It’s morning in My Tho. And unfortunately, it’s time for us to say “good-bye” to the Mekong Delta. Even worse, it’s time for us to leave the boat that’s been our home for the past seven days. We’ve been on an Amawaterways cruise on the Mekong River, starting in Cambodia and ending here in My Tho.
Last night, we left Cai Be and cruised to My Tho, (pronounced “mee toe”). Today, we disembark, hop on a bus, and make our way to Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon. No one wants to get off the boat. We’d made friends with other passengers, but also with many of the staff, who treated us like their adopted family.
The river cruise was a great way to see a part of the world that we might have otherwise considered to be beyond our reach — or so we would have thought. (More about the cruise here).
Time to Hit the Road
My Tho is 80 km (50 miles) from Hi Chi Minh City. It’s close to one of the Mekong’s many openings into the South China Sea, and it’s close to Hi Chi Minh City, so My Tho a busy port. A lot of seafood destined for the big city comes here first.
After saying our good-byes, we boarded a big, air-conditioned tour bus and headed northeast via the CT.01 Expressway. CT.01 is a new toll road that will eventually go all the way from the Mekong Delta to Hanoi.
The drive to Ho Chi Minh City from My Tho took about an hour and a half. We passed field after field of lush, green crops. It’s hard to imagine that forty years ago, collective farming and centralized control devastated this region. But, as noted last time, there was a bright side.
The Bright Side
What “bright side” could there possibly have been? Well, in a communist country, the guys in charge – “The Party” – are in control of just about everything. They can do pretty much whatever they want. So what would the Party do to address the drastic decline in rice production in the South?
Party leaders had some precedents they could take into consideration. Back in the Stalin days, when collective farming in the Soviet Union was failing, the government sent troops into the fields to force people to work harder. It didn’t help. More recently, in neighboring Cambodia, the Khmer Rouges tried the same thing. The result in Cambodia was even more disastrous.
The “bright side” of the story is that in Vietnam, the Party took a different path. They basically said, “OK. This isn’t working. Go ahead and go back to the way things used to be.”
Whoa. That was a big move. I wonder how many farmers in the Delta thought it was a trick.
Do What You Know How to Do
It was no trick. The government gave farmers back their farms, (at least in principle), and let them do what they knew how to do: grow rice. They cut back on centralized control, allowing market forces of supply and demand to be factored into decision-making.
Rice production improved dramatically. It’s been improving ever since. Today, Vietnam is the second biggest exporter of rice in the world. (Not the second biggest producer, but the second biggest exporter).
That story helps me to make sense of what I saw – or didn’t see – in the Delta towns we visited. I thought that when we entered a communist country, things would look different. I don’t know… maybe giant political posters, military vehicles, guys with guns, people lined up to buy provisions. All I know is what I’ve seen in movies and in old newsreels. Nope. Didn’t see anything like that.
Vietnam IS a communist country. Whatever that means today is more complicated than back in the day, when communism first took root here. That would have been in the 1950’s.
We can trace it back to one guy. In fact, we can trace the fact that french isn’t Vietnam’s national language back to the same guy. Even though his name is kinda long, they named the big city we’re coming to after him. He was a very interesting fellow, to say the least.
To be continued…
