Soc Trang

Soc Trang is a delta province where Khmer, Chinese and Vietnamese communities have built beside each other for generations. The result is the strangest set of temples in the south.

Why are the pagodas so different here?

Three traditions built in the same small province of about 1.2 million people, and none of them gave way. Soc Trang has a large Khmer population with Theravada pagodas, a Chinese merchant community with its own temples, and Vietnamese Mahayana pagodas alongside both.

The result is that a half-day tour takes in a Cambodian-style roofline, a clay-modelled Chinese interior and a Vietnamese shrine within a few kilometres. Tra Vinh, the next province up, is Khmer almost throughout; Soc Trang is the mixture.

What is it like at the Bat Pagoda at dusk?

Chua Doi is a Khmer pagoda roughly 400 years old, 3 km from the centre, whose trees hold a colony of several thousand large fruit bats. At dusk they leave. Through the day they hang in the canopy over the grounds, wings close to a metre across, in numbers that are hard to take in from a photograph. Towards evening they drop, circle and go out over the province to feed.

The monks have protected them for generations and the bats are not hunted on the grounds. It is worth timing an afternoon here rather than a morning, which is the opposite of how most delta days run.

What did one man build out of clay?

Chua Dat Set is the work of a single family over decades, and almost everything inside it is modelled clay. There are pagoda towers of several tiers, dragons, lions and hundreds of small figures. Beside them stand candles of roughly 200 kg each, lit years ago and expected to burn for decades more.

The temple is an oddity rather than a masterpiece, and it is genuinely worth the half hour. Nothing else in the delta looks remotely like it.

What happens at Ok Om Bok?

Ok Om Bok is the Khmer moon festival, and in Soc Trang it comes with the largest ngo boat races in Vietnam. Long, narrow wooden boats carrying 50 or more paddlers race a 1,200 m course on the canal through town, crewed by the pagodas that own them.

The festival falls on the full moon of the tenth lunar month, usually in November. The festival fills every room in the province, so it is the one weekend of the year worth booking months out. The festivals guide covers how these lunar dates move.

What is banh pia?

Banh pia is a flaky, layered pastry filled with mung bean, durian and sometimes salted egg yolk, and Soc Trang is where it is made. The recipe came with the Teochew Chinese community, the factories sit along the road out of town, and boxes of it are sold at every stop on the highway south.

Banh pia is sweet, heavy and divisive, because the durian in it is not subtle. Buy a single cake before committing to a box, and if durian is not for you, the plain mung-bean version is on the same shelf.

How does it fit a delta trip?

Soc Trang works as a half-day stop between Can Tho and the far south, and that is how most people see it. Can Tho is 60 km and an hour and a half north, Ca Mau three hours further on, and the road runs through the middle of the province.

From Ho Chi Minh City it is about 230 km and five hours. The three-day delta route does not include it, and adding it means a fourth day or a night given up elsewhere.

Where do you stay, and what should you eat?

Stay in the town if you stay at all. There are plain hotels at provincial rates from the bottom of the accommodation guide bands, and nothing resembling a resort.

Eat bun nuoc leo, the province's own bowl. It is a fermented-fish broth of Khmer origin with pork, prawn and herbs, sold in the market and at street counters from early morning. The broth is sharper and funkier than anything on a tourist menu, and it is the reason to eat here rather than in Can Tho. The noodle soups guide covers where the regional bowls diverge.