My Khanh Tourist Village

Mỹ Khánh began around 1996 as one family's fruit orchard. It lies in Phong Điền, a garden country known for durian, rambutan and mangosteen. The village is southwest of central Cần Thơ, about twenty minutes away by car. Over the years the orchard grew into a tourist village that has now been running for more than three decades and covers more than thirty hectares.

The village stands in Nhơn Mỹ hamlet, and its most unusual feature is a traditional southern house about a hundred years old. The house was moved from a landowner's estate in Bình Thủy and rebuilt here whole. It has an old tiled roof, posts of polished brown wood and a hushed ancestor altar. Everything in it recalls a time that has passed.

Inside this house, a landowner's meal is served. It is a recreation in the style of the landowning class of the South between 1930 and 1945. The dishes are cá lóc nướng trui, grilled snakehead fish, and gà nướng đất, chicken baked in clay. There is cá kho tộ, fish braised in a clay pot, and canh chua chuối, a sour soup with banana. Boiled greens and fragrant cơm tám, tám rice, complete the table.

While people eat, đờn ca tài tử is played live in the room. It is an art of music and song of southern Vietnam that evokes life on the Mekong Delta's land and rivers. This is not ordinary stage music. On December 5, 2013, UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That list is for living traditions, passed on from one generation to the next. Several stringed instruments blend together: the đàn tranh, the đàn nguyệt, the đàn bầu and the đàn kìm. A bamboo flute joins them. The sound has a character that belongs to the Mekong Delta and cannot be mistaken for any other.

Besides the old house and the landowner's meal, Mỹ Khánh holds a good deal more. Small dogs race over an obstacle course. In a pool, small fish of the Garra rufa kind nibble dead skin from the soles of your feet, a feeling that is strange and relaxing at once. For a taste of the fields, visitors can bail out a ditch to catch fish, which is work that farmers of the southwest have done from one generation to the next. They can row a small boat, the xuồng ba lá, or go angling for tai tượng fish, or run an obstacle course in the style of Sasuke. A country market sells bánh xèo, bánh khọt, bánh cống from Cần Thơ, steamed snails with pepper and summer fruit.

One corner is entirely different: a model of the eighteen levels of hell. It shows a popular Buddhist belief about the punishments that follow bad deeds. Earlier generations taught right and wrong through images like these, and the model is vivid and striking in its own way.

From May to August, durian and many other fruits of the western delta are in full season. Visitors pick fruit straight from the branch and eat it in the garden, and the smell stays with them through the afternoon.

That is Mỹ Khánh, a garden of more than thirty hectares where a day can be spent in the rhythm of the old delta. The sound of đờn ca tài tử drifts out of the old house, and the smell of ripe fruit hangs sweet in the river wind.