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 here in Chau Doc, and it all cost us about £3 each. We've got a rather small room with a huge balcony overlooking the central market hall. There's a funeral party going on outside one of the shops opposite the market at the moment (9pm). They're banging drums and playing pipes and feasting out on the street. The coffin is inside the shop.

We walked through the market hall this afternoon and it is so colourful. They have big conical displays of fish, I don't know whether they're smoked or pickled or what, but it's all very beautifully arranged in slimy glistening pillars. We picked our way through the crowds and puddles of fishy water, dodging the scooters (yes, they even ride straight through the crowds in the market halls!) and found our lunch at a small but very noisy cheap joint near the ferry terminal. Looked like the crowd on the next table were having an office party, they were knocking back some clear spirit and getting very loud. We went back to the hotel by way of another Buddhist pagoda in the middle of town. A red collared dove feeding two fledglings in an old tree in the middle of the compound felt like a rare and precious sighting, but there were also 3 dead swallows dumped in the pond at the foot of one of the icons. Grr!

Later in the afternoon when it started to cool off we hired a boatman to row us up and down the river for an hour. It's very peaceful on the water, there's not all the boats you get at Can Tho and it looks more rustic. There's a whole village of floating houses along the banks, supported on empty oil drums, with businesses like shops and mechanics too. The poor man was rowing standing up, that being the way they do it. I was sweating just sitting in the bottom of the boat. We gave him a good tip.

We'd noticed a riverside park from the water so we went there next. At long last we saw some birds! 5 Chestnut tailed starlings were feeding on nectar in a flowering tree, and we saw a delicious pair of olive backed sunbirds - delicate scimitar shaped bills and a blue iridescent throat patch. There were swallows martins and swifts over the river all afternoon but we haven't sussed out which ones yet, apart from the barn swallows. A group of boys were playing a game kicking a shuttlecock-like object back and forth. The more proficient amongst them did it by twisting their leg behind them and hitting it with the sole of the foot.

Then in a decadent mood we had a relaxing sundowner on the riverfront terrace of the Victoria Chau Doc Hotel, the smartest joint in town. A fantasy of colonial elegance comes at a price of about £2 for a beer in this town - about 3 times what we normally pay. We availed ourselves of the stately washroom facilities to make sure we got our money's worth. Individual freshly laundered hand towels, and a rack with golfing magazines in the crap stalls. Dinner by contrast was a budget affair in the town centre. I had an eel hotpot, which came to the table on the boil mounted on a portable paraffin stove.