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11 Feb - An early start at the homestay today. All the traders get moving about 5:30 in the morning, to get to the markets for 6. I guess in the old sampan days this was a fairly quiet affair, but times have changed and a chorus of two stroke engines gently roused us from what had been a very good night's sleep. We had a quick breakfast - coffee, rolls and omlettes, and then said goodbye to Bao and Huong, our hosts.
As we puttered out of the harbour, en route to the Cai Be floating markets, our guide piped up "Not sure if there will be anyone at the market today, Tet was only four days ago!", but by the time we got there, twenty or thirty boats had gathered. On normal working days there can be up to 100, which must be a real sight to see - we were sorry to miss it in full cry. Vinh Long is a wholsale market, so it's mainly populated by larger traders who specialise in a single products, and sell on to smaller boats who then distribute the goods across the delta. You can tell which products they carry - they're normally tied to a twenty foot pole erected at the prow of the boat, so that buyers can find what they're looking for when the boats get really packed in ...
Towering up above the market is a huge Catholic Cathedral. About 10% of the population is Catholic - which doesn't sound like much, but equates to 9 million human beings, or roughly the same number of people that live in Zimbabwe. I guess because of the embedded French influence, Catholocism spread pretty extensively in Vietnam - apparently more so than in any other Asian country except the Phillipines. Anyway, the whole delta is dotted with little (and not so little) churches, normally painted white and wedged in between the shops, factories, houses and temples that crowd the river banks.
After the market, we stopped in at a rice factory. Again, this was a small, family-run business producing goods for the local and regional markets. It was a far cry from any modern food factory, with not much in the way of protective clothing or micro controls! The products were cooked or heated on open fires, using Langon shells (similar to a lychee)... with about eight or nine people carrying out all the tasks needed to turn plain rice or coconuts into biscuit, crackers, rice-paper or just puffed rice. The puffed rice was made like popcorn on a huge scale - the rice was chucked into an enormous (1.5m) work, with some heated black riversand and oil. The operator stirred it with a (pretty dusty) broom handle until everything had popped, and then seived it to remove the sand & bits of husk before sending arcoss the floor to be turned into the end product. The whole operation was pretty efficient, and it was amazing to see the volume of packaged, prepared food that materialised just in the short time we were there. No doubt the setup would give any Elf'n'Safety officer worth their low-sodium-salt-substitute a jolly good shock, but it seemed to work amazingly smoothly just the same.
We meandered back towards Sa Dec, and pulled into another island restaurant for lunch. We were a little early, so cycled around the village (including its crocodile farm) before sitting down to eat. Crocs are farmed here pretty much like pigs - not so much on a large scale, but more in groups of 10 or 20 to each farmer. Apparently there are hardly any wild crocs in the Mekong, but I can't believe that's actually true! The security arrangements looked pretty lax, so I'd guess more than a few have snivelled off to repopulate the wild waterways.
Lunch was great - the food really is something in Asia. It doesn't seem to matter where you go, or how little you are charged, but there's always something delicious produced. At this stage the tour guide had a minor breakdown - we never actually found out what happened, but all the individual, small groups seem to be connected to an overall system for transport and, if there's a breakdown in one part of the system, then gridlock slowly seems to ripple across the whole area. Anyway, while he was rushing around sorting something out on his mobile phone, we were left at the restaurant for a few hours, which got a few of the travellers' backs up a bit. To be fair - the system normally works pretty well, and by three 'o'clock he'd managed to get back on schedule, and even moved all the bags to the right boats (an amazing feat of psychic planning as we were all going off to different destinations, and no-one seemed to have told him whose bags were whose). I guess he maybe made a note of it when we arrived on the boat.
Cheryl and I, with a couple of the others, were then on the boat into Vinh Long, where we caught a bus to Sa Dec. The main bus was full, so the guide organised a small van to take about eight of us to meet the main group. The driver didn't speak any English, but eventually pulled the bus off the road, and into an alleyway. He motioned for us to get off with our luggage and then, just as we were asking where to go next, he drove off! We waited. And waited. Well I might be exaggerating a bit, it was probably only forty minutes - but that's a long time to stand around in a hot alley with no idea what's happening, and the local dogs sniffing you up and down with a hungry look in their eye. Cheryl and I were OK - we had our bags, so we could always go solo, but I think the endless delays had got to a couple of the others. Just when we were considering whether to try and flag down a passing moto, our guide arrived. "Very sorry," he said. "Driver dropped you on the wrong side of the bridge. I've been looking for you. We have a small walk - not too far, just one and half kilometers." This was too much for one of the group, who snapped. We then had quite a strange walk back to meet the main group, with the tourist shouting at the guide, and the guide (in Vietnamese style, i.e. not big on conflict) pretentding he couldn't hear her.
We were just about in time for the main boat to Cambodia - this was a pandaw-style boat with dormitory bunks, and all 30 of us were chucked in together. A couple of people that we'd already met - Heidy and Adrian, and Yoni and Yolan, were on the boat with us, and we also me Jeta - a Dutch music journalist. The evening cruise up to Chau Doc was brilliant - there's something really peaceful about travelling by boat at night. We watched the flow of life on the Mekong pass us by - countless floating homes, restaurants, shops and businesses. This river really is the lifeblood of the regions - for some people it's home, work, transport and food - and we watched the sun go down, as the trees and boats faded into two rows of twinkling lights on either side of us. After dinner, which again was great, we sat up on the top deck, talking into the night with the other travellers that we'd met, and wandered down to bed at about 11-ish
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