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Life on the River (part 2) )

You would be missing the fun of living on the river if you couldn't jump into the water from the bridge!

or if your pet ducks didn't swim around in your front yard canal.

But there is still work to do: wood to transport,

watermelons to sell, 

bottled juice, soda, coconut water or hot coffee to offer.

Heck, here's the whole grocery store set up for you on your homeward commute...

Some houses don't look too sturdy on their rickety pole foundations. But here are a few with a patio growing what looks like tomatoes and other plants, as well as a vehicle (boat) in the 'driveway'.

Coming home

Neighbors of all income levels.

A new giant coming to the river. How will life change?

Life on the River (part 1)

Since we did a lot of countryside riding in the Mekong Delta, we saw many occupations that were closely related to the river and its fertility, flow, and abundance.

Rice paddies of course, often combined with coconut palms.
Green and beautiful.

Some rice comes to this little local rice mill for processing. 

The coconuts get loaded onto the boats, 

and after loading, the workers take a little break.

While others unload boatloads of bricks.

A fishing couple comes home from fishing and puts their boat away.

and ties it securely against the river rise or fall.

Some folks live in their river boats and have a spare boat for fishing.

Food -Viet Nam

Probably the tastiest food I've ever eaten was in Viet Nam. That's not really an exaggeration, most of the group felt the same way. The food was amazing: the ingredients so fresh and the seasonings so complex and complimentary that no matter where we ate, from little sidewalk shops sitting on blue plastic chairs, to four-star restaurants with cloth napkins, we would take a bite and look up in wonder, wondering how could it taste so good? Too bad I can't provide you with a sample, and no, the americanized Vietnamese food we find at home isn't as good. Sorry.

I don't have a lot of photos of the cooked dishes but I can show you the markets with all their variety.
Not that I tasted everything! I ate mostly vegetarian, but many of the group were daring eaters and were not ever disappointed.

Fantastic greens. These are a big part of the flavoring of the stews and noodle dishes.

There is always fresh fish --or octopus, or eels, or shrimp.

Poultry.

Bullfrogs, also eaten in Singapore. Considered very nutritious -and not just for their legs.

Piggies going to market.

Piggies and cow bits at the market.

Fruit: Here you have: mangosteen, longan, passion fruit, oranges, dragon fruit. Second row: lychee, dragon fruit, apples, water apples, limes. Third row rambutan and more longan.

and finally, Durian!

A few more Caminos

I'll finish this category with a few more photos of the varied caminos we rode on.....

The narrowest were the rice paddies. The slipperiest were the concrete, mossy and just-after-the-rain caminos. We had to ride slowly and carefully.

Sometimes rice paddies were so beautiful we jumped for joy, although one of our group fell in and had to be fished out of the sticky mud!

We continued riding along the very fertile and productive rice and coconut fields.

A day or two later our first view of (possibly) cool mountains was a wonderful treat.

 Rani celebrates with her CrossFit strength.

And life goes on along the caminos of Viet Nam.

Viet Nam & Cambodia: EL CAMINO

I do apologize for being so lax and late in my travel blogging. In the time since we arrived in Singapore  I have been traveling here and there: to Viet Nam and Cambodia with Rani, to Hong Kong with Bill, and with various visitors on this island; therein lies the problem. They put their blogs up so fast that I'm left thinking that mine will just be a repeat of theirs; same pictures, same stories. So I get lazy or feel redundant. Ok, my challenge is to show a different angle.....

I'll start with Viet Nam and Cambodia: Rani and I spent almost 2 weeks visiting and cycling in the Mekong river delta of southern Viet Nam, eventually ending our trip in Siem Reap, Cambodia (famous for the temple complex of Angkor Wat). Rani did a great job chronicling the adventure in her blog http://rani-by-the-sea.blogspot.sg/2014/07/cycling-through-vietnam-southern-mekong.html

I'll fill in the blanks with a few more pictures -Posting here every other day by Category.

1.) EL CAMINO (the road, the route, the path, the track, the way, the journey, the direction) Pardon my spanish, but there is no all-inclusive word like this in english.

Thankfully, we were driven outside the city (Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City) in order to start our trip. You'll see in a later post how crazy traffic can be in big cities. So here we are, just starting out on a camino that is getting muddier and muddier. 

and clearly undergoing some repair!

So Vu, our guide has us turn around and find a better road.

Ok, much better.

We pop out of the rural roads occasionally and ride in small towns.

Or towns with a bit more wiggle room.

We frequently cross the rivers and canals by ferry,

or over bridges.

The mother-daughter team in the afternoon of a great day.

Same place Next Year

I named my blog Ingtraveling because I  use it to post stories and photos when I travel. But I surprised myself just now when I went to update it and saw that my last post was from Singapore in 2013. Here  I am in Singapore again, and it is 2014! This time we are staying 7 months, not 7 weeks but that is okay, there is lots to like here and still more to discover.

We arrived on Friday, June 13th and after settling into our apartment and Bill into his office, we had a weekend to acclimatize. We live very close to West Coast Park which is actually a beautiful 3-mile long greenbelt sandwiched between the container port (one of the busiest in the world) and a major east-west highway of the island.

The park is green and clean and flows organically into each of 10 or so areas such as mangrove marsh, jogging path, camping zone, exercise zones with outdoor equipment, adventure playground, picnic tables, bird lake, and much more. Most of the time it feels like you are walking along a path in a garden of immense and exotic trees; they have been deliberately planned and planted to make you forget that you are actually pinned between shipping port and super highway. You almost do forget, but you need to push out of your ears the ever present background noise.

Little fishing boats share port with huge container ships.

On one side is the highway overpass, with a road down below too…










and here is the other side of the greenway, you can see the shipping containers stacked waiting to load.

Exotic 'cannon ball tree'
(notice shipping containers behind)