Saigon to the Mekong Delta

The trip from Saigon to Phnom Penh is a standard trip that we could have arranged on our own by purchasing bus and/or boat tickets. But the travel agencies all offer tours that include bus and boat travel and hotel arrangements
at comparable or less pricing than if you made the arrangements yourself. So we went with one of their three day tours that would take us from Saigon to and through the Mekong Delta and leave us off in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This tour was very inexpensive. Total cost for the two of us including transportation and three nights hotel accommodation was $160. There were parts that were a bit
touristy which we had expressly wanted to avoid at all costs but overall the price was right, it met our objectives and we met some interesting fellow travelers along the way.

We checked out of the Bich Duyen hotel just before 7 the next morning, promising Chanh that we'd return, which we did later. The tour company picked us up at the hotel and we boarded a bus with about 20 other travelers, the majority
of whom were in their mid 20's from Australia and various countries in Europe. Throughout our trip we saw very few Americans. It was a different perspective to be on a bus riding through Saigon way above street level looking down. We had spent the last few days getting around the city by foot or motorcycle at street level right thick in the middle of all the traffic rubbing elbows with the best of the motorcycles.

The Mekong Delta isn't that far from Saigon at all, maybe two and a half hours by bus if you went strictly by bus which is what we thought we were going to do. But the bus took us to a small boat on the Saigon River. The other passengers
and us looked around at each other because we weren't expecting to be on a boat just then. The Vietnamese are masters of the universe in arranging sometimes strange and unexpected travel situations where you're just not sure what's going on thereby making a trip that's already an adventure into even more of an adventure. The way we looked at it was that we got two adventures for the price
of one.

This boat sat low in the water and took us out of Saigon and into the peaceful Mekong Delta. We got to see a wide variety of scenery and life as it is lived in the Mekong. All types of boats and barges were piled high with every
imaginable fruit and vegetable. On the banks of the river people were tending to their farms and animals and doing laundry. The boat had to stop every so often
and cut the engine in order to remove some of the thick vegetation from the propellers. Life here on the Mekong River was far removed from the hustle and bustle of Saigon.

After a couple hours we stopped at Turtle Island and got into a much smaller row
boat in the shape of a canoe. The waterways there were a narrow labyrinth with
trees and plants overhanging close beside us and just above our heads. An
elderly Vietnamese woman and Matt were the ones rowing our boat. During the rest
of the day we were off and on several more boats and taken to Unicorn Island and
Dragon Island where we visited local businesses like a place where they made
coconut candy and a honey bee farm. Later that evening we arrived in Can Tho
where we spent the night in a hotel arranged as part of the tour. It was raining
cats and dogs in Can Tho. We went out and found a great place for dinner. The
salads they served were incredibly fresh.

Later that afternoon we were back on a bus heading for the town of Chau Doc on the Vietnamese Cambodian border. Matt was not over jet lag at this point in time and he slept when he should have been looking out the window of the bus as there was a lot to see. At one point there were these huge sticks of incense for sale by the side of the road and he missed it. How he could even sleep on this bus was beyond belief as we kept on hitting bumps that would send everyone in the bus, particularly us in the back of the bus, up in the air and back down.

This bus trip from Can Tho to Chau Doc took about six hours and was punctuated with a lot of horn honking by our driver and everyone else on the road. Life is lived right beside the roadways in Vietnam with people walking, animals strolling about, children playing and of course the ubiquitous motorcycles all unnervingly close to the bus and each other. The driver drove crazy, layed on the horn at every opportunity and aggressively passed other vehicles. Just before reaching Chau Doc we stopped at an interesting crocodile farm.

It was interesting watching Satoshi communicate with a Vietnamese shop owner
about the purchase of a cell phone. He was trying to figure out if the Sim card
included overseas talk time outside of Vietnam and if it would work in Cambodia.
His Japanese mannerisms and those of the Vietnamese were curious to observe
because they didn't seem to have much of a language in common. Satoshi used his
eyes and the nod of his head a lot. For twenty minutes they went back and forth
trying to figure out what each other was talking about but in the end the two
questions never really got either asked or answered and no cell phone was
purchased either.

The three of us had dinner that night in an open air restaurant at the Floating Hotel overlooking, you guessed it, the Mekong River. Much of this trip is beginning to revolve around the Mekong River and that will remain true too once we get to Cambodia, which isn't far away at this point. We watched the sun set and various boats coming and going and wondered if Cambodia was in fact in the trees we could see on the other side of the river. It was a relaxed evening in a nice setting and the food was fantastic. So we went to bed that night kind of excited because Cambodia and the mystical sounding name of Phnom Penh were both on the horizon for tomorrow.

The next morning we had breakfast at the floating hotel as it was included with our tour. Most of our fellow travelers were heading back to Saigon, only a few of us were continuing on to Cambodia. Soon we were off on a boat headed to a Muslim community a ways up the river. We walked through the village but weren't quite sure why they took us there. We ended up back at the boat dock and here acquired new tour mates. Off to a different boat this time, presumably now en route to Cambodia which we knew must be close by. The boat trip would take about 6 hours on one of their speed boats, but speedy it was not. Time wasn't a consideration for us, we just enjoyed the trip.