The Mekong Delta is “another world,” where markets, villages and schools “float on sprawling, life-sustaining estuaries,” observes Traveller. Often dubbed the "rice bowl" of Vietnam, this 39,000-square-kilometre labyrinth of waterways remains “one of the most densely populated parts of the country.” This is a “comma-shaped flatland stretching from Ho Chi Minh’s city limits southwest to the Gulf of Thailand,” explains Rough Guides; the delta is “an agricultural miracle that pumps out more than a third of the country’s annual food crop from just ten percent of its total land mass.”