Fieldwork Mekong Delta, Vietnam
April 10th, 2016
This April, Jasper and I went to Vietnam to help our colleague, Sepehr, with his fieldwork on the Mekong Delta. The project focuses on salt intrusion in the Mekong Delta. Together with Jasper, Sepehr, his supervisor Maarten, and a Vietnamese team from the Southern Institute of Water Resources Research, we did velocity, salt and sediment concentration measurements. This was an awesome opportunity for me to conduct fieldwork on estuaries, even though it was not part of my project. Furthermore, looking back, this trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the non-touristic places of the Mekong and to get a good impression of the Vietnamese culture. It was a great experience to work with the Vietnamese people, but it also learned me a lot about how difficult it is to set up a project with such large cultural differences and differences in experience and education.
Update 2020: I added a video impression of the fieldwork campaign on the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, where we measured saltwater intrusion in the southern branches. Some travel after the vieldwork is also included in this video. This fieldwork was set up by Utrecht University in collaboration with the Southern Institute of Water Resources Research (SIWRR).
We also aim to create a video abstract with the paper resulting from this field campaign.
