Can Tho on Foot and Water

Saigon, Sunday, January 19, 2025--On Friday morning in Can Tho along the Mekong, Ben started with a walking tour across the pedestrian bridge to downtown Can Tho.  The bridge has huge lotus leaf sculptures where one can get shade from the heat in the parks.  The city is well decorated for Tet, the Lunar New Year which starts this year on January 22nd.  

The signature flower here for the New Year is the apricot blossom which are just starting to bloom.  We learned that you need to remove all the leaves to make it flower in time for the celebration.  

We walked to the Khmer Buddhist monastery where we were greeted and given a tour by the abbot.  He is fluent in English (as well as three or four other languages.)  Aside from the monks, the monastery provides housing for a small number of male out-of- town students registered in the various post-secondary schools around Can Tho.  The competition for this accommodation is great, but the abbot said that the students who are given free will had to comply with the monastical rules including curfew at 10pm.  In line with this free will, the students are not pressured to become monks.

Later came a boat for a tour of the floating fruit market.  The vendors in smaller boats pulled up to ours to sell coconuts, pineapple, melon, and rambutan.  Although Chung, our guide, noted that fewer vendors have been coming in the last decade or so, our group drank coconut juice out of the coconut which was artfully opened by the vendor.

John, who was not feeling well, was not part of this afternoon.  We had traveled by plane first from Hué to Saigon and by bus to Can Tho, the largest city in the delta region.