Advertisement
Published: June 27th 2011
Edit Blog Post
We arrived in Chau doc quickly and took a moto- taxi into town. We settled on a cheap hotel and went out to find some dinner. It seems that we crave western food most when we can’t get any and so instead of the lasagne we were hoping for we settled on beef with fried rice for Deb and prawns with veg for Ang. We stopped for a smoothie on the way back and slept through to 9.30am the following morning.
We had a lazy morning, popping out for breakfast then coming back to the hotel for a few hours’ kip. At 3pm we were picked up by 2 moto guys who took us to some temples, pagodas and Sam Mountain.
We set off to first to the cavern pagoda, where you had to climb up many steps before you got there! We were really amazed by this pagoda especially as one part of is in a cavern with statues of snakes and demons. The temple overlooked the rural side of Chau doc and you could also see the Cambodian border from here.
We whizzed down to the Tay An Pagoda which has a lot of Islamic and
Cavern Temple
why do all the interesting places have to be atop a high staircase? Hindu influences including some statues of Hindu gods. Following this we headed off to the Temple of Lady Xu where some locals give roast pigs as offerings in the temple. These two sites were opposite each other and were full of locals worshipping, so it was worth waiting around for a little while just to people watch.
After this we hopped on the bike and headed up Sam Mountain, we were cheating as we were on motorbikes going up the hill which is a good few miles at least. There were many locals climbing up and down the hill which would probably take a good hour each way!! We spent a few hours here watching the sunset over Cambodia, which was beautiful.
In the evening we had a little stroll around town and changed some money into dollars which are needed to get our Cambodian visas. After this we had some BBQ beef at a street stall round the corner from our hotel which was fantastic!
We were picked up at 7am for our slow boat into Cambodia. We had a brief ride to the river where we were transferred into row boats – 2 people per boat
– and taken to one of the floating houses on the river. Here we were surprised to learn that our $10 slow boat ticket also included a brief tour of the fish farms that many local people build under their floating house and make a living from. We were glad we hadn’t bothered to pay for a tour the previous day! It was interesting to see, particularly when the guide threw in the fish food and they went crazy! We also stopped briefly at a Cham village before being transferred into the slow boat which took us to the border. At the border we got off the boat and had some overpriced lunch while our guide sorted our visas for us. Once we all had our visas we were piled into a sweaty minivan – next stop the Cambodian border!
Deb & Ang
Advertisement
Tot: 0.104s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 41; dbt: 0.0711s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb