Mekong Delta

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We left Saigon after 6 days of hard partying and decided to take the scenic route to Phnom Penh rather than another tiring bus ride. The Mekong Delta tour was over 3 days and cost 36 dollars which inlcluded some meals and 2 nights accomodation. We thought we'd use the 3 days as a bit of a detox and chance to recharge the batteries ahead of Phnom Penh which we'd heard had the good, the bad and the ugly.

The 1st day of the tour was not great, we spent a lot of it on a coach despite it being advertised as a river boat tour, the highlights of the day were seeing some cocount candy being mad and having the chance to sample them. Plus a guy falling off a plastic chairs during one of our stop offs. Again we were the only 2 English on the tour and we probably 2 of the youngest too. Our tour guide was very amusing too and had little patience for some of the tourists that had numerous questions and didn't understand his broken english (we didn't at times so we understood why they were struggling). We stopped overnight in a city of Cantho, had dinner with 2 dutch girls and a canadian the hit the sack early.

We was expecting slightly more from the second day but it never really happened. A 6.30 am start for breakfast then it coach then boat to visit the floating markets. Basically its a market that is run on boats by the local people on the Mekong river, next up was a noodle factory where the highlight was seeing some piglets in the onsite farm. After lunch the group went from 49 to 10 which was a relief to our tour guide who could now destress after losing most of his original group. The 10 of us visited a crocidile farm in teh afternoon where there must of been at least a 1000 crocodiles ranging from babies to fully grown beasts, they also had a couple of black bears here too. The last stop was a mountain pagoda which from the top you could see across the border into Cambodia. Spent our last night in Vietnam in a town called Chau Doc, didn't venture out too far in the evening, had some dinner at a local restaurant recommended to us by a local tuk tuk driver, then spent the rest of the evening updating the blog and setting up Neal's 'real'facebook.

The 3rd day of the tour was by far the best, it was as we'd expected a 7 hour boat ride down the Mekong river (which is some river by the way at certain points it is 1.5kn across). Crossed the border into Cambodia at a point along the river and swapped our remaining Dong for US Dollars (the preferred currency in Cambodia). As we made our way down the Mekong river through Cambodia, there was lots of Khmer kids playing in the Mekong river, and some Khmer men taking their daily wash in the river. Looking at it you can't imagine them to be very clean after!!! Got off the boat at around 5pm then we had the last part of the journey via minibus into Phnom Penh, this was the worst part of the day as the roads were awful. But eventually got to Phnom Penh around 8pm.

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