The Real Secret to Longevity

When I hit the bird's nest elixir in Bangkok, I thought that sealed it, I'd live forever.
But...
Here in the Mekong Delta I found a better prophesy. ROYAL JELLY seems to be the real deal.
Judge for yourself by reading the (verbatim) bill of faith that comes with the purchase of Jelly (It probably works also if you ingest it by mistake):

Royal jelly is a top precious nutritive substance collecting from nectar. Protein and lots of vitamins being got by mason beer(!) with their throat lines create Royal Jelly. This mixture is called royal jelly it is the only food of Queen bees. And it is the food to help Queen Bees to live 40 times longer than Worker Bees.
This is product considered as a high-ranking and top precious one because it contains nutritive substance with excellent value including 22 Amino acids necessary for our bodies and containing lots of contents of important vitamins such as B1, B2, (riboflavin), niacin, B5 (pantothenic acid), B6, biotin, frolic acid, B12, inositol, choline and collagen (is a wonderful remedy against old and maintaining youth). Besides Royal Jelly also contains a quantity of vitamin of A, C, D, and E as well as calcium, copper, iron, phosphr(!), kalium, silicum, sulphur which are almost necessary nutritive substance.

You will realize its effect right in first week of use:
> It is made skin fresh.
> It is helped skin with softness, abolished wrinkles, taken care of beauty.
> It is protected health, slowed down getting old, improved longevity.
> It is helped to get old, ant-burnt due to environmental impact and especially change of woman's hormone (during menopause).
> It is decreases high blood pressure, diabetes, hepatitis of A,B,C,D types.
> it is reinforced vision and had good eyesight.
> it is restored all-around ability of sexual desire of both genders, stabilized disorder of physiological hormone overcame having few children and sterile ability.
> Anaphrodisia.
> It is acted as a tranquillizer, good sleep, anti-insomniac.
> It is opposed infection of urination.

Like Obelix, in Asterix and Obelix comics, who fell as a baby into magic potion, thus got super powers, I filed my cup with Royal Jelly, thinking it was tea. Woe to women who cross my path now!

That three-day trip through the Mekong Delta, I figured, is the most interesting way to get from Saigon to Cambodia, and - it turns out to be true, but comes with a price.
With a fast boat we left Saigon early in the morning and zipped through a mess of canals, wide and narrow waterways into the delta. There is even more traffic, it seems, on the water than on land. Boats, huge to tiny, all hopelessly overloaded, 'til the water line reaches the top rail, so many go upstream, downstream and across, it almost makes you dizzy just to watch. Navigating must be a nightmare since boats don't have breaks.
After about four hours in that fast boat we switched over to small launches that navigated on a narrow, totally overgrown waterway, like a tunnel through the vegetation, to a bee farm - home of the creators of the Royal Jelly. We were served tea with Royal Jelly infused with Cumquat juice, candy made from Royal Jelly, cookies made from Royal Jelly, and pure Royal Jelly to taste, all in addition to carved coconut shells, alligator skin belts, plastic imitation alligator skin belts, dolls, salad serving utensils made from coconut fiber, salad bowls made from coconut wood, fruit jellies, toffies, straw hats, fabric, dolls, beads, custom jewelry and old coins, that were also for sale.
After the Royal Jelly episode came the coconut candy adventure. On small row boats, even smaller than the previous launches - "keep your hands inside the boat so they don't get crushed by the sides of other boats that bang into yours!" - we paddled through an even narrower passage under dense vegetation to a place in the middle of jungle where they make coconut candy. We were invited to watch the production then invited to buy, of course, coconut candy, but also candied ginger, carved coconuts, alligator skin belts, plastic imitation alligator skin belts, dolls, salad serving utensils made from coconut fiber, salad bowls made from coconut wood, fruit jellies, toffies, straw hats, fabric, dolls, beads, custom jewelry and old coins. You can also have your picture taken with a life, twelve-foot python snake draped around your neck.
Then we did a nature walk where the guide pointed out native plants, explained what they were used for, if they were wild or cultivated, what fruits they bear. This part I liked.
Then we went for pre-paid lunch. "You get chicken, vegetables and rice, if you order extra, you have to pay. They also have elephant fish, snake, turtle, frogs, all kinds of good things," the guide announced on yet another boat we were on to get to the "Jungle Restaurant" eating place. I planned on snake, Vietnam version. A Swiss-born Vietnamese girl on a visit to relatives in Saigon, ordered fish. I was about to order snake, but then, just on a suspicion, asked for a menu to see if any surprises come with it. There were. The prices for the extras, were the real surprises, filthy dollars and up per extra (for that kind of money you can feed a local family for weeks!). The Swiss-Vietnamese was in shock because she had already ordered the fish and that was tearing a serious hole in her holiday budget. I passed on the snake and offered to take part in her elephant fish meal. We ended up sharing, I got some of the (disgusting) chicken, vegetables and rice and we shared fish with our other lunch companions, a single traveler girl from the UK and a young couple from Toronto. With the price for one can of beer, that I ordered, you could get gloriously drunk on the same brand in Saigon.
The place turned out to be another elaborate tourist-rip-off-trap, like the Royal Jelly place, and like the coconut candy place.
Tomorrow we visit a floating market. I wonder how they try to snare us there.
After checking into the pre-paid hotel dump, the Swiss Vietnamese girl, the UK girl and I went in search of Phò. Because Phò is primarily a breakfast dish, we only found a place with chicken, rice and vegetables. That meal, same in name as lunch, but unlike the one in the jungle, together with a can beer, was delicious and cost less than a dollar.
So far, the Mekong Delta trip, despite the pretty tacky commercial aspect, is cool. It would be nearly impossible to visit on your own the many nooks in the vast water world we'd seen so far. It definitively beats a bus ride from Saigon to Phnom Penh.
Now it is next day and we've done the floating market, where you could, but didn't have to, buy fruits or vegetables, visited a rice noodle maker's shop, where you could, but didn't have to buy rice noodles, a rice husking outfit, where you could buy brown rice, cracked rice, rice husks and white rice, but didn't have to.
On that delta journey we were on average about twenty people. Some signed up for all the way to Cambodia, like I, others returned after one day or two back to Saigon. They were from all over the planet; the young Vietnamese Swiss, UK, Canada, US, Dutch, Australia, Germany, Israel, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Japan, Argentina, Chile, Singapore, all backpackers, all with plenty of stories about where they have been and where they plan to go.
An amazing many of them are traveling on extremely long journeys, one-year-long trips with minimal budgets are not big exceptions. Some quit jobs and travel as long as unemployment checks from their respective country come in. It sounds like the average daily budget is about twenty dollars. The British girl I've been hanging out with, claims to be able to do it on fifteen. She's already been under way for eight months and plans on another four, 'til end of June, when it gets a bit warmer in UK, she says.
If I lived totally like most of them, I'd definitively save money while traveling, compared to living in the Big Apple, or even Vermont - but I don't. I allow myself the occasional luxury of such things as a Cognac, and other such frivolities, even if the price of those exotic things could easily cover the cost of ten good meals.
Now I get to write because we came out of the midday heat and sit under a ceiling fan in the - otherwise crummy - hotel lobby. The place is surrounded by the local version of hardware shops. You reach the door by winding your way in between stacks of rubber pads, ball bearings, rusty chains, gaskets and paint cans.
In about two hours, some of us who signed up for going all the way to Cambodia, will be picked up by a bus to go to the last Vietnamese town before the border, Chau Dòc, to get to a hotel there. I might get a chance to search for my last Vietnamese noodle shop (Phò). Tomorrow a fast boat will get us to Phnom Penh by evening. No wonder the package price for the three-day trip was only 80 dollars (it turned out to be two bus rides, two overnight accommodations, one breakfast, one lunch, eight different boats, large and small, slow and fast, one nature hike, one border crossing, and at all times a prattling guide with canned jokes).

Now I am in Phnom Penh, 1PM, during midday heat. Outside it is sweltering while I am luxuriating in my thirty-dollar per night room, third floor walk up, air-conditioned, with two windows, a little balcony, a sliver of river view, a toilet cum shower (the toilet and sink are in the shower stall) and a super comfortable bed.

Yesterday, still on the Vietnamese side of the Mekong Delta, after a night on a house boat were I had a Japanese room mate, we stopped at a fish farm, one of hundreds we passed on the river. They are floating houses with fish pens underneath. In the one we visited, they told us, the family produces 14 tons of fish in seven months by feeding them pellets made of mostly rice husks but also fish byproducts. After the fish they brought us to the crocodiles - on a farm, and, after a long hot walk, to an isolated Muslim community - probably to demonstrate the country's religious freedom.

The real cool part came with the border crossing formalities. On the last boat towards the border, the seventh boat of the journey, a guy collected out passports, the twenty-dollars Cambodian visa fee, made us fill out the application forms, supply a passport photo, charged three dollars for his service and then the boat stopped on the Vietnam side at a restaurant. While we ate, drank, chatted, and relaxed, the checking out of Vietnam happened, getting the Cambodia visa formalities done happened, and all that for three dollars per person.
One girl from Seattle didn't have anymore the required two consecutive blank pages in her passport. They were not going to give her a visa. Our three-dollar-per-person man told her a fifty-dollar bill between the passport pages would solve the problem. It did. They glued the visa over some other country's entry and exit stamps.
You'd have to know what the usual tedious bureaucratic hassle such border crossings entail to appreciate our appreciation. All we had to do on the Cambodian side when we got there by another boat, a Cambodian one, was getting the entry stamp. No customs, no lines, no waiting, no bribing necessary, just quickly stepping off the boat, get the stamp and getting back on again was all it took.

Phnom Penh is another, total surprise. When I was here, about a dozen years ago, it was a sleepy, laid back, backwater town. The only excitement we found then, as I remember, was at the Foreign Correspondents Club where you could get a drink besides local beer. Emilie and I went to a Karaoke bar, hoping for some entertainment. A bunch of girls in there looked her over, fearing competition. Nobody sang, it was a place were you went to pick up hookers.
Already as we approached on the river, the Phnom Penh skyline looked very different. Where, as I remembered, the downtown Buddhist temple was the tallest structure, now stood modern, huge buildings. At the dock a mass of tuck-tuck drivers, taxi drivers, motorcycle drivers, hotel touts, money changers, hustlers, pimps, were more reminiscent of former times. I found my way out of that mêlée and walked along the riverside in search for lodging. The assault by hotel and travel touts was persistent, my warding them off was more persistent. Unlike in Rangoon, the first one I went in to inquire, Riverside Guesthouse, had a vacancy.
After a shower, an exchange of sweat-smelly clothes for fresh ones, handing in the dirty stuff for washing and paying the first night, I went in search for food and drink. The river promenade, formerly a dark forlorn place, is now a hopping, happening, swinging, lit up, strip of fancy restaurants and bars. Black marble, brass and leather abounds. Stunningly beautiful, elegant hostesses try to drag you in. Happy hour and massage is advertised everywhere, music is pounding. Many of the tourists look Asian, probably Chinese, Malay, Singaporeans, Taiwanese, but also pimply Americans with baseball caps, visors facing back, super blond Scandinavians and drab Russians and citizens from the Stans, their former Soviet comrades. Phnom Penh seems to have become an international playground and I am about to find out all about it.