Chau Doc - Vietnam (Part 1)

Well finally we made it out of Feckin Cambodia!
Up at the crack of dawn, we got a bus to another big bus. This drove us through some lovely Cambodian countryside and then dropped us at the ‘ferry’! (A house with a wooden walkway out the back. The ferry itself was a small boat with seats for maybe 20 people. It was hella cool!)

So after stocking up on bread and cheese rolls, we piled and we were off. It was a really relaxing journey down the Bassac river (a tributary of the Mekong). The river is very wide and quite brown and very busy with fishing boats, passenger boats and tiddly boats. There were wooden houses on stilts and houses made from corrugated iron all the way along the riverside. Young chaps were chest high in water doing some fishing and small children waved at us all the way down the river.

The boat stopped briefly to drop off about 20 bicycles that had been stashed up on the roof! Then on we went to the next stop where we were all signed out of Cambodia. Then it was back into the boat for another ten minutes. Our next stop was Vietnam immigration. We had a half hour for lunch on the Vietnam side. We were led down to a small restaurant where we had some noodle soup with pork. We chatted to these two South African ladies beside us. They were on a three week holiday through Cambodia & Nam. They said they immediately noticed the difference upon crossing the border. Thinking they meant that the Nam side was a lot brighter and smilier, I totally agreed! But they meant the opposite. They thought the Cambodian people were a bit smilier. Even though it was way too earlier for me or them to make such a judgement, I knew I was right. Nam was indeed brighter.

So we got back our passports and headed to another boat, that took us all the way down the Bassac River into Chau Doc. Along the way there were plenty more young chappies in the water fishing and tons more small children and adults waved and shouted ‘hello’ at us. The shouting ‘hello’ was to become a regular thing. Everyone does it! Gringos are celebs here.

Our tour guide on the boat was a rather lovely but sweaty young Vietnamese lady. She changed our dosh into dong for us and basically divided us into two groups – those who wanted to stay in the hotel in town she was recommending, or those who wanted to stay in the hotel out of town that she was also recommending. He he. Since we had already planned to go to the one in town that she was selling, we got a free lift to the Vinh Phuoc Hotel. She also gave us lots of bumpf on Mekong tours that we happily perused.

The hotel room itself was huge. In Nam there is some type of confusion between getting a single room (a room with one large bed in it) or a double room (a room with two large beds in it). We got to look at them first though and seeing as how the big room with the two beds had a WINDOW!!!, a TV (that didn’t work) and was only 2 dollars extra, we splashed out on the $8 room. We dumped our stuff and had showers, whereupon Jim promptly fell asleep. Oops. Anywho, I worked away on a track and later on when Queen Talulah woke up, we went out for some grub. We were well lubed up with mosquito juice and good enough for us, there was tons of ‘em around.

Vietnamese food is not as delicious as Thai food imo (not much is) and there isn’t as much veggie options for me. I ordered some rice, shrimps & veg and Jimbob had some pork in fish sauce cooked in a clay pot (one of their star dishes no less). We washed it all down with the best tasting beer in the land – Saigon Lager Beer. Wow. It’s my new favourite beer.

After dinner we went in search of more beers and as we were walking down the street, we heard an almighty crash. One guy on a motorbike had crashed into a moped carrying two ladies and a little girl. It all happened in slow mo really. The second lady fell off and so did her bag of spuds. Then the little girl seemed to roll off too. Noone was hurt luckily but everyone in the street ran over to see what was going on, and there was tons of monosyllabic loud talking.