Craft villages, explained

Around Ben Tre, three coconut crafts sit side by side. Families around Hung Phong have woven baskets from coconut-leaf stalks since 1992. Around An Thanh, coconut-fibre production began in 1980 with two workshops and now counts more than forty establishments and several companies, employing thousands. Coconut candy — coconut milk, malt and sugar, cooked and cut by hand — is made in many workshops, and Mo Cay’s is the name heard most often.

What you see in a session: stalks split and soaked, then woven tight; husks broken down to fibre and dried in bundles; candy stirred in wide pans until it sets, then cut and wrapped by hand.

Rice paper in the style of My Long, on the Ben Tre side, is made from rice batter spread thin and grilled over charcoal on both sides; spreading evenly is the hard skill. Versions are made with coconut milk, sweet or salty. Cu Lao May, an islet in the former Tra On district, has a rice-paper village about a century old.

Puffed rice cakes in the Son Doc style are sticky rice steamed, pounded with coconut milk and sugar, pressed and dried in the sun. Weather decides the day’s work: too much sun hardens them, rain spoils them. On a grill they puff to three or four times their size.

Popped rice is made by families on An Binh islet and on the Cai Be side of the river. On An Binh, a workshop in a village nearly a century old works through popping, cleaning, boiling sugar, mixing, pressing and cutting, each step by hand and each taking about a quarter of an hour.

The Sa Dec flower village at Tan Quy Dong, more than a century old, grows potted plants on raised beds above canal water and tends them by boat. Dozens of rose varieties grow here all year; in the weeks before Tet the village fills with the chrysanthemums, marigolds and other plants that southern households buy for the holiday. Cai Mon, in the Cho Lach area of the former Ben Tre province, is the delta’s second plant-growing centre.

• Go early. Sun-dried crafts are set out in the morning, and workshops on the tour-boat circuit are busier later in the day.
• Stay long enough to see a whole cycle. Twenty minutes shows you a product; an hour shows you a craft.
• Pay for time, buy at the maker’s price. We pay each family a fee for the session; what you buy is between you and them.
• Ask before photographing people, homes and altars. Our photography etiquette applies in workshops too.
• Do not touch drying racks or hot pans unless invited.

Some workshops near the main boat landings in Cai Be exist mainly for visitors. They are not fake, but they are a stage. Families further from the landings, and on An Binh islet, are working businesses that have made room for visitors; those are the ones we use.

Craft Villages of the Delta covers coconut, mats, rice paper, puffed rice cakes and popped rice in three days. Sa Dec in Flower Season adds the flower growers and the boat yard. The experience catalogue lists every session, and the Ben Tre and Cai Be pages describe the places.