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Published: December 28th 2007
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- July 26 - Taxi to Vietnam border, Motorbike to Chao Doc (Mekong Delta)
- July 27 - Chao Doc to Can Tho (Mekong Delta)
- July 28 - Can Tho to My Tho (Mekong Delta)
- July 29 - My Tho, Ben Tre and a bus to HCMC
We arrived at the town of Chao Doc on the Mekong river at the top of the delta to spend the night. We thought it should be easy to find a boat down the Mekong, but apparently, they don't really offer this short of hiring your own boat for $300. So we joined up with a tour for 3 days instead at a tenth of the price... It sounded like quite a lot of cool things to see from the description, but it really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
The first morning we were picked up in Chao Doc, went by boat to a little Cham minority village on the Mekong, had a 'tour' of a fish farm which involved getting off the boat and looking into a fish tank with thousands of little fish for about 5 minutes. Then we hopped on our bus to the town of
Rainy Day in Chao Doc
Vendor stands ankle deep in water after the raiuns hit Chao Doc. We were just glad that it didn't piss down rain while we were on the motorbikes! Can Tho.
We had signed up to do a homestay on the Mekong in Can Tho, but in reality it was more like a guest house. We had little interaction with the family. It was a bit disappointing based on how it had been hyped. But we still enjoyed the scenery and being on the delta. In the description, every other sentence was about seeing how the local people live, but it wasn't as quaint as you might imagine. We still found it interesting however.
The next day we took a boat to the huge floating market in Can Tho and then went to see how they make rice paper and how they process rice. The other stops on the tour were more like they were getting some kind of kick back - we stopped at an incense maker's place and then to what they called 'Bonsai Gardens' which really was a glorified tourist stop in the town of My Tho. We've been talking to other travelers and find that Vietnam is filled with these kinds of tours and often it's difficult to do on your own. We are going to do our best if we can.
The
Snake
in Ben Tre provence town of Mytho was really dead - very little going on. We asked the waiter at our restaurant if there was anything going on in the town... Ok, I should mention that I had bought a Vietnamese phrase book in Chao Doc and up to this point we had already needed to use it many times. Communication was very challenging on the Mekong Delta, but that made it kinda fun. We would try to pronounce the phrases and they would look at us with blank stares. Then we'd just hand them the book and point to the phrase - at least Vietnamese is written in Roman letters.... Anyway, apparently all that was going on in Mytho on a Sunday night was Karaoke, so we went to a Karaoke place, just us and the waiter. It was hilarious!! Our new friend Thang would sing a song in Vietnamese, we'd sing some in English. We had a blast... seeing how the local people live.
The final day of the tour was awful. We showed up to the tour, only to find that instead of our small group of 8, we were now being herded along with a group of 35 that
just got off the bus from Saigon. Not only that but there were multiple other bus loads of tourists in front of us and behind us. By the time we got on the boat, it was too late. The tour guide was a girl in her early twenties with bad acne and began her tour by saying in broken English, 'it's not my job to look out for you. You must stay with the group, because if you're not there, I'm not gonna look for you.' We felt like we were on some rotten field trip and everyone just gave each other glances like, what did we get ourselves into? We saw a few extremely touristy things on Ben Tre island - she gave very little explanation, but we saw a honey farm and a snake farm, tried the local fruit and listened to some folk music. Took some little boats down the narrow waterways in the delta. We were so happy at the end of the day to get on our bus to Saigon.
We'll really have to watch out to avoid overly touristy things like this I think. I'm still glad we did the delta tour and
Dirty Bags
Opening the trunk at the Vietnamese border to find our bags covered in red dust it was cool to see, but definitely we can sense that tourism in Vietnam is booming faster than they can keep up...
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