Hey Guys,
So Jared has filled you in on everything up to and including Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. Early on our last morning there we boarded a boat bound for Vietnam by river crossing. We probably could have taken a bus for cheaper but wanted the experience of cruising over an international border by water. Which brings us to the first part of the day. After a couple hours we were at the Cambodian border office, so we climbed out of the boat, got our passports stamped and back in the boat. 5 minutes later we're at the Vietnamese border office. Remember when we crossed into Cambodia from Thailand? Well, new border, same scams. Our tour guide ( and I use this term lightly) was collecting passports, Jared looked at me- suspicious of a scam. When he came to us I just asked "what is this for?" He hurriedly just said, 'go in there' motioning towards the sitting room and stopped trying to take our passports. Basically just wanted to get us out of the way so he could keep collecting all the other tourists passports on our boat. Jared had read that this is one of their tricks; they take your passport, run it to the stamping office themselves (although you could totally do this yourself as it's literally the next door over) and then when you want your passport back you have to pay $5. Now $5 doesn't seem like much to us but in this part of the world it is the daily wage for many. So as a result the quasi-legal jobs as tour guides over the borders are very coveted. We ended up waiting in the sitting room for a bit watching really bad Asian tv and then he came back asking us why we hadn't got our passports stamped in yet. Umm, I don't know maybe because you motioned us into the sitting room, because your skills as a guide are severely lacking, or you are trying to prove a point because we wouldn't let you scam us......all of the above? So he gruffly pointed us to the stamping room where this little Vietnamese guy was on autopilot stamping passports like crazy. He stamped ours, scanned them, and off we went. No hiccups with the Visa either, yippee! What's really crazy about this system is that he would be stamping all day, hardly seeing any of the people he's letting into the country. Also, there were nationalities of passports on the desk that weren't on our boat- who do these orphan passports belong to?!? One of the best rules you can live by while traveling is to keep your passport with you...ALWAYS! Seems like common sense but it's funny how you forget this stuff, especially when your tour guide you are supposed to trust tells you something else. Basically I've come to the realization you can be friendly to everyone here while simultaneously trusting no one. Except Jared. I mostly trust him.
Ok so we're back on the boat and all goes smooth all the way to Chau Doc- our first travel stop in Vietnam! This is the first part of our 2 day exploration of the Mekong Delta- 'The Rice Basket of Vietnam.' This is a rather aquatic kind of place, I think the Mekong River branches into 9 rivers that feed out into the sea, so it's full of people making their livelihood off the river, flooded rice paddies, floating markets, etc. Plus all the settlements on dry land- so lots going on. We are learning there is really no such thing as South East Asian countryside in the way we think about it, there are just smaller towns with rice fields squeezed between. That night we went seeking some cheap, authentic food as we pretty much do every night. I had written a list of Vietnamese dishes with translations and I was trying to feverishly make sense of all the food stalls with their dish names written on the front glass. I recognized 'hu tieu' which is basically a thicker type of rice noodle, so we sat down. The people here were super nice, didn't speak a lick of English but after some finger pointing I thought we had ordered two bowls of noodles with beef dumplings. A lady even gave up her seat so we could sit down! We get our food and there is a hunk of meat with the bone still one, I think it was chicken? Some slices of pork, the beef dumplings and to top it off a nice slice of liver on top, all in a soup. No, we didn't eat the liver, but ate everything else until we were stuffed. The lady that gave up her seat was even trying to teach us how to properly eat the noodle soup, there is actually a protocol with the spoon, chopsticks, a small bowl of soy sauce, etc. I think we failed miserably. So we will just chalk that one up to an adventure.
We boarded a bus the next morning for Can Tho, seeing a few things on the way. A fish farm- that basically consists of a floating house with a net underneath and a hole in the floor to get at the fish. We visited a Cham village and watched the ladies weave silk on the loom. The bus took us to Sam Mountanside, a temple built on a hill and when you went inside the temple you could enter into man made caves and wind through to see more shrines. The views over the countryside were pretty.
After all this we took a bus to Can Tho, where our home stay was. Home stays are basically where you stay with a local family and have supper with them. We had to ride on the backs of scooters out there, I was shit scared.
Spring rolls frying for supper that night at the homestay
The next morning we took an early morning boat cruise to the Cai Raing floating market. We ate breakfast on the boat as the sun was rising- just magic.
The floating market is a really cool concept, people live on large boats on a wide part of the river, each one full of one item- garlic, cassava, melon, etc. They live out on the river permanently, even though there is dry land and city right there. Then smaller boats come to buy all the goods they need and bring them back to sell their wares in their home villages.
That afternoon we saw how rice noodles are made. Basically they grind up rice, add tapioca flour and water and then spread that paste on a hot, flat circular pan kind of like cooking a crepe. That is dried out in the sun and then sliced like paper through a shredder. It was sooooo neat!
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