Day 379: Mekong Delta - Can Tho

The second day of my Mekong Delta trip started very early. We met at 6am for a tour of the village's market and a visit to the primary school. When we got to the school, about half an hour before lessons started, many of the children were working together sweeping the floors. If someone had asked us to sweep the school's floors back when I was a kid, it's almost impossible to imagine that we would have complied. These kids did so very gracefully, however, and had their fair share of fun and laughter in the process.

After breakfast, we went on another boat trip to visit the floating market. The image I had in my mind when I thought of a floating market was that of a market hall somehow made to float on the river. That was not what the real floating market looked like, of course. Basically, the market consisted of a couple of ships anchoring in a specific area. Each ship had one or a few kinds of goods for sale; to tell potential customers what exactly a ship has aboard, they put up a pole displaying their goods.

The customers went around on their own small boats, or on special taxi boats, to visit the vendor ships and make purchases. Each vendor came to the floating market loaded with cargo, and our guide explained that they would stay until everything was sold. Then they would either buy new wares at this market and move on to another market, or return home to get a new load of their (mostly agricultural) goods.

On the way to and from the floating market, we saw a new face of the city: the riverside face. Hundreds of small shacks were built almost on top of the river, while more modern buildings towered behind. 

After the floating market, we visited a rice noodle factory. The factory visit was pretty good because the factory's products - fresh rice noodles - are sold in big quantities, and only to wholesalers. Therefore, they didn't care about the tourist visitors at all, and we were free to look around and watch rice noodles being produced.

Rice noodles are the main ingredient in Vietnam's popular noodle soup dishes, such as Pho. They are made from a mixture of rice flour and tapioca starch. The factory created a liquid dough from these two ingredients, and then workers made big pancakes that were steamed over boiling water (the water being brought to boil by burning rice husks - nothing is wasted here).

The pancakes were then laid out to dry on bamboo mats, and piled up once they were dry. 

In the last step, the dried pancakes were put through a cutting machine and packaged. The cutting machine was the only bit of machinery in the entire factory. Everything else - making the dough and pancakes, arranging pancakes on bamboo mats and in piles, and packaging the cut noodles - was done manually.