Mekong Delta and Rough roads

The plan was a three day trip from HCMC that would finish up with us arriving in Phnom Penh. We did this through a local travel agency as it tends to smooth the border crossing if you have a local handling the paper work for you. The actual trip through the Mekong itself was really good. It wasn't what I had imagined. I'd thought it would just be miles and miles of rice paddies, but the landscape was a lot more varied than that. Loads of orchards, cocunut trees etc all over the place.

We were lucky for the Mekong trip, because we had a really good guide and a really good group of people. Being a cheap a cheerful tour we knew that the accommodation we stayed in for the two nights of the tour could be a bit dodgy. To be honest it wasn't as bad as we'd feared, but it did lead to a couple of lousy nights sleep and a few laughs. The first place was a government run establishment, meaning that no one was really pushed whether you enjoyed your stay or not, plus we had a big gecko in our room that insisted on making noise half the night. The big thing with the second hotel was the sheets. It was a fairly new, family run place, but for some reason they thought that polyester sheets would be a good idea. It was like sleeping on your grannies dressing gown from the 1970's. It was awful, even to touch, never mind sleep on!

We did see loads of great things during the tour...some of the time was just spent drifting down a few of the canals that criss-cross the delta, we stopped in with a local family for some freshly picked papaya as our guide talked about the lives the locals lead. Which isn't a bad life at all, they don't have much money, but they're not stuck for food, between the rice crops, the orchards, the ducks, the hens, the fish......on top of that the life isn't too hard on them....the rice crop requires a burst of work every few months (planting and harvesting) and other than that it's fairly relaxed. Just sit around and watch the world go by. Slowly. We visited a local cocunut sweet factory, a honey-tea resturant where I got to stick my finger straight into a honey comb to taste the good stuff, visit a local floating market (though seeing fish being cleaned first thing in the morning was a bit more than we needed to see)....the list goes on....

On the third morning we did a quick stop at a local fish farm, which was a delightful smell first thing in the morning!! This was followed by a quick trip to a local Cham minority village and a chance to see their Mosque. This is one of those things that I was asking myself,"What makes them think that we want to go and see a Mosque?". With all that out of the way we were whisked off on the first leg of our trip to Cambodia.

The first part of the journey was a 2.5 hour boat trip up to the Vietnam border. The early part of the trip was spent filling out exit documentation for Vietnam and entry documentation for Cambodia. There was plenty of both and confusion to match. It felt like doing an exam in school again and not doing very well at it. The boat journey itself was very pleasant. It was a decent size boat, plenty of room and nice views of the mekong river as we went on our way. Lunch was served on the boat. We went of the veggie option cause it's usually safer, but even veggies can't save cold noodles at 11:30 in the morning (It's actually a sign of things that lunch at 11:30 AM no longer seems strange). Anyway, not too long after 'lunch' the boat starts pulling to the bank of the river. This apparently is the exit post for Vietnam. Our guide gathers up all our passports and forms, points a shady spot on the river bank out to us and heads up the the post. We clambered off the boat, across the narrow board that served as a gangplank. I was a bit nervous getting off the boat cause I had Gina's bag in one hand and my own in the other, both over 20Kgs, going across the board. We have been determined that we won't use the "backpack" straps that are on our bags. The trolley dolly handle and wheels have served well. So lugging both of these across I was dead proud of myself. And a little bit puffed by the time I made it to shore. We got up to the shady spot and sat there waiting for something to happen. All we needed was an "Exit" stamp and there was only about 20 of us. It took about an hour before we got our passports back! Don't ask me what they were doing with them, that's just the way things work here. Anyway, passports in hand we wheeled are way along a dusty path at the rivers edge to a final post where we had to show our passports to another gaurd to verify that we had exit stamps. Another hundred yards along, which I assume is a kind of "no mans land" we hopped aboard another boat. I thought that things were picking up. After about 2 minutes the boat headed back into shore again! We had to do the entry processing for Cambodia here. Now, the entry process for Cambodia should just have been a dated stamp, cause we all had our visa's already. You have to, they aren't issued at the land border crossings. We headed up the bank to see 3 very serious looking men in uniform waiting for us at a big table. The bloke who looked the most senior of the three had this massive steel finished brief case on the table in front of him. I thought when I saw it that he must have a laptop with Satellite uplink to check our visa details online, or something very "James Bond" like that. Anyway, they gathered up all the passports and carted them away. Then the boss man opened up his brief case. I think everyone was dying to see what he had. It was a basic foreign language course! You know the ones that are full of cartoons and stuff? So, for the next hour we all sat there in the heat, praying it would rain, while the boss man received a language lesson from our guide. Around the time that the language course came to an end our passports showed up and we headed back to the boat. We were in Cambodia!! Of course there was that hour where we'd exited Vietnam, but hadn't been let into Cambodia yet. I don't know where we were for that.

Down the bank again and off we went. This leg took about 2.5 hours. Then in the middle of nowhere the boat pulls into the bank again. I do my magic trick with the two bags up the muddy bank, much to the amusement of the locals. We have to go through someones back yard and house ( I took a wrong turn in the house and nearly ended up in the kitchen). In the front yard were a couple of Hi-Aces and a car. By the time we got there most of the other people on the boats were well in the process of getting loaded up. I was really knackered at this stage with the bags and the mother of the house was selling refreshments to us as we went by. I feel a bit ashamed to say it, but the first encounter I had with a local person in Cambodia was to bay a can of Coca-Cola from this woman. I did follow it up with a can of Pepsi, which I felt balanced things up.....

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