We boarded the beautiful River Vessel, the Avalon Siem Reap, a 36 passenger luxury riverboat.
Sonya says - "do we have to go home?"
Part of the the initial trip was cruising through an area known as "The Ditch", which is a narrow waterway carved out to shorten the transportation time on the Mekong. It is a REALLY busy waterway, with so much traffic that every ship honks when overtaking;
kids waving and yelling "hello, where are you from" from the dike;
and much commerce throughout its length - coconuts anyone?
After cruising up the ditch until late in the evening, we dropped anchor in a town called Cái Bè. I say a town, but the population of the greater Cái Bè is about 290,000. It was a location for the Amazing Race 2009 series, for fans of the show.
The next morning we visited a shop that made rice wine and a specialty called SNAKE WINE!
In the afternoon we went to one of a number of brick factories in the delta area. There is very good sand in the area, with all of the sediment flowing down the river to the Delta. There is also a good source of clay about 15 km away. These combine to make very good bricks. The process is very labour intensive, and it takes many days to make the bricks. The kilns are heated with rice chaff and rice stalks, as the electricity is very costly. The bricks sell for US$0.15, but remember the average wage is US$ 400 per month.
Women and men both work in this factory, with the women here loading up a hand truck to move the bricks from the kiln to the packaging area.
While there, we met the chief fireman for the place. The fireman is the guy in charge of keeping the kilns burning rather than putting out fires!
There are two firemen on staff at a time, and they work seven days a week, rotating 6 hour shifts. This guy was in his mid to late forties.
After this, we were off to the local market, in an amazing race style of competition. Each of 4 teams was given two items to buy. We were only given 10,000 dong (USD $0.50) and the names of the items to purchase in Vietnamese, verbally - with no idea as to what the item was in English! They suggested we write it down phonetically to help us ask the locals for it in the correct fashion. We had to ask around the market to find a vendor that sold the appropriate item. The locals all kept laughing and had great fun with us!
Our team had to buy Aut and Hogwa (phonetically spelt) with no idea what we were looking for. It was an absolute hoot looking at the faces of the vendors as we asked for these items. We think that the vendors had more of a laugh than we did! Anyway, our team was first with both our purchases. One team brought back change. Three of the four groups brought back the right things.
This woman did not sell either of our items and as you can see she was a bit circumspect about what these crazy tourists were doing asking for items in Vietnamese!
On Saturday, we visited Chau Doc, a town very near the Vietnamese / Cambodian border to see a fish farm, raising Tilapia (a white fish). Most of the tiapia we get at Costco comes from here. It takes 9 months to raise them from fingerlings until they are ready for market. It costs US$100,000 to set up a fish farm, a small forutne for most of these fish farmers.
As we left for the fish farm, this little girl was spying us up and down as we approached their fishing boat, which is also their home.
This was their home and their fishing boat!
After we finished the tour of the fish farm, we weighed anchor and departed for the Vietnam / Cambodian border, and we spent a leisurely afternoon on the boat as we went through the process of waiting in line and clearing both borders.
Come visit us in Kampuchea (Cambodia)!
Paul & Sonya
