I decided to book a tour for the second day. This was was to visit the Mekong Delta – with a visit to a couple of the islands around the Delta. The tour was called a “My Tho and Ben Tre 1-day tour”.
The beauty of the tour is that it picks you up from your hostel/hotel, and then a mini-bus ride to a few different sights of interest. Although it was an 8am start, it actually was nice, with time for brekkie at the hostel (which BTW: was a great touch and more importantly delicious!), and only cost 210,000 VND per person, in fact the deal I got was for 190,000 VDN from the hostel – so a nice small discount 🙂
The journey would take approx. 1hr 30 mins – probably most of this to actually get out of Ho Chi Minh City (lots of mad traffic). But once you are out of the main city centre, there is a nice highway with no motorbikes. They actually are installing toll-booths, so will eventually start charging people for using the highway, but currently no toll required 🙂
About 30 minutes we stopped off at a Handicraft Stall – it’s actually quite an intriguing place, because it offers jobs to handicap Vietnamese people, who then create the various artworks, porcelain, home-ware and plates etc. Of course after the workshop tour, there is the shop – and I must admit the items were absolutely all gorgeous.
-
- Handicapped Handicrafts
-
- Creating each item was very human-intensive!
-
- The workshop…very moving…
-
- Looks nice – hey? 🙂
-
- Nice Smurf artwork 🙂
-
- The shop at the end of the tour…
-
- Gorgeous 🙂
-
- Good set of wall artwork 🙂
-
- Nice vases 🙂
-
- Nice plates too 🙂
I decided to purchase a painting for my wall – with part of it made from cracked-egg shells – looked beautiful 🙂 The piece of work cost USD$45 (but I think it was quite good value – and I think I know where I want to hang it in my home (UK-home that is!)