Aqua Expeditions Mekong River Cruise, Maybe I'm Not A Cruise Person But I'm An Aqua Expeditions Person?

David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again spoke to me on a very deep level. I grew up going on cruises - “you unpack once and see a lot!” was my mom’s logic, and I get that, but it’s not for me. There’s one main reason (and a bunch of small gripes) - the food. I need to be in a place overnight, I need to be in a place for at least one breakfast, lunch and dinner, but ideally more, to feel like I’ve been there.

This is a girl who needed to eat at the same outdoor cafeteria in Saigon four days in a row.

But, I got drunk and bid on a river cruise up the Mekong River at the Coral Gables Tour of Kitchens last year (I’m giving away two tickets to this year’s event, head over to my Instagram to enter!) and won. Which meant I was going on a cruise. I should confess that while that story is charming it wasn’t quite as blind as it seemed. On a sleepless night at the beginning of 2019 I was reading all those lists that come out about where to travel in the new year and I stumbled upon this very cruise. I woke up husband up and told him “look at this - when we’re rich I want to do this even though I hate cruises.” A week or so later, that very cruise popped up at the silent auction and I impulse bid. So I was going to Vietnam and Cambodia.

Aqua Expeditions isn’t really a cruise. At least it’s not fair in my mind to lump the two ideas of what I experienced on the Mekong and what David Foster Wallace and I complain about.

The ship only sleeps 40 guests and on this particular voyage, we were 14 guests and the Consulting Chef David Thompson (lots of David’s in this story, David Thompson is the Michelin-starred and James Beard Award winner behind Bangkok’s Nahm), who became the target of my many, many questions. We became cruise friends, in the way that you can make a camp friend who you feel like you’ve known forever, and chatted more politics and less food at many of our meals onboard.

Each cabin is the same, the only difference is some have an indoor seating area and some are open-air, we opted for the open air. All meals are eaten together in the dining room, but you can sit alone or with your new cruise friends, or mix it up and there’s always a selection of Eastern style dishes and Western - you better believe I opted for Eastern every time. Congee is my new favorite breakfast, long live the breakfast soup.

We visited a small village for a Lion Dance (that looked suspiciously like my dog), I got up midmeal to try and make a turmeric rice flour crepe myself, the sunsets couldn’t have been better, our guides - one Vietnamese and one Cambodian - were on hand to explain the wild river (it rises and falls by a dramatic amount, like a truly shocking amount, that I could find if I was better at reading about geology) that is the Mekong and the culture that lives along it.

We ate tarantulas - you dare us - we do it.

And we ordered iced coffee from a woman on a small boat in a floating market, which was scarier than the tarantula but didn’t do anything freaky to my stomach! Which I consider a huge success. Vietnamese iced coffee in Vietnam, by the way, doesn’t have condensed milk like we see here in the States, but it is that sweet. It was like a Cuban coffee, but maybe even stronger and more sugary. And I can appreciate the country’s serious iced coffee obsessed.

Here are just a few photos from this very, truly magical and luxe trip. I won’t call it a trip of a lifetime because I would really love to be back on board in one of their other destinations. Now to find a silent auction where I can do my dirty work…