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Published: March 25th 2009
Our journey from Cambodia to Vietnam has gone down as being one of the nicest, hassle free border crossings to date.. long may they continue! We'd settled on a bus/boat transfer as we'd read that this was the nicest way to do it and for just $9 each you can't beat that. We jumped on the bus outside our guesthouse at 7am, travelled for around an hour to the river, hopped on a boat and enjoyed a 2 hour ride along the river until we reached the Cambodia office. Off the boat, stamped out of Cambodia and back on again for another hour until we reached the floating Vietnam Immigration office. Off the boat again, we enjoyed lunch on the river bank, got on another boat and enjoyed another 2 hours of river cruising through many little Mekong villages on stilts on the riverbank until we reached Chau Doc our destination town.
Chau Doc is an up and coming town thanks in part to the new border crossing described above. It's found right next to the Hau Giang River and is quite a nice town to introduce us to our latest country. With only one major highlight we only stopped
for one full day which was filled with exploring the town and it's super cheap eating stalls, viewing the weird and wonderful things for sale on the market and visiting the main tourist draw.. Sam Mountain. This mountain is around 500m and is found 6km along a dead straight road from the town centre. It has many pagodas around the base & up the sides but for us the attraction was the amazing view you got from the top. We visited it in the late afternoon so as to enjoy the sunset and thankfully had employed 2 moto drivers to take us to the top as it would have been one steep walk otherwise. The view from the top is spectacular and you can see all the way to Cambodia in the distance as well as back towards Chau Doc and beyond. The sunset was also amazing, especially as they had a little hammock bar at the top with cheap as chips cold beers.
The following morning we made our way to the bus station and got a local bus to the next major town of Can Tho. This is another popular city on the tourist trail thanks to
the large floating markets that are found around the city waterways. We booked a trip for the following day and spent the afternoon walking the riverfront and being amazed at the strange things that can be found on the menus out here.. grilled rat, snake or frogs anyone?!
Our trip started at 5.30am the following day but having not had one lay in past 7am for a couple of weeks this didn't really bother us too much. We made our way to the small boat along with a really nice german couple and jumped in. Our trip involved visiting 2 floating markets, a rice noodle manufacturer and then a gentle cruise back along the small canals with many villages at either side.
The first market was not quite what we had expected as it was a lot of very big boats which seemed to be more wholesale than individual purchase. All the same it was quite interesting to see everyone jostling around with us bobbing in between and was a good intorduction. The second one was much more what we had expected with countless small boats bunched together each containing piles of brightly coloured fruit & vegetables, some
we recognised and some we didn't. Generally we find the fruit & vegetable selections out here are much more intersting than in Tesco's at home and we really enjoy trying new things every day.. some we like and some we don't but it's fun all the same with Dragon Fruit being Dale's fruit of choice at the moment and lychees being Sophie's.
The visit to the rice noodle place was good too, they still use the traditional methods to make it and we watched in awe as they scooped out the rice mix, swirled it around on the hot plate then lifted it off onto bamboo stretchers to dry out. Sophie took a shine to the pigs that lived here too.. especially when she found a litter of tiny piglets under one bamboo stretcher.
After the excitement of the market we dived into one of the small canals that feeds off the main river and stopped for a noodle lunch. We found out here that we had to wait for an hour for the water to rise in the canals otherwise the boats cannot get through. We were quite amazed at this as neither of us realised that
these river deltas which are so far away from the sea are affected by the tides and you have to time your journeys accordingly. After our hours wait we made our way slowly back to Can Tho, very slowly in fact as typically we chose the boat with the problems! We had to tow another boat for a while as their engine had fallen apart, those people got transferred to a shiny new boat and off they went while we continued to tow the boat, then stop off at a boat menders place to get it fixed. This was quite fun though as it was beside a bar area and they invited Dale to drink some rice wine with them after he wowed them with his Vietnamese.. he won't do it again in a hurry as the rice wine is pretty much pure alcohol and nearly blew him away!
At one point eagle eye Sophie also managed to spot a small red snake swimming across the canal, our boat went over the top of it and we feared it might have been squished but it cruised out the other side and carried on it's way to the other side
of the bank. About 10m downstream a group of children were playing and we feared a bit for their safety but we guessed they do this all the time with no problems so left them to it.
The trip was excellent and we thoroughly enjoyed the markets and especially crusing though the tiny canals with slilt houses on each side of the banks for the whole journey. The only thing we didn't like was the state of the water... the water is obviously very very important to them and provides areas to wash, fish, swim etc but they seem to also use it as a rubbish dump and toilet which is horrible when you see one man weeing out his back door at one house and a lady washing up her cutlery at the next house. Our boatman also got annoyed when he kept on getting plastic bags caught round his propellor every 5 minutes but rather than undo it and prevent the problem, he undid it and just threw the bag back in the river! Litter is probably the thing we dislike most about Asian countries, and South America too, people just have no idea on how to
dispose of things properly and just throw everything on the ground once they've used it, or out bus windows, it's incredible the amount of litter that is everywhere. Even in indoor restaurants people just throw their used napkins on the floor! Ok litter rant over!
After the fun in the floating markets we headed to Vinh Long which is where you have the opportunity to do a homestay on one of the river islands. We booked our homestay and spent the afternoon exploring what little there was to do in the town.. not much really! We did have a fantastic meal on the market though, this consisted of pancakes stuffed with a pork, shrimp & veggie mix to which you added a kind of vinegary coleslaw and wrapped in green leaves. There was a lovely lady who worked on the stall who showed us how it was done and we left feeling very stuffed. In the evening we had more gastronomic delights as we visited a lovely rooftop restaurant. We had checked our LP's suggestions and didn't think much to them so when we spotted this restaurant from our 5th floor room in the guesthouse we decided to check
it out.
It was quite posh and obviously new as it was in a big shopping complex not even mentioned in the 2007 edition of LP and we weren't sure if it would be in our budget as we went up in the lift escorted by a nice Vietnamese lady. We asked to have a look at a menu in our usual non-commital fashion and were amazed that we could actually afford to eat in this sit down restaurant complete with table cloths and the most attentive waiter, a huge change from our normal plastic stools perched next to a market stall with rats running by your feet (yes we have seen them!). For dinner we selected a Vietnamese Hotpot, we were a bit dumb with what you had to order and do with it so the waiter helped us out and we selected a soup base of hot & sour crab, shrimps to go in it (you can choose from many fish & meats including pig intestine & eel so we opted for a safe choice!) and some noodles to beef it up a little. With a hotpot you get a hot plate on your table with the
metal hot pot on top. They give you the soup base in the hot pot and to this you add green vegetables, the shrimp and noodles as you want to eat them and it is delicious for the bargain price of £3.70 and that included drinks too.. so nice in fact that we went again on our final night.
To make our night complete we went to the local karoke cafe by the river. No renditions of Angels here though as the songs are all Vietnamese ones we didn't understand but they do do a good job of making the terrible songs sound even worse so in that respect it's much like home! Sophie then decided that she fancied cake so we went on a mission to find a hawker cake stand but without success. We did however go one better and stumble across another new shopping complex and this one had a supermarket so we were like kids in a sweet shop.. literally.. as we ran in and selected bags of sweets to munch on our way home. We really don't eat many sweets, mainly because our coffee in the morning has all the sweetness we need for
the day with either about 5 tablespoons of sugar added or a huge dollop of condensed milk. That alone each morning is enough to strip our teeth of any enamel we may have left so we don't want to make it worse after the teeth problems we have had so far on our trip.
The following morning was homestay day but we weren't catching our boat until 3pm so we mooched around the town until it was time to go. Both of us had similar visions of what our homestay would be like.. a corrogated iron/wooden house on stilts with an old family, perhaps a couple of young kids sitting around on the wooden floor and eating very traditional food.. maybe pigs intestines with rice? The reality could not have been more different...
We went along a really small canal in our boat and pulled up to a nice entrance gate complete with the most lovely house behind. A young woman & man rushed to greet us and this was our homestay family.. a newly married couple Dien & Thi and her sister Quy. They really didn't speak any English but Thi was armed with a Vietnamese to
English phrase book so we spent our first hour going though that to say hello & learn names etc. Dale also tried to learn a few more Vietnamese phrases but it's so hard to get the tones correct he struggled a bit (there are 6 tones for each word here so effectively each word can mean 6 different things depending on how you say it). The house was just gorgeous, very very peaceful with a lovely garden which led out to the canal. We learnt that the house itself has been in Dien's family for 70 years and they have just added a new terrace to it 1 month ago to start to do homestays.
After chatting for a while we took a walk along the canal to see some of the other lovely houses and soon fell in love with this area. It's quite a bit nicer than the canals around Can Tho & Chau Doc as there isn't so much rubbish and it's a lot quieter with prettier houses & flowers all around. After a nice walk we returned to the house to relax in the terrace and wait for dinner and were joined by 2 French
Lady we met in our hotel
she just came up to us while we were on the internet and started speaking French to us, then insisted we take her photograph and post her a copy!girls and their guide who were also staying the night. When booking the homestay we asked if we would be able to help cook so the family invited us to join them in the kitchen which we were happy to do. Dale had a go at frying some spring rolls which he did successfully but Sophie's attempts were not so good! She had to turn over and fish out the battered prawns & fish from the hot oil which sounds easy but the lady put them all in so fast Sophie got a bit flustered and took most of them out too soon but the family were really nice about it and tried to disguise the fact that they had to put most of them back in the oil to cook properly and avoid giving everyone food poisioning.
The food was a feast of many different courses including the spring rolls, battered prawns & fish, little chips, corn on the cob, a lovely pork dish cooked in a clay pot and a vegetable soup finished off by watermelon.. we are loving Vietnam already as the food is just so nice. Dinner over we were left to relax in the
hammocks before going to bed in our little room divided up by a yellow curtain.
We had to leave quite early in the morning because of the tides, if we left any later than 7.30am then the water would be too low to get a boat out. We had a lovely breakfast (complete with tooth rot coffee!) and used the phrasebook to thank the family for a lovely stay and wonderful hospitality. We left by rowing boat this time as the tide was too low to get a motorboat though and our rowing lady lent us conical hats to wear for our journey back to keep the sun off our heads, even at 7.30am the sun is very very strong here. We had a fantastic time doing the homestay, the house and family really is great so if anyone is coming this way and wants to do a homestay we would highly recommend them just let us know and we can pass on the details.
Our final day in Vingh Long was a job doing day so washing done we chilled out a bit, had a yummy bowl of Pho (noodles) in the market and a hotpot in
the evening before catching our bus to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and looking forward to the endless list of things we wanted to do there...
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Holly
non-member comment
Hiya
Loving the blogs so far [well, apart from the S21 one]. Cambodia and Vietnam look amazing. Looks like you guys are having the best time. Can't wait!! You guys have both lost loads of weight, must be all the walking and the heat rather than the lack of nice food. The best weight loss plan I've ever seen! Take care. Missing you loads. Love Hxxx