There was torrential rain all night, I guess the rainy season hasn’t quite ended yet! At 06:30 there was a hammering on the door, telling us to get up in the dark and get ready, otherwise we’d be late. Breakfast out on the balcony watching the rain fall along with Gemma and Jacquie, then race across the courtyard to get in the bus, trying to minimise the amount of rain exposure.
Adrian helping to feed fish on a Chau Doc fish-farm
Down to the river for a boat trip out to a fish-farm, luckily the rain stopped as we arrived. The fish farms are large floating sheds on pontoons, the cages underneath holding thousands of river fish. All day long the owners boil up the fish feed, a porridge-like mass made from rice-husks, vegetable matter and left-over fish. The fish feed is shovelled into sacks, left to cool for a while, then fed to the waiting hordes below. On the boat that tourists visit, one lucky “volunteer” is selected from the audience and gets to feed the fish. Our guide to one look at our group and selected me — a brief instruction to mush the feed up in a bucket so it cools down, then throw it in a handful at a time. Like something out of a bad piranha documentary the water exploded, catfish threshing wildly as they gorged themselves. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the rest of the group step further and further back from the fountaining river water as they all laughed, I just tried hard not to swallow too much while laughing and being soaked.
An infectious grin from a young girl selling cakes
From the fish-farm we visited one of the ethnic minority villages where silk clothes are woven — and sold to tourists. Very polite people, the one elderly man insisted that I, being the only male in the group, sit and drank tea with him while all the women try on various pieces of silk clothing.
Boat back to the docks and into the bus, then a detour into the town to find two passengers who should have been with us that morning. They were waiting at their hotel, having managed to get lost earlier in the morning, then soaked in the rain, and had decided to go back and get changed rather than meet us on the dock.
Back on the road we had ten or fifteen minutes to visit a market, our guide was extremely annoyed, partly by the two German girls who had managed to get lost, miss the boat, delay everyone, and then insist that we stop so that they could go to the toilet now, and partly because of the political turn of some of the conversation. A few of the people in the bus were asking about the school hours, where-ever we went there seemed to be kids around, Chin had insisted that all the children all went to school and that it was all paid for by the government, but also said that schools were expensive and cost different amounts and many parents couldn’t afford to send their children to school. The conversation went around and around with us in the bus getting confused, and him getting more and more defensive — a reminder that for all the wild free-market economy in Vietnam, it is very much a socialist state in some ways and people did not like any political topics being brought up.
The very shiny Uncle Ho in the park beside the river in Can Tho
From lunch in Can Tho back to Ho Chi Minh city Chin sat in a sullen silence, we all thought that the visit to the incense factory had been abandoned, but out of the blue the bus pulled up at the road side where we got out to see a colourful array of incense sticks, and a family business turning raw cane and sacks of yellow goo into dried and packaged incense bundles.
A road-side stop at the café nearing Ho Chi Minh city almost turned into disaster, the other mini-bus hadn’t stopped at the incense factory and there was a great deal of argument about who’s fault it was. Our guide seemed to be calling the other driver names, but the other guide was claiming we’d never told them to stop. It finally blew up with the driver smashing his glass on the ground, leaping to his feet and waving a steel bar around, Chin running off, then storming off into the gardens shouting over his shoulder.
Back in Ho Chi Minh City we walked out onto the street from the where the bus dropped us off, turned right, walked three doors up the street and decided that this hotel would do. Right in the centre of the backpacker district, cheap, friendly, comfortable. Changed and took stock of our finances, then back out onto the evening streets for food.
