Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [93]
Back in town, the Chuong Duong hotel restaurant, which specializes in seafood, is the best bet, with large reasonably-priced portions. For simple but tasty local dishes, the Chi Thanh 1 and 2, the first of which is at 279 Tet Mau Than, and the second around the corner at 19 Ap Bac, are generally reliable, drawing plenty of locals each evening. Down by the riverside, at 11Trung Trac, the Banh Xeo 46 serves up tasty shrimp pancakes. There are also several cheap but popular restaurants at the southern end of Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, including a couple at numbers 24 and 44 that serve hu tieu (noodles with seafood and meat), the local speciality.
There’s little nightlife in My Tho, though the recently-opened Lac Hong Coffee Bar at 63, 30 Thang 4, adds a touch of class to the town with its colonial-style shuttered windows, comfy armchairs and good selection of coffee and cocktails. The bar features live jazz and blues on Thursday evenings.
The Mekong Delta | My Tho and around |
Around My Tho
Day-trippers tend to see little of My Tho as they disgorge from tour buses and embark on a boat trip round two or three of the islands in the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong River. Upstream at Cai Be it’s a similar story, with fleets of buses from Ho Chi Minh City descending on the village at around 11am for boat tours of the floating market. Arranging trips locally tends to lead to a more relaxed and enjoyable experience, but you’d probably need to sleep over at least one night. In contrast to Cai Be, the quirky snake farm at Dong Tham sees few foreign visitors.
The Mekong Delta | My Tho and around | Around My Tho |
The islands
Beyond its chaotic shoreline of stilthouses and boatyards, Tan Long (“Dragon Island”), the least frequently visited, boasts bounteous sapodilla, coconut and banana plantations, as well as highly regarded longan orchards. As with the other islands, Dragon Island is sparsely inhabited, by small communities of farmers and boat-builders. Thoi Son (“Unicorn Island”) is the largest of the four islands and many of the organized tours out of Ho Chi Minh City stop here for lunch and fruit sampling. Local tours do not always include lunch in the price, but all tours will stop somewhere you can get refreshment. Narrow canals allow boats to weave through its interior. Gliding along these slender waterways, overhung by handsome water-palm fronds which interlock to form a cathedral-like roof, it’s easy to feel you’re charting new territory. Swooping, electric-blue kingfishers and sumptuously coloured butterflies add to the romance.
Qui (“Turtle”) Island is the newest of the group, having been formed by sediment in the river, then stabilized by planting mangroves, and is overflowing with longans, dragon fruit, mango, papaya, pineapple and jackfruit. A small, family-run coconut candy factory is located just opposite on the Ben Tre coastline. Here you can watch the coconut being pressed, and the extracted juice being mixed with sugar and heated, then dried and cut into bite-size pieces. After tasting, many visitors buy a box to take home.
Phung (“Phoenix”) Island is famed as the home of an offbeat religious sect set up three decades ago by the eccentric Coconut Monk, Ong Dao Dua (see "Ong Dao Dua, the Coconut Monk"), although there’s not much left to see from his era, and only the skeleton of the open-air complex he established remains. Among its mesh of rusting staircases and platforms, you’ll spot the rocket-shaped