THE MEKONG’S SONG – Vietnam by bicycle 2019

Tribulations of a “tai bo la” on the baks of the nine-dragons river

Order the travel book

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In October 2019, I straddled my bike again to Vietnam to ride along the banks of the Mekong Delta.
Wherever it flows, this river fascinates people and shapes their lives.
It is here that I rubbed shoulders with this great and generous “water snake” which, after a tumultuous journey of nearly 4500 km, comes to join with the China Sea.
Powerful, carefree, languishing as it approaches the ocean, the river simply sets the pace for life.
It waters, carries, drops, moves, orders… Shaping the joys, sorrows, ardor, hard work, and sometimes the miseries of men established on his long court.
This simple evocation gives birth in my mind to many images, dreams, and fantasies sometimes.
Indeed, nothing evokes so much in my muncher-traveler mind as this mythical river does; it has remained unexplored for a long time and still is, to a certain extent, untamed to date.

Chuyến đi tốt tốt đẹp
Jérémie “cyclo-muncher”

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TRAVEL BOOK EXTRACT

“The wooden canoes stir gently, raised by the undulations left by the wake of the traveling boats. Broken, rusty, they swing, rocked by the song of the Mekong like me. Here we are, sitting on a huge green carpet of hyacinths, drifting to the rhythm of its melody. »

Jérémie, the sketchbook on the shoulder (a Tai bo la, literally “white man with a bag”, meaning “a western backpacker walking around the country”), offers us this time a silent drift on the banks of the mythical river, a travel diary between land and water, between imagination and reality.
A bike rides along its banks, in its delta, before it merges with the China Sea.

We swim there with the people of the water, those navigators of the river who have organized their lives in its meanders, to meet the infinite poetry of the inhabitants and their culture in the struggle against the elimination of history.