Can Tho, for a boat ride

The guest house the lady on the boat recommended happened to be the one we had looked at in the book, although it was a bit of a coincidence that she turned up when we got off the bus.  Nevertheless, we took a moto (with our rucksacks in between the driver's legs) to the guesthouse.  It was certainly not the nicest we had ever seen, but it was cheap, so we just took it, but not before I burnt my leg on the exhaust pipe of one of the bikes downstairs - ow!

After showers, we were about to head out when a lady from downstairs tried to convince us to buy a boat trip from her.  She was trying to sell us an 8 hour deal, which seemed a bit excessive, and was definitely too expensive.  We told her we'd think about it, which she didn't seem to happy with, and we headed out to have a look round the town.

There was a massive food market, which looked pretty cool, so we took a wander through that. We were headed for the river, but after a while realised we were going the wrong way, so headed back. We ended up on a street that was mentioned in the book for restaurants, but I couldn't understand why one of them was in there. It had the same name and address as mentioned in the book, but certainly didn't look like a restaurant, for locals or westerners, and the two ladies eating inside saw us look in and laughed at us. We walked on for another bit, and eventually ended up asking two Westerners we saw walking towards us. They directed us to the place I had been looking for, which was packed full of Farang- easy saying it's in the book. I think the road numberings are just a bit random, and the first place had just given itself the same name as the restaurant - probably just to laugh at all the white people looking confused outside. Having said that, that's one of the things that makes it so easy to find your way about in Vietnam - all the shops and businesses have their street address above the door, so you always know what road you're on.

We had food, and then headed back to the guest house.  The boat lady wasn't there anymore, but another lady working there tried to sell us the same deal.  We figured we didn't have much time to spend in Can Tho, so after some bargaining, we booked with her for a trip first thing in the morning.

So at 6 the next morning we were collected from our guest house, and we walked down to the river.  There, we jumped on a boat, and set off for the floating markets.  About 10 mins into the journey, our driver pointed to the sky, but we had already noticed that the clouds ahead were black, and noted that we had no rain protection whatsoever.  The driver put a roof over us, which was some relief, but when the rain started, we quickly realised that wasn't going to be much good!  Our driver also gave us some tarpaulin to cover ourselves, which worked wonders, and kept us pretty warm.  Nevertheless, the rain was so hard that I couldn't even open my eyes, and we enventually pulled over and waited for the storm to subside.

It did, and we set off again.  The floating market was great, it was much better than the one I had been to outside Bangkok.  It seemed a little more authentic - in that Thai people were actually buying stuff there, and we only saw one or two other boats with westerners.  What's more, no one actually tried to sell us anything!  There was so much fruit and veg on sale, it was amazing to see.  And there was a guy catching and chopping cabbages mid-air, it was cool, and I don't know how he didn't lose a few fingers in the process!

After the market, our driver took us somewhere for food, and took great delight in showing us the snake and turtle that were kept on the premises!  After we had ordered, a lady appeared and started to give Larissa a massage, which went on for quite some time.  When she tried it with me she got a polite but firm 'no'.  She then turned round and charged Larissa about 20,000 dong!  Cheeky bint.

We had food, and then continued on through the small canalways on the boat, which was lovely.  Having said that, Vietnam has a huge problem with litter, both on the streets and in the water.  People throw rubbish out the windows all the time, with an identical attitude to what we had before we were told otherwise.  So hopefully things will have changed in ten or fifteen years.  The problem for them though is that the Mekong flows from the north west, so it's not just the Vietnamese attitude that would have to change.

We were kinda glad we didn't go out for 8 hours, because 5 was quite enough!  Back at the pier at about 11, we jumped off, headed into town, and took some photos.  After that it was back to the guest house for a bit of a nap!!  (Well, it had been a long day traveling followed by an early morning!)  That afternoon, we had lunch in a little 'hole in the wall' place round the corner from us.  The guy serving us was so friendly, and seemed really proud of himself to be able to speak English - he was lovely!  The bbq pork was great too, although I'm not sure I would have tried too much else on the menu!

I spent the evening on the net, and then went back to the guest house and booked a bus to Chao Doc.  We had dinner, paid for our room, and went to bed.  The next morning we were collected at 8, and were taken in a xe loi (like a motorised cyclo, with the passengers behind the moto) to the bus station.  This minibus was decidely more packed than the last one, and didn't really seem to stop so much as slow down to let people on and off!  I was glad we had bags in the back, so they'd have to make a complete stop to let us out!!  It wasn't a long trip though, and we arrived in Chao Doc at around 11.