Coconut Kingdom

We got up early to take a tour.  We first went to a local market.  This market was different as all the animals were live.  The food, although a little scary, was all super fresh.  Frogs.

Cat fish.

A man killing a fish.

Squid.

Ducks and chickens--it was amazing how fast most of these were purchased after a short tour.

Yummy...

These are eggs that were coated to let them age, one salt, one dirt.

Thirty kinds of rice.

Fighting cocks can go for thousands of dollars.

Then we saw a Khmer (Cambodian) temple...

And a Cai Dao temple, a new religon that 15% of Vietnamese follow that incorporates multiple religions.

Then we cruised to and toured a brick factory...

First they dry them...

Then they rice husk to cure them in the kiln.

It's an amazingly efficient process.  They load tens of thousands of bricks into a kiln.

The rice husk looks like dust and continues to trickled down like molten lava as it b

Then we headed back to the boat to cruise to the coconut kingdom where everyone grows and works with coconuts.

That's coconut dust that is created from crushing the shell and separating the fiber.  It's used for growing orchids.

These are the husks.

This is the fiber after the husks are crushed and dust removed.

They were amazingly efficient at taking the husks off.

We even saw huge ships being loaded boat by boat all by hand.

Then we ate some fruit.

Then the boat got stuck in the ground trying to pass a big barge that was stuck.

The tide fluctuates three meters each day.

But we were happy being on the boat, even when we were stuck--the longer the better.

Then back to Ho Chi Minh City and toured some markets.  Jen was looking for large chopsticks so she could cook like the woman on the boat.