Mekong Delta (Can Tho)

Top things to do in Mekong Delta (Can Tho)

1. 01

   Cai Rang Floating Market - the wholesale market before dawn

   food culture arts 👍 Popular

   Six kilometres downriver from Can Tho, the delta's biggest floating market forms in the dark and is done by mid-morning. Wholesale, not a show: barges sit low under pumpkins, cabbages and pineapples, each hull hanging a sample of its cargo from a bamboo pole. Boats leave Ninh Kieu quay in the dark; coffee and noodle boats find you. Roads and bridges have moved much of the trade ashore.

2. 02

   Phong Dien Floating Market - the smaller, local one upriver

   food off beaten path

   About twenty kilometres southwest of Can Tho, Phong Dien is the market Cai Rang used to be: fewer boats, almost no tour traffic, more rowing than engines, and the trade still largely between growers and local buyers. Most operators pair it with a slow run through the orchard canals nearby, where the channels narrow until the fruit trees close overhead and a monkey bridge crosses every few hundred metres.

3. 03

   Tra Su Cajuput Forest - sampan through the flooded melaleuca

   nature wildlife scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   A planted melaleuca wetland near Chau Doc, the delta's most photographed scene: a paddled sampan pushing through water carpeted in vivid green duckweed, under pale trunks, with storks, herons and cormorants nesting overhead. A motorboat covers the main channel, a rower the quiet cuts, and a watchtower looks over the reserve to the Cambodian hills. It only works when the water is high: the floating season, not the dry months.

4. 04

   Delta eating - lau mam, canh chua and the elephant-ear fish

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   The southern kitchen at its source: canh chua ca, sour with tamarind, pineapple, okra and river fish; ca kho to, fish caramelised in a claypot; lau mam, the fermented-fish hotpot that is the regional test, with raw herbs; hu tieu, the pork-and-noodle soup from My Tho; plate-sized banh xeo; banh pia, the durian-and-mung-bean pastry from Soc Trang. Eat at market stalls, and take the fruit seriously: durian, mangosteen, rambutan, longan.

5. 05

   Ben Tre's coconut canals - rowing sampans and candy workshops

   nature wildlife culture arts 👍 Popular

   The province south of My Tho is coconut country: plantations wall the water, the canals narrow to arm's width, and only a rowed sampan fits. Family workshops boil coconut milk to caramel and cut, wrap and box the candy by hand; the same bank trade weaves mats, presses oil and burns husks for charcoal. The most packaged half-day here, and the clearest look at an economy grown from one tree.

6. 06

   An Binh Island homestays - a night on the water with don ca tai tu

   culture arts nature wildlife 👍 Popular

   Across the river from Vinh Long, an island of orchards, fish ponds and hamlet lanes where the homestay tradition is strongest: a family compound of a few rooms, dinner from pond and garden, bicycles for the dyke paths and, often, don ca tai tu, the southern chamber music of zither, moon lute and voice played here for a century. Waking here puts you at the markets before the tour boats.

7. 07

   Binh Thuy Ancient House - the family house from The Lover

   history culture arts

   A wealthy Can Tho family's home in Binh Thuy district, built in the French period and still lived in, mixing a French facade and imported floor tiles with Vietnamese ancestral altars, carved hardwood screens and a courtyard of potted orchids. It stood in for the family house in the film of Marguerite Duras's The Lover, and the orchid garden makes it the most atmospheric of the delta's surviving merchant houses.

8. 08

   Sam Mountain and the Ba Chua Xu Temple, Chau Doc - the delta's great pilgrimage

   culture arts history

   A lone hill on the flat plain by the Cambodian border, ringed by temples and tombs, over a chequerboard of rice. The Ba Chua Xu temple at its foot draws pilgrims from southern Vietnam to a statue of the Lady of the Realm: loud, smoky and devotional rather than scenic. Chau Doc sits below, with floating houses farming fish in cages under the floor and Cham villages with mosques opposite.

9. 09

   Sa Dec flower village and the Huynh Thuy Le house

   history scenic

   Sa Dec grows ornamental plants for the south, and its nursery quarter is a grid of raised beds worked from flat-bottomed boats, densest before the lunar new year, when the town is staged with chrysanthemums and kumquat trees. In the old centre stands the Chinese merchant's house of Huynh Thuy Le, the man Marguerite Duras wrote about in The Lover, a small tiled building whose story beats its architecture.

10. 10

    Khmer pagodas at Soc Trang and Tra Vinh - the delta's other culture

    culture arts history

    The delta was Khmer before it was Vietnamese, and Khmer Krom still live here, so Theravada temples punctuate the farmland: tiered roofs, gilded nagas, murals of the Buddha's life. Soc Trang holds the best: the Bat Pagoda, its trees full of fruit bats, and the Clay Pagoda, its statuary hand-modelled by one man over decades. Tra Vinh is quieter, its temples in ancient groves around the Ao Ba Om pond.

11. 11

    Tram Chim National Park - sarus cranes on the Plain of Reeds

    nature wildlife off beaten path

    A fenced remnant of the Plain of Reeds in Dong Thap, once the northern delta's flooded grassland, now a Ramsar wetland worked by boat through reed and lotus. It is known for the sarus crane, the tall red-headed bird that feeds on dried-out grassland in the dry months, and for storks, ibis and egrets year-round. Crane numbers have fallen a long way: a birding trip, not a guaranteed sighting.

12. 12

    Ninh Kieu Quay - the Can Tho riverfront after dark

    food scenic

    The promenade where the city meets the Hau: the Ho Chi Minh statue, the Can Tho bridge lit downstream, the pedestrian bridge to Cai Khe island. It fills in the evening with families, students and food stalls, and the boat-owners who run the four-in-the-morning market trip tie up here. The covered Can Tho market hall behind, built by the French, is mostly souvenirs but keeps its frame and river doors.

Getting to & around Mekong Delta (Can Tho)

Know before you go