Jul30
We reached My Tho by local bus after a 4 hours ride on a bumpy road. The stop was a few kilometres away from the city centre, in the middle of nowhere. Once again we were lucky and a minibus took us four –we were still travelling with Empar and Juan- for free from the side of the road to the river shore, where the most of the action happens in town. We didn’t like it much and expected to find a much authentic place in Ben Tre town, just a 15 minutes ferry and an overland ride of 12 kilometres on the other side of the river.
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The Mekong Delta towns of My Tho and Ben Tre
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Jul27
What do 4 tourists do in a local bus travelling through the Mekong Delta? Well, among others, have fun!! It was a long walk from our hotel to the local bus station in Chau Doc but it was really worth the effort. Once we arrived there we found out –read corroborate- that hotels and travel agencies sell out tickets of the same buses at higher prices than in the station and then impute it to the rise of the prices of petrol, not to their comission. So we bought our tickets, got in the bus and were surprised of seeing some local people on very wide costumes filled up by what it seemed to be their flesh –something weird if you think that the average Vietnamese is quite skinny. After some minutes the bus had moved and had crossed the first police checkpoint on the road, we could finally know about this mystery. What they all had under their clothes –and in every corner and seat of the bus- was packets and packets of cigarrettes that they were smuggling into the province of Can Tho, our next destination. Between stop and stop they kept on screwing out pieces of the bus to take the hidden cigarrettes and put them on big boxes, then stoping in the middle of nowhere to pass them on to a motorbike rider, who should take them somewhere different, and so on. This trip was pretty fun and once we arrived in Can Tho we had enough to laugh about.
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Can Tho and the floating markets
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Jul25
Fearing things before they happen is not our way to proceed but, somehow, we had been warned so many times –by other fellow travellers and by different guide books- about the rude manners, the scams and the dangers of travelling in Vietnam, that we unconsciously were more mindful than we normally are. Such a false prejudice, we arrived in Chau Doc and were completely amazed with the people, the food, the city and everything around.
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Vietnam, such a nice surprise
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Jul22
There were different options to reach Vietnam from Pnomh Penh, but from all of them we choosed to take a boat and travel down the brown and quiet waters of the Mekhong River until the Vietnamese frontier village of Chau Doc. It was a pleasant journey on a 2 storey slow boat from where we could take pictures of villages and locals in their daily activities.
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Entering Vietnam
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