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30m · Admission ticket included
We board your private boat for a cruise on the Mekong River. Our first stop is at a bee farm, to gain an insight into one of the cottage industries in the region. We will also visit an island with lush tropical gardens where we have a chance to sample tropical fruit.
You can visit a factory and be explained the process of making the sweet. As we meander down the Mekong, we will have a chance to visit local villages in the area and learn more about the traditional lifestyles, culture, and customs of people who call the Delta their home.
We will travel by tricycles motorbike to discover local life in incredible alleys hidden insight covered tropical fruit orchards, from where we will transfer to a smaller rowing boat to help us get deeper into the smaller canals of the Delta.
For lunch, we will hit up local restaurant, where your local guide will provide you with some advice on the finer points of local cuisine and assist with ordering some of these delicacies.
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2h · Admission ticket included
Unicorn Island is a long sandbank in the middle of the Mekong, reached only by boat. Your guide walks you through a working village rather than a show: a bee farm where you drink honey tea with pollen and kumquat, a family workshop puffing rice over hot sand into com gao, another rolling coconut chocolate and candy by hand, and a stall making fresh rice paper rolls you eat on the spot.
An electric cart then takes you along the narrow lanes, past houses, gardens and canals, so you see how people here actually live. In a tropical orchard you sit down to a plate of whatever fruit is ripe that month while local musicians play don ca tai tu, the folk music of the delta.
You finish in a wooden sampan, rowed by hand down a canal so narrow the water coconut palms close over your head. It is quiet, shaded, and the part our guests photograph most.
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1h · Admission ticket included
You swap the boat for a cyclo and roll slowly through the lanes of the coconut country: houses half hidden behind palms, hammocks strung between trunks, children on bicycles, coconut fibre drying by the road, water on both sides. There is almost no traffic out here - just your driver pedalling behind you and the sound of the leaves.
The ride ends at a riverside restaurant built on stilts over the water and open on every side. Lunch is a Vietnamese meal cooked to order and shared at the table: elephant ear fish with rice paper and herbs, clay pot fish, morning glory with garlic, soup, rice and fresh fruit. Tell us when you book if anyone is vegetarian and we will arrange it.
You eat looking straight out at the river, with boats passing a few metres away. Take your time here - there is nowhere else to be.
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20m · Admission ticket included
Ben Tre is Vietnam's coconut province, and this is where the fruit becomes everything. In a family workshop open to the road you watch the whole chain: husks split with a blade, the white flesh grated, the milk pressed out by hand, then boiled with malt and cane sugar in a shallow pan over a wood fire until it thickens and darkens.
The mixture is poured onto a cool table, cut into strips while still warm and wrapped one by one in edible rice paper by women who have done it for years and barely look down. You taste it straight off the table, still soft, in plain, pandan, peanut or durian.
Your guide explains why nothing here is wasted: the husk becomes rope and doormats, the shell becomes charcoal and bowls, the water becomes vinegar. It costs nothing to watch, and the smell of hot coconut sugar stays with you all day.
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Vinh Trang Temple
30m · Admission ticket included
The extremely beautiful structures in the pagoda are two triumphal arches bearing an art of inserting bottle and porcelain fragments which create harmonious pictures illustrating the Buddha’s legendaries. Inside the pagoda, there is a set of pictures “eight angels riding on animals” another set of statues of the Amitabha Holy Trinity carved in bronze, as big as a man, and more particularly, the set of the eighteen Arhants, wood carving work, is the only one, not two, in the west of South Vietnam, made by a snumber of artists in 1907. Graves of Buddhist priests who took care of the pagoda are scattered around. These graves are decorated with carefully engraved flagstones.
There are three entrances to the pagoda. The central iron gate is always closed, while the two side gates, which are designed in the co lau style are open. The side gates are adorned with colorful porcelain mosaics featuring Buddhist folktales and natural scenery.
