Vietnam - Chau Doc

Instead of taking a bus across the border from Cambodia into Vietnam, we decided to do an overnight tour down the Mekong Delta to do a water boarder crossing. The tour started with a minibus pick up in Phnom Pehn and a rather hairy fast drive to Neak Luong, where we boarded a slow boat. When they say ‘slow boat’, they’re not kidding -  it was so slow that a few of us had to nap. We stopped after a couple of hours to go through customs and immigration in Cambodia, got back on the boat and went another 10 mins down the river to go through immigration and customs in Vietnam - easy! 

The next 2 hours was spent drifting down one of the Mekong Delta’s channels. It was truly awesome to see how different Vietnam was just km’s from Cambodia - conical straw hat that you associate with people working in rice fields, giant wooden fishing boats, ducks in their millions swimming in herds and kids riding water buffalo.

A boat carrying hay and grain... perhaps a little overloaded

Every kid waves at you :)

Water Buffalo and SO many ducks

A house boat, Mekong Style

There were also a couple of rules we learnt about Vietnamese water craft safety:
No.1 Ensure your driver has very dexterous feet

No.2 If this fails, ensure your boat has a good set of eyes

The channel ended and we were sucked back out into the Mekong, which was over a km wide, an amazing site. Chau Doc was soon visible, also an amazing site with hundreds of houses floating on the water and many more houses hugging the river bank. We docked and were taken through a maze of tin shed abodes, to a hotel and our room being a modest and rather hot shoebox. 

Back on the Mekong we encountered huge wooden fishing boats

A rather typical Vietnamese picture

Approaching Chau Doc

River side homes, on stilts to avoid the wet season river rise

The bomb squad - recovering unexploded ordinates still left over from the US

After a crappy sleep, we awoke early to continue our tour, which was another ride down the Mekong to see the floating houses and fish farms. The houses originated after the war, as many people fled Vietnam to Cambodia and then returned with very little money. The government allowed people who couldn’t afford land to then build houses on top of boats and float them on the river. Chau Doc was heavily bombed by the US, as was Neak Luong and so they have had to rebuild with the small opportunities they could.

Examples of some river houses

A Vietnamese fishing boat partially submerged to keep it's catch alive

Fish going nut over their breakfast at one of the river house fish farms