Nov 9, Fri, Ben Tre and Tra On

By tomandcherylinsarasotaNovember 11, 2018

At the end of Friday, I was thinking that this was my favorite day. But at the end of Saturday, THAT turned out to be my favorite day. In any case, it was a very neat day. We left the ship at 7:30 by sampan and went through a canal to a small village. We walked through the village and visited a coconut candy making factory (? – about 5 people) and were then picked up by some horse carts and taken to a family who owned a fruit orchard. They served us some Jasmine tea with homemade honey and a citrus, along with a huge plate of various fruits. Then some singers and musicians from the village sang for us. After that, we left in some canoes, most of which were managed by tiny old ladies who could maneuver those canoes better than anyone I’ve seen.

After a buffet lunch, we headed out by sampan again to a home where there were five women making baskets from the roots of water hyacinths to sell to Ikea. They couldn’t sell any to us because they hadn’t been fumigated yet. Then we took the sampan to a Buddhist temple situated in the middle of a garden with 230 stone tablets with Buddhist sayings. We docked overnight at Can Tho, which apparently has quite a night life. There were large billboards for the ship tourists, and party ships heading out for night cruises with quite loud music. I don’t think many on our cruise were tempted, although some got off and walked around town after dinner.

Cheryl

Heading out on our sampan

Bananas are both a large export and major food source

Hey, chocolate lovers – here’s the source!

Coconut candy taffy

And here’s the production line

Jasmine tea and honey

It’s at this point in the posting that I discovered that a slow internet takes too much time out of my vacation and is more work than fun. From this point on, I’ll only take time to describe what we do during the day and post the pictures without captions and in quite random order. I hope you understand. I’d rather post something instead of nothing.