Slow Boat to Vietnam
Saturday, March 10th, 2007
9th March 2007
We returned to Phnom Penh for our final night in Cambodia and checked into a hostel on the edge of Boeng Kok lake. The hostel bar had a rickety wooden terrace that stretched out over the lake, providing a great spot to watch our final Cambodian sunset. We enjoyed a cold beer or two whilst comparing bruises from the elephant / truck rides and reflected on what has been a great 16 days in this fantastic country.
We were soon brought back down to earth however, as returning to our room to try to remove some of the layers of dust that we were coated in (Cambodia is the dustiest place on Earth – official), we found we had an uninvited guest! Our room mate was either a big mouse, or a small rat, but either way, after seeing it scamper behind the bed, we decided that the only way we would get any sleep that night was to request a change of rooms, and a skinful of cheap Cambodian beer at Mosquito bar!
So it was with a slightly blurry head that we boarded our bus at 7am the next morning to start our long journey to Vietnam. Having experienced enough of Cambodia’s roads to last a life time, we opted to cross the boarder to Vietnam by boat. Although a longer journey, this option would allow us to spend some time taking in the Mekong delta region of Southern Vietnam, before heading onto Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), formerly Saigon.
We had a short bus journey to take us to the boat, before cruising at a lazy pace along the scenic Mekong for 3 hours or so to the border. Having arranged our visa in advance, the border itself was very easy to negotiate, with only a 1,000 dong (what a great name for a currency!) additional payment to make, presumably to keep the border officials in cigarettes! At 30,000 dong to the pound (god bless sterling!) this seemed like a reasonable payment for a hassle free passage into the country.
We continued on our journey towards our first Vietnamese destination, Chao Doc. The Mekong river is the life blood of this region, and on our journey we saw lots of fisherman, rice warehouses and floating houses (with attached underwater fish farms). In the fields around the river were hundreds of workers, going about the manually intensive rice cultivation, wearing their distinctive pointy hats (very much like light shades!). We cruised into Chao Doc in the early evening, and spent a relaxing night being greeted by the locals (we had been warned to expect people in Vietnam to be less friendly than Cambodia, but our first impression could not have been better, we felt like Mick ‘crocodile’ Dundee in New York walking down the street with everyone stopping to say hello!).
Next morning, it was another early start as we set off on another long day traveling to HCMC. As we approach the end of our trip we don’t want to waste a minute, so again we combined the journey with some sight seeing action en route. We first headed up Sam mountain in Chao Doc, for a view back across the border to Cambodia and the surrounding paddy fields. Whilst here we also got to visit our 3 billionth pagoda, this time with some interesting Lion statues. After this we headed off down the river in a local canoe, visiting a fish farm (which the locals keep under their floating houses to take the hassle out of fishing) and a ‘minority’ village of Muslim Cham people. We then transferred to a bigger boat for another couple of hours of Mekong cruising, before finally transferring to minibus for the remaining 3 hours to HCMC.
Much to our relief, the roads in Vietnam appear to be light years ahead of Cambodia!
Chris and Charl