Even with 300 small boats, a two-hour wait: why the Mekong's Thoi Son Island suddenly got crowded

On a Mekong islet less than a two-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City, a line forms where people wait two hours to board small boats. The setting is Con Thoi Son in Thoi Son, Dong Thap Province. The experience of slipping through narrow canals aboard the wooden xuong ba la boats caught fire after a Chinese KOL's Douyin post, and even with about 300 boats running nonstop, weekend waits reached one to two hours, Dan Tri reported on July 21. In late July the singer Hari Won also visited and filmed the same experience, and the video topped one million views. It is easy to fit into a Japanese traveler's itinerary as a day trip, but knowing the day of the week, the time, and the going rate completely changes what the same day holds.

From a single photo to a jetty where even 300 boats aren't enough

It caught fire in June 2026. Photos a Chinese traveler took on this sandbar spread widely on Douyin, and that flowed back into young Vietnamese, Dan tri reports. Thanh Duc, 24, a guide with four years of experience who spoke to the paper, said, "Customers used to just look around and go home. In the past half month, a lot of young people come with the aim of taking photos in ao dai and ao ba ba." A Znews on-site report on July 18 recorded customers arriving without a break from around 9 a.m., with each dock nearly frozen in place between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Thanh Duc describes how it clogs on weekends: 'Weekends are far busier than weekdays. Sometimes you wait an hour before a boat finally comes around.' The ride covers about 2 km and takes 12–17 minutes. Capacity per boat is given as 2–3 by Dân trí and 3–4 by Znews and VnExpress, so it varies by outlet. Either way, the established practice of seating passengers spaced apart for photos means turnover stays low relative to the number of boats.

The year the island's address changed, its visitors changed too

One snag when searching for information in Japanese is the mismatch in place names. Con Thoi Son was long introduced as 'Thoi Son, My Tho City, Tien Giang Province,' but the 2025 provincial reorganization merged Tien Giang into Dong Thap, and the current designation is Thoi Son, Dong Thap Province. Many old guidebooks and personal blogs still have the old addresses, so an article written in Japanese as 'My Tho' or 'Tien Giang' and one written in Vietnamese as 'Dong Thap' point to the same place. When searching booking sites, it is faster to look up 'Thoi Son' or 'My Tho' rather than the province name.

It's not just the address that changed. According to Dan tri and Thanh Nien, the island's visitors were originally mostly middle-aged and older people, families and foreign tour groups. But a July 15 VnExpress article reports that today about 70% have shifted to Gen Z individuals and shared-tour customers. A destination selling a traditional rural experience has been rediscovered as a photo spot. When the goal moves from "experience" to "a single photo," visits get shorter even as the time boats occupy the jetty gets longer. In Vietnam, there have been cases where a viral eatery was forced into a temporary closure after exceeding its capacity (Talismans on the cups?! Why Ho Chi Minh City's “cultivation cafe” went so viral it had to temporarily close), and when demand alone spikes without changing the supply-side design, the quality of the experience erodes from the bottom up.

180,000 visitors and about 810 million yen in the first half: the shape of the boom, by the numbers

Lining up the figures published by the government and local media gives a sense of the scale of the frenzy. Amounts are converted at 1 yen = about 162 Vietnamese dong (as of July 2026).

Divide first-half revenue by the number of visitors and each person spends about 730,000 dong, or roughly 4,500 yen.Inquiries rose 20-25%, yet actual bookings grew only 10-15%-that gap is exactly the number of people who "saw it but didn't go." Word of the wait times runs ahead, and would-be visitors are being lost.

Rowers went to 7 or 8 trips a day, and officials moved to organize the flow

The change on the ground comes through most plainly from the rowers. One who spoke to Znews said, 'I used to row only one or two trips a day; now it's seven or eight.' Income has multiplied several times over, but by the same multiple so have the physical toll and the burden of safety management.

Local guide Thanh Thuy says she "guides 150 to 200 people to the island every day." When a single guide processes that many people at the jetty, the queue naturally grows long. Nguyen Thi Xuan Mai, deputy chair of the Thoi Son Ward People's Committee, told Znews that the very fact that visitors' interest gathered during the trial period of the community-tourism model is a positive sign. She also told Thanh Niên that "the social-media effect brought in a younger crowd, and Thoi Son's name spread without the locality spending much on publicity."

The authorities' response covers both facilities and flow. Repairs to Vo Cau pier, a flower trellis along the Ba Ngoan canal, and landscaping of Route 94C, the access road, are already complete, and a boarding ramp on the Ba Ngoan canal is under construction. On the flow side, the plan is to coordinate departure times with tour companies and the rowers' union (Nghiep doan do cheo) and to split activity across three routes - small boats, horse carts, and walking tours of the orchards - to ease the concentration on the canal. Grassroots security personnel are stationed at the site to guide crowds at busy times. The sequence adds facilities while smoothing the flow of people.

The travel agencies take a cooler view. Tran Thi Bao Thu, who heads marketing and PR at Vietluxtour, told VnExpress: "Social media brings customers very fast, but only a good experience keeps them and creates lasting value for a destination." The takeaway: buzz widens the entrance, but the satisfaction at the exit is decided by on-the-ground capacity.

How to plan around the two-hour wait, and the option of "enjoying the jam itself"

From here, it becomes a matter of planning for the visitor. Read the reported time distribution at face value and the crunch takes shape like this: the influx begins after 9 a.m. and peaks from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Boats run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. In other words,The early 8 o'clock slot and after 14:00 once the peak has passedis likely to be a different experience even at the same place. Leaving Ho Chi Minh City in the 6 a.m. hour, the 70-80km takes an hour and a half to two hours to the pier, then 10-15 minutes by boat. Working backward, making the earliest slot is well within the realm of the practical.

Another move is to skip the day trip. Crowds on this island concentrate on weekends. Head into the Mekong on Friday night and stay over, catch a boat first thing Saturday morning, and move on to another town in the afternoon. Around Can Tho, an itinerary that covers the night market and the early-morning floating market in one overnight has become well established (A food festival is on in Can Tho—see the night market and the morning floating market in one overnight), and slotting Thoi Son into the first day of that route lets you dodge the two-hour-wait window entirely.

Alternatively, you can factor the crowds into your plan. A waterway packed with small boats is itself a picture you can only capture right now. But if you go that route, decide in advance how you'll spend the wait. Boat operations are most concentrated on the Ba Ngoan canal in the Tuan Thanh area, and were later extended to Lach Chiec in the Hoa Binh area, Thoi Son Ward explains. Counting the renovated Bo Cau pier, there is more than one boarding point. Before resigning yourself to the line where you first arrived, there's room to check conditions at another landing.

What Thoi Son rolled out first wasn't a cap on entries but operational fixes—renovating the boarding area and spreading out visitors. Because most of the small boats operate through a rowers' association, the authorities can adjust departure and arrival timing simply by going through two parties: the association and the tour companies. With the organization already in place, the coordination gets off to a fast start.

The Shelf Life of a 'Viral Tourist Spot' and What Stays in the Mekong

Vietnam's tourism statistics show this isn't a one-off. Foreign arrivals in the first half of 2026 reached 12.3 million, up 14.9% year on year; by market, China was the largest, and China and South Korea alone made up about 40% of the total. When Chinese social media points to a particular place, the scale of people who actually move is already large. What happened in Thoi Son is a case where that flow was directed not at a provincial capital or a famous resort but at a single islet in the Mekong.

The question is durability. Visits driven by photo-taking recede the moment the composition wears thin. But Thoi Son already has draws like beekeeping farms, orchards, and a coconut-candy workshop, and the shared tours are built as a 1.5- to 2-hour route. How much of this surrounding content you can get visitors who came just for the small boats to experience will decide the numbers that remain after the boom passes.

From a Japanese company's vantage, there are two takeaways. One is the speed at which a single cross-border social post can saturate a small local capacity within weeks. If you're investing in tourism or dining in Vietnam, you need to set the peak-demand multiple higher than your old assumptions. The other is to build supply-side dispersion into the product from the start. What Thoi Son moved on first was renovating the landings and spreading out visitors—clearing the intake bottleneck before adding any new attraction. As a way to protect the quality of the experience without inflating the investment, it's realistic.

Getting there, fares and hours at a glance

Here is the practical information confirmed in reporting. Yen conversions use 1 yen = about 162 dong. Whether reservations are required has not been announced, but weekend group tours are reported to sell out.

Summary: If you're going, lock in first thing in the morning or after 2 p.m. first

The two-hour wait at Con Thoi Son comes less from a shortage of supply than from demand bunching into a specific two-hour window. If so, what visitors can do is clear. Choose a weekday when setting your dates; if that's not possible, work backward from a departure time that puts you at the pier by 8-something on Saturday. It comes down to two choices: leave Ho Chi Minh City in the 6 a.m. hour, or head into the Mekong the night before and stay over.

As a guide, a standalone boat ride runs 100,000 dong and a shared tour 150,000–200,000. A tour company's full-day package including transfers and lunch is about 400,000 dong, so your choice comes down to how you weigh the effort of arranging it yourself against a difference of roughly 1,200–1,500 yen. A local rule of thumb for spotting the quiet eateries in town (When 39 of 40 diners are locals, it's a hit—the golden rule for choosing a good restaurant in Vietnam). As before, using when the locals move as your yardstick makes it hard to miss even in crowded places. Start by checking the day of the week of your trip, and if it falls on a weekend, move your departure an hour and a half earlier.

Sources:Dân trí／Dân trí（Hari Won）／Znews／VnExpress／Thanh Niên／VietnamPlus