Cai Rang Floating Market

Wednesday January 9th

This is Thursday and we're in Phu Quoc but so much happened yesterday we're dividing it into at least 2 parts. Plus the internet here is slow and shaky.
We left our hotel in Can Tho at 7 am yesterday and took the motorboat in the picture about 1/2 hour down the Mekong to Cai Rang floating market. For the past few hundred years farmers in the Mekong Delta have been sending their produce to market this way since there were few roads. The market is usually at an intersection of branches of the river. Gradually, they're dying out but this one is still going.
Local restaurants and shops send out their longtail boats, so named because the propeller is on a long shaft out the back so they can raise and lower it easily, to the bigger boats loaded with produce in the river. The big boats might be loaded with melons, onions or anything else. They tie a sample of what they're selling to a bamboo pole so everyone can see what's available. The boat crew is usually a family who live on board. They wait for a few days at the market until they sell all their produce and then go back to the farms to pick up more. It's all cash.
As we approached the market we went by a gas station, lots of small businesses and lots of houses that are at least partly built over the river on stilts. Some houses are floating on the river. Because these people literally live on the river, every thing they do is associated with it. Hence, the Mekong is incredibly polluted. It's brown because of the silt but maybe that's a good thing. People will sit on a couple of boards with a gap between them at the back of the boat and take a dump. Then 3 feet away they'll haul up water for washing dishes and clothes. Or you see somebody taking a leak in the river while only a few feet away someone is simultaneously washing their face and arms. This is all they have to work with.
In the cities, there is treated municipal water. Outside the cities, those with enough money buy bottled drinking water. The poorest people scoop buckets of water out of the river and mix alum powder into it to help settle the sediment to the bottom. Then they drink it. Of course we couldn't see what effect this has on those with little resistance to disease, like infants, but it can't be good. In Canada, we take clean water for granted. Others around the world aren't so lucky.
And it's not like there's much in the way of health care. Our guide told us that there are public government hospitals but they are not free, just cheaper than the private hospitals. However the public hospitals are very overcrowded, often with 2 to a bed and people lying on the floor in the halls. The private hospitals are better but much more expensive. Even the few people with health insurance have limits to their coverage. So again, this is not a communist state with universal health care like we have in Canada. Count your blessings.
After we toured by boat around the floating market, we went for a tour of a small rice noodle factory. That's another story for later but let's just say we want our rice noodles well boiled from now on.