Sat 11 On the bus to Cat Tien We're having a stressful couple of days. Yesterday morning in Chau Doc was relaxing enough, we just poked about the market and had lunch at the local vegetarian place - TVP imitation chicken skin in my "chicken noodle soup" ...mmm...? Phuong Trang bus service sent a shuttle bus to pick us up from the hotel at 1pm. The bus to Saigon was full this time. (We'd been 2 of only 5 passengers travelling from Can Tho to Chau Doc on Tuesday.)...

We've had an angry day. A couple of cyclo riders (a sort of passenger trailer attached to a bicycle that they use as rickshaws here) picked us up from the local tour agency office at 9 this morning, and took us to the river for a boat tour of the Cham minority village across the water. Robbie was in tears by the time we got on the boat: I hadn't noticed it, being in a different cyclo, but she'd seen a woman near the market selling live egrets trussed up on the pa...

At last we've found where some of the birds are hiding! We hired a car & a driver to take us to the Tra Su forest bird reserve. It took 45 minutes via the Sam Mountain, the local holy hill that rises out of the flatness of the delta. Our plan was to spend all day tomorrow climbing up the Sam, but there's a right grotty looking town grown up at the foot of it and I doubt we'll get much peace & quiet up there, so we'll just leave it till the afternoon. The...

Thankfully we both slept well last night so are feeling more sprightly. We breakfasted in the restaurant of the Kim Lan hotel, which is like a little glass penthouse hut right up on the 8th story. Great views of an unpretty town. The bus company we were travelling with to Chau Doc sent a shuttle vehicle to our hotel to take us to the bus station for the 9am bus. Can you beat that for service? The journey took 3 hours, then they delivered us to Trung Nguyen Hotel...

Another night of non-sleep last night, not just due to the jet-lag and having to get up at 5am for the trip to the floating markets, but also because the air-con unit started dripping water on to my bed in the middle of the night. I had to rearrange the furniture to drag the bed away from the wall. The receptionist tells me it's fixed now, but I think all they've done is to drain all the water out of it, because it only seems to work as a fan now. Our guide was ...