Chau Doc (27-28 Nov 12)

---

And yet another bus hiccup! And this time from a supposedly legitimate tour company! I'd bought the ticket for my ride from Can Tho to Chau Doc from the official-looking booth by the riverside, and was told there would be a transfer from my hotel to the bus station at the ungodly hour of 4 am, to catch the 4.30 am bus. So I got up real early and waited, and the minibus transfer never showed! Despite it being 5 am in the morning I managed to ask a passerby to call the company that issued my ticket, and he said he would call the driver right away. So I waited another 30 min and he still hadn't showed. By this point ordinarily I guess one would have waited till the booth opened again to complain, but because I'd paid only the booking fee of USD1 at that point, I decided to forget and forfeit it and head straight to the bus station myself.

Fortunately, notwithstanding 3h of terribly damp and musky odour in an old rickety local minibus, I arrived at Chau Doc without further issues. And what greeted me offered some degree of consolation. Vietnam had thus far seemed like a rapidly developing country whose best days for more adventurous backpackers might be behind it, but Chau Doc seemed to provide a slight respite. The town close to the border with Cambodia remains relatively untouched by the frills of Western tourism, and for the first time since my first day in Vietnam when I arrived in the relatively less popular city of Thanh Hoa, I felt that I was once again just one of perhaps only a few foreigners in town. So there are indeed parts of Vietnam that are still relatively untouched, though you literally have to go to the extreme ends!

I'd gone to Chau Doc thinking it would be my final stop in Vietnam, and that I would do the border crossing into Cambodia there and head to Phnom Penh. But I found out in Chau Doc that I could also cross the border further west instead near Ha Tien, and head towards the Cambodian south coast, which was my intended destination anyway. So I'll be making an additional stop in Vietnam after all. More on that to follow.

Stayed at Tai Ngan Hotel.

---

Photos

Nui Sam Mountain
The view of Chau Doc city from the peak. That's Cambodia in the distance.

Lotsa Preserved Fish
Trust me, it smelled even worse than it looks!

More Preserved Seafood
A whole street full of the stuff, in fact.

Mekong
We are in the Delta area after all.

Nui Sam Mountain
Shrine at the peak.