From Ha Tien we followed the Vietnam-Cambodia border to Chau Doc, a small transit town that serves as an over night stop for tourists taking the Phnom Penh - Saigon boat. We were happy to find that a least a couple of people in Chau Doc spoke reasonable English but once again we felt like the only foreigners in the small dusty town.
After an afternoon scoping out travel agencies we were feeling quite downtrodden as the prices were astronomical and it seemed we wouldn't be able to afford to do anything we wanted to do.
We drank ice coffees in a shady cafe and then walked along the busy riverside that burst into life as the sun went down. There we met a Vietnamese man called Trung, who stopped to chat to us and invited us to join him for breakfast in a local restaurant the following morning. Another example of the wonderful Vietnamese hospitality.
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| A Vietnamese breakfast of meat, eggs and bread. |
We had a very pleasant breakfast with our new friend and then set about trying to see the sights on our shoestring budget. By chance we came across two awesome moto-taxi drivers called Van and Duc, who saved us a ton of money and took us everywhere we wanted to go for a very reasonable price.
First we visited the river islands where an ethnic minority of Muslim 'Cham' people live. We visited the mosques and saw women weaving scarves on old wooden looms. It strikes me as strange that no matter where you are in the world, the tourist shops are always full of scarves, even in hot, tropical climates like Vietnam, Thailand and India. That said, I still managed to buy one!
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| Wooden walkway leading to a Cham floating village on one of the river islands. |
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| Ric with our super tour guides for the day, Van (left) and Duc (right). |
We mentioned to Van and Duc that we were disappointed by the prices of the river tours, at $20 each from all the agencies in town, there was no way we could afford to take a boat out to the Cambodian border. But our guides came through for us again, calling on a friend with a boat they arranged for us to go out on the river for a two hour tour for just $5 per person! That's more like it. We saw floating villages, fish farms, floating petrol stations, local fishermen using ancient techniques and we went all the way up to the border in our own private boat. It was fantastic.
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| Fishing on the river at Chau Doc. The woman rows while the man operates the net. |
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| House boat. |
Fish are farmed under the floating house boats.
To end our day we zoomed up Sam Mountain on the back of the motorbikes, speeding around the corners at an exhilarating speed. At the top we sat in hammocks admiring the miles and miles of rice fields that surrounded us, and watched the sunset over Cambodia to the west.
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| View from Sam Mountain. The tree line on the far left marks the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. |
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| Sunset over flooded rice fields from Sam Mountain. |
We had such a great day zipping around with Van and Duc, they were friendly, knowledgeable and spoke good English.
They can be contacted for tours:
Van: 0918 308 460
Duc: 0944 765 258
After saying goodbye to them and arranging for them to take us to the bus station the following morning, Ric and I returned to the river for an evening stroll. Unbelievably, sitting on a bench, we bumped into a couple that Ric had met on the Galapagos Islands three and a half years earlier. What a small world. Gabby and Yogi were staying in Chau Doc for one evening before continuing on to Phnom Penh by boat in the morning. Having spent the entire day thinking we were the only foreigners in town, we meet a German couple and they turn out to be friends from another trip many years ago. It really is remarkable. We spent a lovely evening having drinks and catching up with them.
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| Ric reminissing with old friends, Gabby and Yogi. |
