Oct 26 - Tan Chau and Evergreen Island

An amazing excursion into rural Vietnam... a trip into another era...








We moved through the villages by rickshaw....

Not many tourists come this way, we had a warm welcome...smiles everywhere, people at the side of the road, waving...for once I felt as much like a zoo animal as they must feel when we marsh through, cameras clicking everywhere.
We see all kinds of things from the back of the rickshaw...here a house under construction , note the scaffolding...

 ...dinner...there were about a dozen of these by the side of the road...

 ...lovely people, welcoming...

 We saw more people at work...great pride in the home industries, small factories producing (imitation) silk, mat-making:

 ...and a lady from the old regime...

 At the silk factory Bibi went local...

But for me the highlight was the sidetrip to Evergreen Island...no cars, only bicycles. 700 people live in an area 1 km wide and 7 km long...there is no electricity. In the monsoon season the island floods, that's why the houses are on stilts. when they cannot grow their crops, they catch fish, right under their houses.

For me this was a trip into the past. The similarities to the life style of (very) rural Mexicans from half a century ago with the lifestyle of rural Vietnamese in the 21st century took me back more than 40 years to Caracol where I did community development work with a group of seminarians.
The smell of wood fires, the construction of the homes (no windows necessary, you can see through the grass and twig construction), the laundry, the smiling people, the mud....