... that it has now been 2 weeks since we have left Phnom Penh! We have done a lot of sightseeing and different activities since then, that Cambodia seems a lifetime ago...
On the day that we left Phnom Penh, we were meant to go on a boat down the Mekong River to Vietnam through Chau Doc on a tour with one night at a "floating" hotel...well, the boat cruise never happened on the Cambodian side since the boat driver "went home to the province" because of the Phcum Ben holidays in Cambodia.
We weren't told of this until we asked....so we went to the border on a minivan and crossed into Vietnam walking with our big and heavy packs on our backs for about 10 minutes to the ferry terminal. From there we took a boat to our "floating" hotel in Chau Doc, where our first meal in Vietnam was instant noodles (I heart tours in Asia...). The rest of the day was free to roam around but we didn't really find the interesting spots as our guidebook didn't have a map and neither did the tour guide so we went back to our hotel and read for the rest of the evening in their restaurant by the river.
The next day, we started early on our tour of Chau Doc, apparently it is a very large and famous city in the Mekong River Delta region because there are many fish farms in this area that export their fish (such as Basa) to western countries... now I know where our fish comes from (not really sure I wanted to know this...). This makes Chau Doc fish farmers very rich, as our guide told us these fish farmers make billions of Dongs per year (1 billion Dong is equivalent to US$50,000) depending on their farm size. These fish farmers live in a houseboat with a square opening in their floor where they feed the fish. When our guide poured the fish food in the water all the fish jumped and splashed around like crazy!!!! The food they are given are homemade fish food composed of water lily leaves, rice, and leftover meat/fish. We also visited a Champa village which is a small Muslim ethnic minority village in the Mekong. There was a small mosque and the children were learning Arabic. I don't know if I enjoy "visiting" ethnic minority villages with a tour group, something doesn't sit right with me about it. After that, we started making our way to Saigon by bus, visiting Sam Mountain en route where there is a nice temple in the mountain where you can see Cambodia from. Finally, 8-hours later we arrived in Saigon, a big bustling city with tall buildings and modern facilities.
Our first impression of Vietnam after two-days of driving through and touring around the Mekong was that it was more developed and wealthier than Cambodia. The roads were bigger with 2 lane highways, most of the buildings and homes were made of concrete and not bamboo/wooden structures like Cambodia. We didn't see any shacks or poverty comparable to that of Cambodia (from the bus window-don't know how much I can generalize, but Cambodia was much poorer from the bus window). There were also many graves in the middle of the rice fields as well. We saw many school children along the way in their uniforms and some older girls were wearing long white traditional Vietnamese dresses riding on bicycles (the typical Vietnam image...). Two very different war-torn countries...
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