take the lodge upgrade before you book rather than asking to move on the day.
• People who cannot step down unaided into a low boat from a floating jetty, or walk a plank bridge over a canal. There are no handrails and the sampan sits close to the water.
• First-time visitors with only three days in Vietnam. Spend them in and around Ho Chi Minh City or up north instead; the delta is better as a second helping.

How the days actually run