I spent another afternoon in Rach Gia and then decided to jam all the way back to Saigon after realizing that I’ve spent about 2 weeks in Vietnam and haven’t even left the southern tip yet… (This post is really just for the travelogue map.)

I knew that the tourist boat bound for An Thoi on Phu Quoc island leaves Rach Gia every morning at 8:15 so I figured showing up at the dock before 8am would be fine, but no. It seems that the high-speed boat to Phu Quoc actually runs according to its published schedule, unlike anything else I’ve encountered in Vietnam so far. While I was trying to beg / bribe my way into a seat (it obviously wasn’t full) I noticed a cargo boat docked nearby. It turns out the cargo boat would be leaving at 9am and the ticket was far cheaper, of course, so I hopped on that one instead.

There are a couple of trade-offs with the cargo boat option, though. Instead of 2.5 hours, the ride was 9 hours and I got to share it with fighting cocks, barrels of stanky fish-sauce and a full-house of Vietnamese people, none of whom spoke a word of English. Normally this wouldn’t pose much of a problem but I made a mistake as I boarded the boat. A lady handed me a hammock and asked for 50,000d which I assumed was my fare for the trip. When the ticket-guy came around later on, though, I realized after much confused gesturing that I had purchased the hammock and not yet paid my way on the boat… They let me get away with giving only 25,000d for the ride so I let them keep the hammock and everyone was happy.

We pulled into An Thoi just before sunset and I got a ride to Duong Dong to find a nice bungalow on the beach. Since its the off-season on Phu Quoc there are far from enough foreigners to fill the resorts and bargains are easy to find. Without much haggling I moved into a great bungalow right on the beach for $4/night. They even stocked my fridge with beer every day!

I ended up spending 4 nights there, exploring a bit but generally doing as little as possible. I rented a motorbike to get around (the island is pretty big, much bigger than any of the Thai islands I visited) and visited some remote villages. I read 3 books, watched some amazing thunderstorms and put plenty of km’s on my rented bike… I saw only a couple other foreigners the entire time.

I spent the whole day sorting out what ended up being a challenging bus ride to Rach Gia. I finally made it, though, and found a good meal and crappy room for the night.

After a last brilliant day with Dan in Phong Dien and Can Tho, we each went our own ways - Dan back to Saigon and I to Chau Doc on my way deeper into the south. After a pleasant bus ride into town I found a room and had a quiet afternoon walking around.

Chau Doc is a major tourist border-crossing town with Cambodia, like Moc Bai except most people entering the country here travel by boat on the Mekong from Phnom Penh or Siam Reap. Its a small and sleepy place that usually serves travelers as a connecting point on the journey to Saigon, but I heard about a couple things worth seeing from another backpacker so decided to stay for 2 nights and explore.

The next morning I found a xe om (motorbike taxi) to take me to the base of Sam Mountain (Nui Sam) where there are several famous pagodas and a peak from which you can sometimes see all the way into Cambodia. I walked up the winding road to the top, stopping at small cafes, shrines, and cave temples on the way. As I was nearing the peak I stopped to take photos of some strange animal statues that were set up in a park area when a group of Vietnamese guys having a picnic called me over. They were sitting on the cliff next to a giant yellow tea-pot looking thing with a big plastic jug of rice wine and a guitar, singing songs and drinking. A very surreal scene… I sat down with them and although we could hardly communicate they insisted that I stay and drink. The guitar was passed around for a while - we traded songs in Vietnamese and English - but I eventually had to leave to avoid getting too drunk to walk up the mountain (it was only 10am anyway!)

I walked for the rest of the day and then turned in early to prepare for the bus journey to Rach Gia the next morning.

Somehow we managed to get out of the room by 5:30am and rented two bicycles from the International Hotel for the day. After a quick breakfast of coffee and sandwiches we started off on the 20km ride from Can Tho to Phong Dien to visit the floating markets before they wind down at around 8am.

Vietnamese coffee tangent: Everyone around seems to be up and in the streets as soon as the sun rises - running, stretching, doing aerobics or just shouting at eachother and honking their moto horns (a national pastime?). I think this has everything to do with the rocket-fuel coffee they’re drinking constantly. The coffee shops in Vietnam serve only coffee and tea. No food, sometimes cigarettes, but thats it. You usually get a glass of ice, a pot of tea and a shot glass with a miniature percolator sitting on top. After a few minutes, the coffee filters down into the glass (which is already loaded with sugar) and then you pour it into the ice. I’ve been a regular coffee drinker for the past couple years, but a cup of this stuff makes me light-headed…

We managed to pedal straight to Phong Dien without getting lost (something to be proud of!) but couldn’t figure out how to get over to the market. We rested over a bowl of pho bo and walked around the town a little - we seemed to be the only foreigners in sight and attracted lots of attention. After a while, a local guy called us over and we got into his boat for a long tour around the canals, including a visit to the floating market. It turned out to the best boat ride yet - we spent 4 hours traveling along shallow canals into the countryside and stopped in a small village for drink. The kids were fascinated by Dan and I and soon we were entertaining about 30 of them, playing carem and communicating with the help of an english-vietnamese dictionary.

After the tour, we rode back to Can Tho, took a nap and went out for dinner. We found a place that served snake curry and a good tamarind-sauce eel dish and then went out for a farewell round(s) of bia hoi - Dan left for Ho Chi Minh yesterday and I decided to continue westward, further into the delta. After a couple weeks traveling with some great new friends, I’m solo again…

On the move again: Dan and I left Ben Tre via the ferry to My Tho. From the boat we found a cyclo driver who promised to take us to the bus station…

It’s the beginning of the wet season in southern Vietnam. Every day there is a violent downpour in the afternoon that lasts about 40 minutes, but otherwise the weather is pleasant. As soon as we got on that cyclo, though, it started pouring down. In a matter of seconds we were soaked through. It was a slow ride (the cyclo, or xiclo, is a pedaled rickshaw-type thing that’s common in southern vietnam) and when we finally got off we saw that we weren’t taken to a bus station at all. Instead, the driver just took us to a random spot on the highway where he could flag down a minibus and make a nice commission on our fare. We managed to get him to leave us alone and flagged down a bus on our own, but more drama ensued. As soon as we got on, we asked some of the people around us what they were paying to get to Can Tho. We figured the price should be 25,000 dong each and the negotiations over the fare soon turned into an arm-flailing broken english shouting match. Eventually we just gave the driver 25,000 each and said we’d just get off the bus if that wasn’t enough. In retaliation he turned the radio up to full volume - there was only one speaker on the bus and it was about an inch from Dan’s ear. For the entire ride we had to suffer through ear-splitting Vietnamese power-ballads. Everyone else on the bus found this quite funny. When we got to the bridge that crosses over to Can Tho, an english-speaking Vietnamese lady helped us smooth over the argument over the fare and after paying a few thousand more dong everyone was happy.

Dan and I found a cheap room in town (Phuong Nha Hotel) and turned in for the night.

Dan and I rose early to get a taste of My Tho’s local specialty breakfast soup, Hu Tieu. Its lighter and sweeter than pho, but has many of the same basic ingredients: beef pork, fresh herbs, bean sprouts and rice noodles. Along with a glass of strong iced coffee its a fine breakfast.

We then walked over to the Ben Tre ferry crossing and onto the boat. The crossing is free when you’re on foot! On the other side we got motos to take us into town, where we made it to a guesthouse and then walked out to find a driver for a boat tour of the canals around the province. Across most of the towns in the Mekong Delta the government has a monopoly on boat tours, so they cost quite a lot (up to $35 / person). In Ben Tre, however, the local drivers operate on their own and the prices are much more sane. We got on a boat and were taken on a nice 3-hour ride through some narrow canals and along a wide section of the Mekong.

We finally made it onto a boat on the Mekong! This one was bound for My Tho, a city just a quick ferry ride away from the island province of Ben Tre where we were headed, so we paid a small fare and… waited. It was a cargo boat, carrying mostly random baskets of stuff and a few other Vietnamese passengers (not another English-speaker on the boat) so we didn’t have a clue when we would arrive in My Tho. Hours? Days? We didn’t really care. They just hung up two hammocks for us and we laid back for a few hours before the boat finally pulled out of Ho Chi Minh at 5:30pm.

The ride proved to be highly entertaining, if not a little weird, mostly thanks to the drunken captain. He loved me and Dan. So much so that he was constantly standing next to our hammocks slapping our asses (what?), smiling and shouting god-knows-what in our faces. Every once in a while we picked up on the fact that he was trying to get us to give him some of our things - clothes, my calculator, dan’s watch - but we played dumb. At one point he took Dan out on the deck, pointed at a small hole in his son’s shirt, then tore the shirt and his pants to shreds and threw them into the river. The whole family stood shouting at Dan in Vietnamese (who was very confused by all this) until he threw up his arms and went back inside. They served us some foul weird-shit-and-rice for dinner before we finally arrived in My Tho at midnight. The captain pulled the boat up to a random dock, swung a ladder overboard, and we scurried off. 30 minutes later we had a room and went to sleep for the night.

In the morning we went out to the docks to see about getting on a boat to Vietnam via Chau Doc, but failed yet again. If we had been up earlier we could have caught the $15 tourist boat to Ho Chi Minh City, but that was more than we wanted to pay anyway. We wasted the next few hours looking for any other cheap way to get into Vietnam on the river - we pressed hard - but turned up nothing. Instead, we crammed ourselves into another minibus and hopped off at the Moc Bai border crossing. From there we took another bus into Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) and arrived around 8pm. The bootleg photocopied Vietnam Lonely Planet we picked up in Phnom Penh suggested Miss Loi’s guesthouse in Co Giang so we got a nice room there then went out to find a bowl of pho bo and a bia hoi joint.

Pho bo is my new food obsession. It is by far the most popular dish in Vietnam, usually eaten for breakfast but you can get some at any hour without looking very hard. At first glance its just a simple beef noodle soup, but somehow makes for an incredibly filling and delicious meal. Dan and I had a big bowl and then walked on to find bia hoi.

Bia hoi = “fresh beer”. The concept was brought to Vietnam by the Czechs a long time ago and since then the Vietnamese have put their own touches on it. Bia hoi is a very cheap, weak locally brewed pilsner that has no preservatives and is only meant to stay fresh for a short time. You can find bia hoi shops all over the country - they’re basically just a bunch of tables and chairs in front of a big steel beer vat. A liter of beer generally costs 3000-4000 dong (25 cents or less) and the Vietnamese treat drinking bia hoi as a very social affair so there is constant toasting and drinks being passed around. We found a suitable place and sat down with an interesting bunch: a rapper from Ghana, his pro soccer-player cousin, a creepy one-armed Canadian expat and a loud Australian. The bia hoi tank ran out at around 1am so we turned in with plans to finally get on a boat headed for Ben Tre the next day.

Defeated in our plan to get back to the captial on the Mekong, Dan and I went looking for the cheapest way to get back by road. We hit the taxi stand / bus station area of town, launched into some serious negotiations with the touts and ended up in a taxi to Kampong Cham for next to nothing (usually a costly ride, I don’t know how that worked out). From there we haggled our way onto the roof of a packed minibus to Phnom Penh. We clung to the roof-rack like monkeys the whole way, which was actually far more comfortable than riding inside with the 30 other passengers. We went straight back to Narin Guesthouse and planned to search out a boat ride to Chau Doc for the next day.