Mekong Delta

Them 22hr bus journey (it actually took 25) wasn't so bad, they were good buses and on the second half I had plenty of space. At first things didn't look up when the Vietnamese guy below me and to the side started smoking and playing songs on his mobile phone, but he soon stopped, in fact he was very helpful when I had a major panic after dropping my iPod down the side of my bed and it ended up lost somewhere under his girlfriends bed. It was eventually located when we got some light, phew! The second half of the journey the bus was full of Germans who all were taking lots of pictures of themselves on the bus, how exciting.

I had one night in Ho Chi Minh City (which everyone still calls Saigon) and headed off on a two day Mekong delta trip. This wasn't so well organised as the trips up North. Crapper buses, guides with worse English, more extras to pay for - but we still saw a good bit of the Mekong Delta scenery on Various small boat trips. We visited a coconut candy workshop (yum) which also had disgusting banana wine, somwhere else for honey tea, which had a large python you could play with, and then up another small river for lots of fruit and a local music performance. The afternoon featured lots of time in a bus including a ferry trip. A nice Canadian couple (is there any other kind?) and I had opted for a homestay, so while the others checked into a hotel we were taken off for a white-knuckle motorbike ride down the backlanes to the 'home', a very swish 'resort' almost, by a small river. The place could have held about 30 people but there were just the 3 of us. We had a nice dinner featuring some fish soup and a few beers before an early night before the 6am start the next morning. Slept okay, but the beds all seemed to have small ants in them. After breakfast we went down the small river in a wee boat and met up with the others, before visiting the floating market, a noodle factory and the fish market. After lunch it was back in the bus (I've spent rather a lot of time in busses recently!) and home. Of course the promised stop at the "Bonsai Gardens" turned out to be just another shop, where we were joined by "10 new friends" who squeezed into our minibus for the last few hours of the journey. People were not impressed.

The sights on this trip were individually not worth going out of your way to see on there own, but it was nice to get a feel of the Mekong Delta. In fact though it is called the country's ricebasket, much of the journey from Saigon was through urban sprawl and not very pleasent. My god there is a lot of motorcycle traffic around Saigon!



Me with new friend.



Boating up the backwaters.



The floating market.