Rye Hushed Asses

We have had to get up early everyday for a week now and I am getting sick of it, if I wanted to wake up early all the time, I would get a job! We were woken up at 5am by boats roaring up and down the river and then the tour started at 6am, we needed to get going before it was too warm outside. We met Hung just outside of our room where the boats were docked and climbed in to the narrow boat, with just enough room to have two people sit side by side. Our boat was made up of three Spanish people, Hung, the boat driver and us. There was also another boat with a Dutch family of five who were driven by a lone female driver.

The boat headed down the river while Hung passed out breakfast of bread with soft cheese and coffee or tea. First we went to the floating market where people from 11 different districts come to buy and sell their goods. Each boat has a tall stick with what they are selling attached to the stick.

The floating market is generally wholesale but there are a few people selling food and drinks to tourists and the wholesale vendors.

Our boat pulled up next to a pineapple boat, filled with pineapple. We climbed into the pineapple boat and the crew cut us each up a half of a pineapple. The speed and way they cut up the pineapple is really amazing, it's like food on a stick.

I'm going to go out of sequence here for the sake of clarity. We went to both a rice paper factory and a rice processing plant.

When the rice is processed there are several different types of rice that come out, brown rice, which is polished and then has various broken bits that come off, with the smaller broken bits going to feed animals. The somewhat broken bits are sent to the rice paper factory along with the rice husk and the good rice is packaged to be sold as rice.

We also went to the rice paper factory where the broken rice grains are mashed and added to water to make a paste. The rice husk is used to heat a fire that heats the paste that is then fried and turned into rice paper.

We also went to a nursery where seeds of hard to grow plants are planted in banana leaf that is filled with rice husk ashes (the way Hung says it is Rye Hushed Asses) and then when the seeds sprout they are sold to farmers.

We also went to a rice paddy and watermelon patch where we learned all kinds of exciting things about watermelons. That sounds like sarcasm, but it isn't I found the whole day to be extremely informative.

In addition to learning all about rice and farming it was a great opportunity to get away from the city and all of the other westerners and see how people really do the day to day work of their lives in rural Vietnam.

Check out all of today's pictures in the slideshow below: