Rolling on the River

We got up very early to see the local floating market. Turns out today is a special holiday on the Lunar calendar, so there were very few boats out for the market. We have so much bad luck seeing floating markets. The one we tried to visit in Bangkok had moved out of the water and onto the street.

But we did get a great ride through many narrow tributaries of the Delta. I like being on the water, and I like the smaller waterways. You get a false sense of being a little farther away from civilization.

On one leg of the journey we came upon several larger boats loaded with sand. The Mekong is a very silty river. The water looks like coffee with a lot of cream. The sand is used locally to make concrete, and there is a lot of building going on here. Everything from housing to very large suspension bridges are going up all around us.

To get through this narrow passage, our boat pilot and the crews of the dredging boats had to cooperate. In many cases there was just barely enough room to pass. What I noticed was no one had a terse word for the other. The crews of all of the boats just accepted the presence of the other, and worked together to get the traffic to pass. It's a bit different than the freeways back home.