Rice Paddy Adventures

I am not an athlete. I’m the type of person who would reliably score on her own team in school. Surprisingly, here I am on day three of cycling through a rice cooker—the humid rice paddies of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in the rainy season. Even more surprisingly, I love it. My husband, Kevin, and I ambitiously decided to weave across the Mekong Delta in a “baptism by fire” for non-athletes.

Daily life moves around us with each push of the pedals. Two girls who look about seven and ten years old pass us giggling on a single bike, while rice-paddy workers don’t look up from beneath their conical bamboo hats. Slender green rice seedlings poke out of the wet earth, where they’ve been planted by hand in perfectly symmetrical lines. The infinite fields flooded to sprout rice are a reminder that Vietnam is the second biggest rice producer in the world. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact these resilient workers harvest it all by hand, too.

I watch a little longingly as a distracted motorcycle rider sporting an eggshell-thin helmet zips past, and I shift my weigh on my seat, hard as an unripe papaya. Powering a bicycle at my own speed, inhaling pungent fish sauce mingling with ripe fruit in a local market, is preferable to the scent of burning motor oil. I’ll stop for a bottle of semi-cold water for fuel rather than gas which, incidentally, is also sold out of water bottles at small road-side stands.
The sun bakes the pavement as we roll down wide roads on the outskirts of Vinh Long. Occasionally, motorcycles zoom past us carrying mothers with children clinging happily to the handlebars, or loaded with an inordinate amount of toilet paper rolls and fruit. The scenery of villages, roadside stands, and palm trees slide by us as if on a conveyor belt.

Riding along, we marvel at the turf we’ve covered while criss-crossing the delta by numerous boats, sampans, passenger ferries, and best of all, by bike. The rice bowl is bountiful and alive. Heat adds to the physical challenge, yet the journey and our sense of accomplishment energizes us. I have a sense that we’ve zoomed in and seen the Mekong’s quiet rural way of life and culture up close. We, who travel strictly by car at home, have cycled nearly endless miles of rice paddy, village, and canal-side paths to prove to ourselves that we can do it. I don’t know how I was convinced to take on the delta by bike, but I do know that I couldn’t have truly experienced it any other way.