We heard some horror stories about the border crossings between Cambodia and Vietnam. Nothing dangerous, just annoying and potentially costly. Fortunately, we had no trouble at all.
As we pulled up at the border, a girl still wearing her motorbike helmet came into the bus and started asking everyone for 1 USD and their passports. Nobody was questioning why but when we asked why we should give her our passports and any money at all, she said it’s to speed up the check-in check-out process and to make sure the bus doesn’t get delayed because of us or even leave us. We thought this was ridiculous. So we didn’t give her anything… and we were actually done quicker than all the other passengers on our bus. So we had to get off the bus with all our stuff, bring our passports to a counter, where they checked them and the printed visas we had to get online (and pay $25 for) in advance, and get “checked out” of Cambodia. Then we had to actually walk in the hot sun with our big backpacks on across the border like 500meters until we got to the Vietnam checkpoint, where our bags were put through a pointless metal detector and we got “checked in”. All of this costing us a suspicious 1$ at each checkpoint, so a total of 2$ per person, in addition to the official fee we paid online. In fact, none of this was official, it seemed. When I asked if I could have a receipt for my $1 “safety screening” fee, the man looked at me like I was an idiot…. I didn’t get a receipt.
Ok so now we are in Vietnam! Country #4. I’ve been super excited to get here, mainly because I love Vietnamese food, but also because I know many people who have recently vacationed here and loved it. Our first city in Vietnam is Can Tho, where we also spent my birthday.
Can Tho is a smaller city in Vietnam (compared to Saigon or Hanoi) and is located on the Mekong delta. One thing we didn’t want to miss was the famous floating markets. This is very well known all around southern Vietnam so much so that there are day tours out to Can Tho from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) for a ride down these waterways.
The floating markets was something unlike anything I have seen or can compare to. Imagine the grocery store in your city that you frequent for your basic food necessities… it’s nothing like that. There are big boats all around, each with their own product filling the boat to the brim. Water spinach on the water spinach boat, mangos on the mango boat, coconuts on the coconut boat and so on. The boats advertise what is sold on board by placing their item(s) at the top of a pole stretching into the sky. Instead of walking around the local grocery store, placing their wanted items in a shopping cart, they drive around on their own little boats and use a hook to hold on to the big boat with the goods they want to buy. AND this all happens before or right at sunrise!!
We were on our own little boat with one woman, and before the sun came up, we were out there witnessing it all. We got our own iced coffees from a coffee boat and I got a fresh orange juice from a little juice boat. The vendors selling drinks and snacks are probably mainly there for the tourists but we loved it!
Once the sun came up fully, business started slowing down and more tourist boats came through. We made our way down the river further, heading away from the city. Our next stop on the tour was the fruit garden. We continued on the main river for a while, until making a turn and heading into the narrow canals. We stopped on the side of the waterway, to have a bite to eat and walk around the fruit garden.
Then we stepped back onto our boat, now with a little roof for shade and two of these bamboo triangle kind of hats that the locals wear here. Our driver was very sweet, although we could not exchange a word.
The last place included in our little morning boat excursion was a rice noodle factory. It wasn’t so much a factory, as just a man standing out back making rice noodles. They were pink and we watched the process in its different stages, from melting it down and then drying the circular forms in the sun, to sliding the flat circular discs through a machine that cuts them into thin slices. This was cool to watch!
And I also found a cat in a tree inside the shop. He loved me. He had fleas.
This was all in one day. On the other of the two days we spent in Can Tho, we walked around the town a bit and got spa treatments as a birthday treat!! Happy birthday to me!!
Stories of Exploration and Travel 