The ferry the bridge replaced

For most of her life, Mrs Hai's day began with the engine of the first ferry. At half past four it coughed into life at the landing on the Tien River, and within minutes the lane behind her stall filled with motorbikes, lorries of pigs, schoolchildren in white shirts and women carrying baskets of fish. Mrs Hai sold iced coffee and steamed sticky rice to the people waiting in the queue, which on a bad morning could stretch for an hour. 'We never had to look for customers,' she says. 'The river brought them.'

The bridge that ended all this opened a few kilometres upstream. Bridges of this sort have been replacing the Mekong ferries one by one since the Rach Mieu and My Thuan crossings were built, and the logic is hard to argue with. A journey that once ate half a morning now takes a few minutes. Trucks carry vegetables from the delta to Ho Chi Minh City while they are still fresh, and farmers can sell to buyers who would never have bothered with a long ferry queue. Nobody in the town, including Mrs Hai, would want the old crossing back.

What the bridge took away is harder to measure and easy to overlook. The landing was never just a place to cross a river. It was a market, a meeting point and, for several hundred families, a source of income: boatmen, mechanics, ticket sellers, food stalls, a man who patched tyres. The people who now drive over the bridge do not stop. The town below it, as one shopkeeper puts it, has become 'the view from a window', something that is seen but not visited.

Some of the landing's workers adapted fast. Two of the boatmen drive trucks now, and a former ticket seller runs a small homestay with a view of the old jetty, which brings in a trickle of visitors curious about the delta as it used to be. Others were less lucky. Mrs Hai, who is sixty-one, moved her stall to a spot beside the bridge approach, where, she admits, the customers are fewer, in a hurry and not at all interested in chatting.

The town has not given up. The council has talked of a riverside market held on weekends, a boat trip to the old landing for visitors, and a stretch of the old approach road closed to traffic. Mrs Hai is polite about these plans and unconvinced. 'They will do it for the first month,' she says. 'Then everyone gets busy again.' She has seen enough committees to know the pattern: enthusiasm, a banner, and a fading of interest as the banner fades.

Her grandson, who is fourteen, takes a different view. He has used the bridge since he was small and sees nothing to mourn. Last year he made a video of the old landing for a school project and was struck by how much of it was queues. 'Everyone looked tired,' he said. His grandmother laughed, then pointed out that tired people buy coffee.

It would be sentimental to wish the ferry back, and she refuses to be sentimental about it. But she is not quite reconciled either. Asked what she misses most, she thinks for a while and does not mention money. 'On the ferry you were stuck with people,' she says. 'You talked. On the bridge you just pass.' Progress, as the economists like to say, has winners and losers. What they are less quick to say is that the losers are often the people who once held a community together.