ExclusiveWhere Flood Is a Gift: The Floating Water Season of An Giang | Vietnam Within Us

Every year, around the 7th and 8th lunar months, when the current from the upper Mekong comes rolling down, the whole Mekong Delta seems to wake up. Water spills over the fields until they are one white sheet of color. Boats begin to bustle along the canal. And ding-ding flowers, the golden blossom of the Cissbanea plant, bloom along both banks. People call this the floating water seasons. Today, on Vietnam Within Us, we invite you down rivers to An Giang to feel the beauty of a land of rivers in the loveliest season of this year. For the people of the Delta, the floating water season is not a frightening flood. It is a gift from heaven and earth. The water brings silt to enrich the fields and fills the canals with fish and shrimp, feeding generation after generation of families here. So instead of worrying, the people of the Delta welcome the water like an old friend coming home, with all the abundance and generosity that nature gives. If you come to An Giang in this season, there is one place you will find hard to pass by, Trà Sư Cajuput Forest, sitting in a small tắc ráng, a narrow motorboat, as it winds through the flooded forest. You will feel as if you have slipped into another world. The water is covered with a soft green carpet of duckweed, smooth as velvet. Rows of cajuput trees mirror themselves in the water and give cool shade. In the stillness, you hear only the oars dipping, the birds, and the call of egrets drifting from somewhere far off. Trà Sư is also known for the longest bamboo bridge through a forest in Vietnam, which carries your steps deep into untouched nature. When you leave Trà Sư, you can head to Búng Bình Thiên, which the locals like to call the Lake of Heavenly Water. This is the largest natural freshwater lake in the Southwestern regions. The strange thing is that the river water outside arrives heavy and red with silt. But once it enters the lake, the silt seems to settle, leaving the surface clear, green, and quiet, mirroring every passing cloud. Along the shore are villages of the Cham people, with old mosques that give this land a culture all its own. And it would be a pity to visit the delta in the floating water season without tasting the simple dishes of these months. People here say that if you haven't eaten galin, a small river fish, you haven't really come to the floating water country. The first young galin of the season, rich and plump, are cooked with golden dingding flowers into a sweet and sour hot pot with a rising fragrance, a taste that is hard to forget once you have tried it. Then there is neckhead fish, grilled whole over open fire, and crab in lotus leaf, water lily stems in braised fish sauce, and banh xeo, the crisp pancake made with dandelion flowers. All of this is humble, and all of it carries the warm-hearted spirit of the land and its people. But there is one image that if you look closely, appeared again and again through the whole picture of this season, the women of the Delta. From the first great light, while mist still hangs on the water, you see them in their albaba blouses and conical hats, rolling out to the fields to pick ding-ding flowers one by one, casting nets and setting traps for fish and shrimp. Those hardworking hands turned the harvest of the water season into a warm family meal and into a jar of fermented fish to last the whole year. That is the women of the river country, patient and tireless all year round, keeping the household together and still holding on to a simple, warm-hearted, open nature of her own. Even when the water spreads wide and life is sometimes uncertain, their laughter still rings bright and their kindness still runs full. Then the water season will draw back, returning the fields so a new harvest can begin, and leaving a layer of rich silt to make the soil more fertile. But for those who have once come to the Delta in the floating water season, the impression left behind is probably more than that. It is a wild river land, fast and yet so gentle, with humble country gifts, and the image of hardworking women who have quietly kept that land warm with kindness.