Mekong Delta – homestay hospitality

Our trip to the Mekong Delta included a homestay with a local family, who truly lived up to the words that our guide Huy kept using to describe the people in South Vietnam – ‘always a smiling face.’ The Anh family live on and run a farm in Tra On, just south of Can Tho – to get to their home, we walked lush off-the-road paths along the river.

We enjoyed a homemade lunch before heading out for the afternoon for a ‘relaxing’ (white-knuckle) bicycle ride (more on that in another post!).

In the evening, we got to spend some time with the family before dinner. Three generations live in the house together. The two boys, Bi and Bo, were absolutely adorable, and took an immediate shine to our girl.

No one in the family spoke any English, and of course we didn’t speak any Vietnamese beyond hello (xin chao) and thank you (cam on) – so Huy was our expert interpreter. He had learned English in school, but in the stilted, grammar-focused, non-conversational way that many of us learned languages in school – so he said that he made himself more fluent by watching YouTube and Hollywood movies!

When it was time to cook dinner, we all pitched in – from snapping homegrown green beans to cooking a traditional meal – we even got to cook the rice pancakes we’d enjoyed on our street food tour.

Here’s a time-lapse look at Mrs. Anh making the traditional pancake:

 

We each got a turn – I won’t say which pancake turned out the best. 🙂

Our meal – served with homemade ‘happy water’!

Another unique thing we got to see – Mrs. Anh and her daughter make rice paper that gets taken to Ho Chi Minh City for sale. They were constantly working the whole time we were there – steaming the paper, laying it out to dry on stackable bamboo racks, and hand stacking it to get it ready for transport.

We fell into bed exhausted after a full and adventurous day. And we found out what time roosters wake up on the farm. 2:51am. And 4:08am. Roosters can really be jerks.