The river

At the point we visited, the Mekong is over 2 km wide.  It is 17 to 20 meters deep around here.  We were about the midway point between Cambodia and the Eastern Sea, as the Vietnamese call it.  They don't like to call it the China Sea, as China does, for political reasons.   

The tidal rush means the current is strong.  The water flows hard and fast.  Starting in Tibet, it brings water from theHimalayas  down through a number of countries before it empties into the ocean through a great mouth made up of smaller and larger branches spread together over hundreds of miles.  This is truly one of the great rivers of the world.

We saw fishing boats, river sand mining boats with giant towers, flat bottomed freighters, ferries, and countless small working boats of various sorts.  We also saw a giant fish farm, with large mud banks and bamboo fenced built up right in the middle of the river, about a mile long and a quarter mile wide. This is a working river, giving life to countless numbers of people for millennia.