It was a million, give or take. Which sounds a lot, but we’d come here to Can Tho mostly to see the floating market, so we decided to suck it up. After all, it was still less than £40 for us to hire a boat, a boatman and An – the owner of our guesthouse – to take us out for the day, to the floating market for dawn, plus a few other attractions, with breakfast and lunch included. Put like that it didn’t sound so bad. Which is how we found ourselves stumbling into a shabby shallow-hulled boat, not much more than a punt, and heading off into the pre-dawn gloom.
For the first hour or so it was all a bit lowering. What should have been an idyllic sashay along the creeks throughout this muddy Mekong tangle turned into a dismaying stop-start, as our boatman stopped every 20 minutes to disentangle plastic from his propellor. Vietnam is absolutely plagued with litter – and the waterways are the worst, with absolutely no let up from assault by bottles and cans, boxes and styrofoam, and above all bag after bag after bag of rubbish, just roughly tied and flung into the water.
Out on the river, things looked brighter, and before long we were approaching the famous market. V, having been to similar ‘water markets’ in Thailand, was resigned to finding a bit of a tourist trap, but far from it – we found ourselves in the district Covent Garden, where tourists are an irrelevance as wholesalers buy 400 pineapples or 200 kilos of sweet potatoes, to then sell on to street market traders. The place is a frenzy of big boats, little boats, hustle, bustle and banter, for the hours either side of sunrise, boats in the middle offering hot tea and coffee, and hot pho for breakfast.
At lunchtime a guided tour round the local market ended up at a small roadside stall for lunch, where An introduced us to the delights of DIY rolling: a basket containing lettuce leaves along with mint, cucumber, some kind of pepper leaves, and sort of lemon leaves. Then a plate in the middle, with various kinds of meat and spring rolls and fried tofu, and deep–fried prawns. And a little bowl of dipping sauce each. So you take your lettuce leaf and you add whatever you fancy and roll it up and dip the roll in the dipping sauce and then munch it. And it’s all fresh and delicious.