Goodbye Vietnam!

Having spent the day traversing several Mekong Delta towns (Can Be, Vinh Long, Can Tho), we arrived at the "floating hotel" at Chau Doc, the large town near the Vietnam-Cambodia border. This is just the kind of tour trap that one would like to avoid as it forces you to stay at a place that is not of your choosing and also eat food at their premises given that it is quite far from the town. However, this is but a small downside to the otherwise excellent value offered by the tour. Just the transport and hotel and food costs would actually break even with the cost of the tour, thus making it an attractive proposition given the extras that the tour offers.

The next morning involved yet another early departure (darn again!) for a quick stop at a "fish farm" which just turned out to be a demonstration of fish feeding frenzy inside a hut along the river. Another brief stop at a Cham village involved just a 5 minute walk through a street and another stop outside a mosque and a bridge crossing. This visit connected us with our earlier visit to My Son in Central Vietnam where the same people's ancestors had constructed intriguing monuments to Shiva. The details of their eventual conversion to Islam are not fully clear.

That brings us to the main highlight of the day. The international border crossing on a boat on the Mekong River! From Chau Doc, a slow wooden boat took 2 hours to reach the Vietnam border post. Unfortunately, the tour guide collected our passports to get Vietnam exit stamps as well as our Cambodia Visa-on-arrival stamps. We just love doing this ourselves, so we felt deprived as we waited an hour for the guide to return with our passports. The wait was made tolerable through the availability of food and drink at the "customs house".

The passports eventually arrived with the Vietnamese exit stamps and the Cambodian visas. Back on the boat which just crawled north for a couple of kilometers before docking on the bank. After waiting a few minutes, the promised "fast boat" from Cambodia pulled alongside. After switching baggage and passengers, we were off upstream. 

It quickly made another stop along the banks of the river and balancing ourselves over tottering planks, we arrived at the Immigration office on the Cambodian side. The Cambodian immigration officials stamped our passports (valid for 1 month) without much ado.  

We were back on the fast boat to continue our 4 hour trip to Phnom Penh.