ON TWO WHEELS
Bike the Mekong Delta
The Mekong River shape-shifts through six countries, where floods provide, droughts threaten and history lurks in muddy farms and playing fields. Our bike tour followed the river through this changing landscape, a rich and lush sea of islands floating in a dry land, scorched and unyielding.
We began the tour at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh and the tunnels at Cu Chi, which memorialize the wiliness of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. There are many tourists at Cu Chi, but most aren’t preoccupied with the recent history of the place. They pay to shoot an AK-45 and pose for selfies in front of gun displays, or lounge around the pool and restaurants. They’ve made Cu Chi into a theme park.
There we were: 10 Canadian friends on a bus headed for the Mekong Delta, cranked with anticipation. A large truck followed, laden with bikes, gear, tools and our support crew of experts at guiding, fitting, repairing and feeding us.
In the delta, the wild crocodiles have been hunted out of existence. They are now farmed and supply chic restaurants with their meat, and upscale boutiques with their sought-after skin products. Our guide told us this in fluent English, reassuring us about the safety of our cycling route along the estuaries of the great river.
Our route took us into a complex network of roads and ferries across river channels, past dragon fruit orchards, duck ponds, bright sea-green rice paddies and crypts rising above the rice water. Families in the countryside stay close in death, and the tombs of ancestors are raised high to protect the spirits of the dead from the tidal floods of the rainy season.
This pastoral landscape is also dotted with broken-down, railless wooden bridges. We cycled over gaping holes in the slats of wood, which danced loosely under our wheels. We were careful not to swerve, knowing only a slight wobble would throw us over the edge into the muddy Mekong.
Our five days in the delta took us past coconut plantations, docks and barges, the cone-shaped woven hats and traditional skirts of women on bicycles, everyone’s arms full of children, flowers, pots, motorbike parts. We saw elephant-fish farms, factory-sized duck and goose farms, locals fishing for anchovies and hand-operated threshers harvesting rice.
Every now and then, the view opened up to a wide, fast-moving Mekong tributary on one side and green rice fields on the other. Clusters of sweating men would look up briefly as they excavated the roots of apricot trees, which would be fought over at market for their yellow blooms to celebrate the lunar new year.
Bathroom breaks were always an iffy search for so-called happy bushes or squat toilets. No toilet paper. We all improvise.
We checked out of Vietnam and crossed into Cambodia and the capital, Phnom Penh. We visited Tuol Sleng and the killing fields of the infamous Khmer Rouge regime, returning in a quiet mood. To access Mekong Island, we crossed a one-kilometre bamboo bridge that is washed out every year and reconstructed. It was a shiver of boards, crackling like artillery beneath our wheels.
The floods ended early this year and the region was in the grip of a serious drought. Kapoc trees waved above us, their lacy branches a fine detail in this wasting tableau. With every revolution of our wheels, our nostrils and eyes were assaulted by blinding bursts of sand and dust.
The further we went, the poorer the people and the more barren the land. We moved inland away from the river, higher and bone dry, into a region of rubber trees, tapioca, banana and teak. At Kratie, we dismounted.
Crossing the border into Laos, we were back on the Mekong. At Don Khon Island, we loaded our bikes and bags onto two open wooden boats and clambered in, passing little Mekong islands and water buffalo. At our riverside lodgings by the French Bridge, we were soon enjoying post-ride drinks and a deep red sunset.
At the top of the Bolaven Plateau — 1,300 metres up — feeling the chill of altitude, we bundled up with several layers and windbreakers for the 50 kilometres downhill to Pakse, shedding layers only at the end.
We were driven back up to the plateau to the Sinouk Coffee Resort. As a bonfire burned in the yard, we learned the difference between Vietnamese-owned coffee operations that contribute to the coffers of a bean baron and the cooperatives that contribute to the coffee growers in the villages. Our guide Somsak is from this region and told us how his parents lived underground through nine years of U.S. bombings, and how people have relegated that destruction, death and suffering “to the past.” Only two weeks ago, he said, six children, playing outside, exploded a bomb remnant, killing two of them.
After a bleak and long ride through a forsaken land of burntout jungle, forlorn homes and foreign-owned rubber plantations, two burly Toyotas took us up a steep road to the Koh Ker Temple at Preah Vihear, but the smoke from the annual burnings hid the vistas from sight.
Back at our hotel in Sro Em, the Wi-Fi had been knocked out by fires in the fields that destroyed the wires that bring the Internet to the whole town. We were also off the grid in other ways, the only westerners in town, which was a carnival of chatter and competing boom boxes, raucous outdoor dining, children, dogs and a black polka-dot pig nosing the garbage. The hot, smoky skies were devoid of birdsong.
For the last few days of the tour, we returned to Cambodia, having crossed the great wasteland back into a lush, green landscape. Our Angkor Wat guide, Cheak, led us along narrow, sandy trails through the park, returning to the main road to visit three different temples: Ta Prohm, Bayon and Angkor Wat. We lunched at Cheak’s home, where his wife prepared spring rolls, vegetables, fish, chicken and sweet desserts.
Cheak is devoted to the preservation of Angkor Wat and Cambodian history and culture. He has developed his property with a school for poor children, a garden and a fish pond he hopes will one day become a farm. He and his family have designs on creating a tourist destination that will employ people in the community.
He told us of his family’s ordeals during the Khmer Rouge assaults, when his parents hid out in Angkor Wat during days of prolonged shelling and gunfire. Villagers hunkered down there with their families and livestock.
At the main temple, he showed us the holes made by gunfire, still visible in the temple walls. In 1997, he said, his family was captured by soldiers during one of the Thai-Cambodian border flare-ups. He and his parents had gone to a wedding and became trapped behind a confrontation. They were arrested, blindfolded and forced to kneel while their captors debated whether to shoot them.
On the last night of the tour, we enjoyed a farewell dinner at the home of the tour manager, Barang. Apparently this was the only way the crew would feel comfortable at dinner with us. We all wore our traditional Cambodian scarves. Barang’s wife prepared a feast — a generous barbecue of seafood and meat, wine and beer. The Mekong had changed us just as it transformed the landscape. We sat at a long table in their front yard, laughing in the darkness, drinking toasts to the crew.