A serene journey down the Mekong on a new luxury ship

Thirty or so tourist ships cruise up and down the Mekong between Vietnam and Cambodia but the real story, and scenery, is the window onto the daily lives of the millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the river. On the delta’s many islands and along the web of estuaries, canals and waterways, aquaculture and agriculture intermingle. Fields of flooded rice paddies, and crops of mango, durian, jackfruit, pomelo and mangosteen nod to the local export industries. Floating family homes sit above caged shrimp and fish farms, their small “catches” offloaded to big co-ops and sold internationally.

As Hung, one of our guides is at pains to point out, the sediment and silt, which gives the Mekong its chocolaty hue, is rich in nutrients so that the dramatic waters that flood the land during the monsoon season are a veritable life force, feeding the soil and the crops.

“It’s not clean and clear like the Danube,” he says. “And it’s not meant to be”.

Whether from my private balcony, a poolside recliner or the dining room, I am riveted by the Mekong’s tantalising, ever-changing visual feast.

Barges ferry cargo and food, up and down the river, their cumbersome hulls sitting heavy in the wash. Charming wooden boats with painted beady eyes are piled with logs headed to construction sites. Local ferries, their sides strung with orange life rings, taxi passengers across the river, the karaoke tunes carrying across the water to my willing ears.

Our itinerary includes one or two riverside excursions each day either from traditional wooden sampan vessels or direct from ship to the riverbank. We visit Cai Be, a port town with a colonial past and wander around the Roman style Catholic cathedral with its tower bells cast in France in 1931. In Sa Dec, we walk through street markets where squatting fruit sellers offer us slices of durian “the king of fruits”.

On Evergreen Island, we visit the ornate wooden house of a couple who tell their story of being moved, as educated city intellectuals, to rural Vietnam to be re-educated in agriculture after the Vietnam War. Their garden dangles with Vietnamese culinary staples: jackfruit, tamarind pods, wing beans and custard apples.

Back onboard, daily activities are designed to complement the day’s excursions. We watch as the chef cooks goi cuon (Vietnamese rice paper rolls) and pho bo (beef noodle soup) after our market visit, and tune into a documentary about Cambodia as The Serenity cruises toward Phnom Penh. Trinh Ngoc Thanh, otherwise known as Tim, our kind-hearted and soft-spoken tour director from Hanoi, gives nightly briefings that combine his considerable local knowledge with Buddhist wisdom.

The passing scenery keeps us occupied too. I rise early on day four as Phnom Penh comes into view. The Cambodian capital’s pinky cloud-washed metal skyscrapers rise on the horizon and the golden stupas and Silver Pagoda palace come into sharper focus the closer we get.

In the elegant French-colonial Cambodian capital our itinerary includes the Royal Palace and National Museum or an excursion to the Killings Fields, the site of the Khmer Rouge regime’s horrendous crimes. I choose to explore the city. In the old quarter I order a trio of imported French cheeses and a glass of chardonnay in a little bistro surrounded by the city’s glorious yellow and white French colonial buildings.

Beyond Phnom Penh, we cruise closer to the banks where enormous stands of bright green bamboo pop among the darker palm and mango trees. Old wooden canoes nose the banks where goats and white humped-neck cows nibble and graze.

At Oknha Tey village we alight for a tuk tuk ride to a village to learn how thread is extracted from silkworms and then woven into exquisite bolts of fabric. At another riverside stop, we walk to Wat Hanchey hilltop pagoda where novice monks stroll around temples and stupas built in the eighth century.

Further upstream, riverside Angkor Ban is one of the few villages where pretty stilted wooden houses survived the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. Its nickname, Lucky Village, is a sentiment that extends to our visit as it coincides with an annual festival. We walk down the gangplank to a town square in full party mode with a live band on stage, the tunes reverberating through the tinny speakers. I buy a banh mi from a young Cambodian for $US1. The same delicious meal, I tell him, costs 10 times that at home.

Buying food is completely unnecessary, of course. Cruises on The Serenity are all-inclusive with decent cocktails, international wine and chilled local beer available any hour of the day. Meals are equally generous. Breakfast is a full buffet spread including a station with bubbling fresh noodles while elaborate a la carte lunches and dinners feature the likes of rich Cambodian beef stews and Vietnamese sweet-and-sour soups.

Often dinner festivities continue in the Harmony Lounge until late, but on some nights Tim invites guests to join him for a meditation on the top deck. Only a handful of us make it on the final night. With the moon reflecting off the water, the sound of frogs croaking and the current trickling by, we take some big full breaths worthy of this mighty river … aah the serenity.

The writer was the guest of APT Touring.

THE DETAILS

The 11-day Spiritual Cambodia and the Mekong tour from $6295 a person. The itinerary includes a seven-night cruise aboard The Mekong-Serenity, and a sun-rise visit to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. See aptouring.com.au