The Mekong Delta heartland — floating markets, homestays on river islets, elephant ear fish, and the orchards of An Bình island
Vĩnh Long is a small city in the Mekong Delta, 135km south of Ho Chi Minh City — less visited than Cần Thơ but arguably more rewarding for its proximity to the river island system around An Bình island, where a network of narrow channels between fruit orchards can be explored by small wooden sampan. The homestay culture here is the most developed in the Delta: local families take visitors in for the night on stilted houses surrounded by water, feed them elephant ear fish (cá tai tượng — a type of gourami, fried whole and served on a banana leaf so guests wrap the crispy skin in rice paper wit…
The Mekong Delta was the last part of Vietnam to be absorbed by the Viet people — it was Khmer territory (part of the Khmer Empire's southeastern delta settlements) until the 17th century, when Vietnamese migration southward gradually displaced the Khmer population. The Nguyen lords of Hội An and Huế pushed south and east through the 17th–18th centuries, and Vĩnh Long was formally incorporated into the Nguyen dynasty in the 18th century. French colonialism (from 1858) transformed the Delta's agricultural economy — the French drained the wetlands and built the rice export infrastructure that m…