Built around people, not stops

We plan short private trips in four places — Sa Dec, Cai Be, Ben Tre and Can Tho — and we build every day around one or two sessions with someone whose work is the subject: a home cook, a weaver, a rice-paper family, a flower grower, a boatwright, a photographer-guide. Around them we put a private car, an English-speaking guide who interprets, the boats and the most comfortable bed each stop has.

We do this because the delta’s usual day trip shows the outside of everything. A coach stops at a candy workshop for twenty minutes, at an orchard for twenty more, and a boat makes a loop. Nobody at any stop has the time or the language to explain what they do. The same places look different when you give one person an hour and an interpreter.

A short trip suits this way of travelling. Two to four days is long enough to spend real time with three to seven people at their work and short enough to fit inside a longer journey through Vietnam. Most of our travellers arrive from Ho Chi Minh City and go back there, or fly on from Can Tho; the sample trips are built so that either works.

This site carries no testimonials, star ratings or quotes from travellers. Reviews on a company’s own site are chosen by the company, and you have no way to check them. We would rather you judge us by what you can check: a written quote that names every hotel, session and fee; a plan that tells you when a market is past its peak; and a reply to your first message that answers what you asked.

We work in four places on the Tien and Hau rivers: Sa Dec, Cai Be, Ben Tre and Can Tho. They are close enough to one another that no leg between them takes much more than an hour, which leaves the day for the sessions rather than the road. They are also where the crafts we care about are still practised by families who will open their workshops to a small group.

Staying in a small area has a cost: we cannot offer the far west of the delta, its mountains and forests, or a river crossing into Cambodia. It also has a benefit. We know which workshop is working in which month, which lane floods at the high tides, and which hotel room faces the river. That knowledge is most of what you are paying for when you book a short private trip.