Ca Mau

Ca Mau is the last province in Vietnam, a flat sheet of mangrove, canal and shrimp pond where the country runs out into the sea.

What is actually at the cape?

Mui Ca Mau is the southern tip of the mainland, at about 8 degrees 37 minutes north. What stands there is a marker shaped like a boat, a viewing tower, a boardwalk and mangrove on both sides. On one side the sun rises over the sea and on the other it sets over it. No other point in Vietnam can offer that.

The cape is also still being built. The rivers drop silt here faster than the sea takes it, so the land grows seaward by several dozen metres a year, commonly reported at 50 to 80 m. That is the reason the national park, about 41,000 hectares of it, is on the UNESCO biosphere list. The cape is 110 km and two hours beyond Ca Mau city, and the drive out is half the experience.

What does a shrimp province look like?

Ca Mau looks like water with edges. Most of the province has been cut into shrimp ponds, separated by low dykes and linked by canals. Vietnam's shrimp export industry is largely this one landscape repeated for a hundred kilometres.

The province is not pretty in the way the upper delta is, and it is more interesting than that sounds. Mangrove is cut and replanted, ponds are aerated by paddle wheels, and boats move between them because there is no road. The delta hub covers how the rest of the region farms.

What is the swamp forest like?

U Minh Ha is a national park of about 8,000 hectares, peat swamp under cajuput trees standing in water stained the colour of tea. It is among the last large pieces of that habitat left. You visit it by boat down cut channels, with the canopy closing overhead.

The forest also burns. The peat dries out in the hot months and fires are a recurring event, which is why access varies by season and by year. Take what the health guide says about mosquitoes seriously in this particular forest.

What do you eat at the end of the country?

The food here is crab, and the province knows it. Ca Mau mud crab is sold live at the market and cooked simply, and it is the one thing people from Saigon ask visitors to bring back.

Two others are worth ordering. Ba khia is small crab fermented in salt, sour and strong, eaten with rice rather than on its own. Dried shrimp from the ponds outside the city is the province's other export, sold by the bag in the market and used across Vietnamese cooking. The seafood guide covers what to order elsewhere on the coast.

Is it too far for a normal trip?

For most itineraries, yes, and that is the honest answer. Ca Mau is about 350 km and eight hours from Ho Chi Minh City, three hours beyond Can Tho. The cape is two hours past the city again.

The province earns the journey if the end of the country means something to you, or if you are already deep in the delta with days to spend. There is a small airport with flights from Saigon of a little over an hour, which is what makes a two-night version of this trip possible at all.

When can you actually travel here?

December to April is the dry season and the only reliable window. Roads, boat trips and the park are all straightforward then, and the heat is bearable in the morning.

From May to October the province floods — it sits barely above sea level, and this is the wettest corner of the delta. Trips still run, plans stop holding. The typhoon and rain guide covers what the southern wet season does and does not mean.

A bed in the city, or one at the cape?

Sleep in Ca Mau city, which has ordinary provincial hotels. The alternative is one of the few simple guesthouses near the cape, for the sunrise without a four-hour drive attached to it. Rates sit at the bottom of the accommodation guide bands.

The cost of this province is the transport, not the bed. Budget for a car or a boat for two full days. Nothing here is close to anything else, and public transport thins out the further south you go.