After saying farewell to the wats, we hopped a 6-hour bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. We just stayed one night in Phnom Penh and didn’t really find it that interesting (compared to everywhere else we’d been so far in southeast Asia). It was merely a launching pad for our Mekong Delta adventure.
As we were preparing to board the speed boat for our 4 hour trip from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc (a town on the Mekong River in Vietnam), the skies opened up with a torrential downpour. We wrapped our luggage in garbage bags and made a beeline across the parking lot. Fortunately, it was about 90 degrees out so even though we were wet it kinda felt nice to cool off.
The streets went from zero to flooded in about 10 minutes
All aboard!
After a brief stop at the Vietnam border where they inexplicably separate you from your passport for 30 minutes while they take it into another room (and probably make copies), we arrived at our hotel in Chau Doc, which turned out not to be a quaint little town on the Mekong River but rather a million-person fishing metropolis. In general, the ride down the river was a little underwhelming, since the Mekong River is just a giant brown working river so from a boat in the middle all you really see are fishing boats or barges. I imagine it’s kind of like what going down the Mississippi River is like.
One of the "stunning" vistas out across the Mekong River
Man of the Year
Since we were making our way to Saigon (everyone over there seemed to call it that instead of Ho Chi Minh City so I’ll do the same), we pretty much just hopped in the car with our guide, Phuc Doc, the next morning and drove through a few other towns in the Mekong Delta region, making brief stops at a crocodile farm, a brick-making factory (which was pretty interesting), and eventually getting into another boat for a quick trip to our homestay for the night, which was located on an island in the middle of the river (in a village called Vinh Long). Again, going in, we had kind of romanticized this homestay experience as an opportunity to sit around the dinner table with a Vietnamese family and learn about their culture (or something like that), but what it ended up being was just a Third World version of a bed and breakfast. We stayed in a dormitory style room and were served dinner at a table for two out on the patio while the rest of the family ate elsewhere. I won’t even get into the amount of bugs that surrounded our bed at night, other than to say that in the morning the white tile floor looked more like a brown and black polk-a-dotted floor. The only redeeming quality of the homestay experience was the fact that the village itself wasn’t very tourist, so when we biked around nobody hassled us (“buy from me?”, “cheap cheap”, “maybe later?”, “tuk tuk?”).
Cutting bricks out of clay
Biking around the village near our homestay
We were happy to leave Vinh Long the next morning and get back in the boat to go visit a rice cake factory and take a canal tour on a small canoe before getting back in the car for our drive to Saigon. The lesson we learned was that the Mekong Delta is over-rated (at least the section in Vietnam) and the best way to see it (if you feel compelled) is just to take a day trip from Saigon. We preferred the fishing villages we had seen in Cambodia, since they were less developed and less touristy.
Mekong River canal tour (hats included)
-Jim
