Good morning Vietnam

Xin ciao!

We are loving Vietnam so far – the fresh food, the cheap drinks, the markets, hustle and bustle of traffic. We’ve spent the last couple days enjoying our Pho soup for breakfast, delicious seafood and cheap massages :-) happy days!

We are now in Can Tho, a small town along the Mekong River about 4hrs south of Saigon. We had quite an interesting bus ride down here…
Much to our hostel receptionist’s dismay we bought tickets for the public bus instead of through a tour company. We got picked up by a taxi and taken to the bus station where we picked up our tickets and were chauffeured onto the bus… Oh My Goodness the bus was TINY and FULL. All we could think was how hard the next 4 hours were going to be. As it turned out however, after about 20 minutes we pulled into another bus depo and thankfully realised we were yet to board our actual bus to Can Tho. We offloaded from the little bus and were faced with our next quandary; everything was written and announced in Vietnamese – we realised then why it was ‘difficult’ to catch public buses. We managed to find our way in the end though and made it onto our bus. The next bus was much nicer and Joel and I were sat together this time which was good.

We made a rest stop at a large food hall around lunch. Neither of us had a Vietnam Dong to our name as the ATM we had tried to use prior to boarding the bus wouldn’t accept our cards. We figured we were going to have to go hungry until this guy came over to help us and told us our ticket included 20,000VND ($1 AUS) for food – score! We officially had enough to buy Pho (the only thing we understood on the menu!) Mmm :-)

Getting from the bus station to the main part of Can Tho was just as difficult (we still had no money so a taxi wasn’t an option)… These guys on motorbikes offered to take us by an ATM on the way to the town so we accepted and on we went (sorry dad – it was that or walk 7km with our packs).

Anyway! Here we are in Can Tho. No one speaks English here either but we’re quite enjoying the challenge. We’re off to visit the floating markets tomorrow at sunrise :-) then it’s another 4hr bus ride to Chau Doc where we’ll stay the night before crossing the border into Cambodia by boat along the Mekong!

Renée