Today’s best photo was taken on the muddy waters of the Mekong river, at the floating market in Can Tho.

Not pictured is my bike, which I had to ditch today ahead of schedule 🙁 Basically the ferry I wanted to take to Go Cong wasn’t running so I had to detour to Saigon, which put me a day behind schedule to meet up with my family in Phu Quoc. So I booked a bus for the last leg. I was planning on leaving the bike on the side of the road with a “go on boy, you’re free now!” But just as I was doing that, an intrepid hotelier says “hey nice bike” and I was all “sure is, wanna buy it??” And he was all “totally, how about a million dong?” And I yelled “sold!” So I made the equivalent of like fifty bucks out of nowhere.

But back to the market! As you can see from the story I just told, trade is flourishing in this communist country. Something about “floating market” makes it sound ethereal and illusory, like the Invisible Hand or the idea that markets evolve naturally out of human culture. But what I find more interesting than that is the way tradition seems to stand still in this backeddy on the swift current of global capital. Roads and trucks have surpassed canals and rivers in this watery delta, especially where the big cities are popping up. Cities with addresses – something you can’t have if you’re a boat person, yet essential for education, healthcare, opportunity. Still, generations built the physical and cultural infrastructure to grow rice on the delta and then trade on the rivers, and that infrastructure has a resilience the roads don’t. And besides, who are we, the new generation, to turn our backs on the gifts our forebears worked so hard to give us??? Or, perhaps, there’s still a market efficiency in trade and transport on the river that’s keeping this backeddy churning.

Either way, it does make me want to investigate which bits of resilience my ancestors worked to build for me, and what I can do to keep them strong. What comes to mind for you?