Off East

We were up early the next day to get a boat along the river to the famous Cairang floating market where all local wholesalers of fruit and vegetables bring their produce by boat to sell their wares to ‘middlemen’ also in boats. The boats were laden with produce and in order for people to know what they were selling, they all had a long pole sticking up in the air which had the produce attached to it so people could see what they were selling. Once they’d run out of something, they simply took that item off the pole. Simple but effective! It was very atmospheric cruising amongst the boats seeing all the hustle and bustle.

The last day’s cycling was the longest and when we got on our bikes in the morning we were knackered! My legs were still fine but my bum was really sore and the thought of 50+km that day was a bit daunting! the first stretch was a breeze though as we cycled right along the river under a green canopy of trees and flowers which was a welcome relief. We went through some really pretty villages and as with the first two days, were always accompanied by kids on bikes and hellos and friendly waves from everyone we passed!

We visited a Taoist temple and a crane sanctuary where there were literally 1000’s of cranes nesting in the trees. We had the option of having a Crane lunch (!) which we declined…

After a non-crane lunch we drove onto our next destination. The road we were supposed to take was closed as a bridge had collapsed so the one we had to take was ridiculously bumpy and busy and at times we were driving so close to the edge of the river that it felt like we were going to topple in. You wouldn’t want to fall in to the river as we later found out that during the typhoon earlier in the year, the waters had risen to high that one of the local crocodile farms had been flooded and approx 20,000 crocodiles had escaped into the river. Quite a few children had been killed by crocodiles in the villages that we past through, as they played in the water.

The last stretch of cycling that afternoon was about 45km and included one pretty big mountain to get up which looked even bigger than it was against the flat landscape of the rest of the Mekong Delta! As we were approaching the Cambodian border, the area that we were cycling through had a large Cambodian population as people had fled from Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the borders had been moved several times. They were obviously very, very poor. They people looked very different to the Vietnamese people we’d met in the rest of the country. They were really dark-skinned and their dress was different with many people wearing traditional Cambodian scarves. A lot of the elder women had shaved heads which I later found out was because they shave their heads when they are widowed.

We had all sorts of kids cycling along with us and talking to us as they came home from school or for others, from work. Some of them had to cycle 10Km to get to the nearest school and they’d do this journey twice a day. It made me realise as we cycled along for pleasure, just how important having a bike is to people in rural areas. for most, it’s their sole mode of transport and means the difference between going to school and getting an education or not. Without a bike, they can’t get an education and end up working the fields with their families to try and earn some money. We saw really young kids on massive bikes that were way too big for them, pedalling along or having a backy on someone else’s bike.

Despite being knackered, we pushed on and ended up covering the distance pretty quickly and even managed to make it up the mountain in one go – a downward slope has never felt so good!!!

It was really beautiful with huge fields full of palm trees stretching as far as the eye could see and as dusk fell it looked really magical.

We arrived in Chau Doc our final destination and had some well earned beers with Loc our guide who was a really nice guy. We then went and got some street food. It was so sad though as there was a very young boy on his own wandering around the market late at night trying to sell lottery tickets. He was looking hungrily at the food and hanging around the stalls so Loc bought him something to eat. He wolfed it down and gave us a big smile and it nearly broke my heart. What we didn’t know then though was that the poverty and hardships that we’d seen people facing in Vietnam as a direct result of the American Vietnam war, were almost going to pale in comparison to the situation in Cambodia and the stories that we’d hear.

The cycling trip was absolutely brilliant and was one of the highlights of our time in Vietnam and was the perfect way to scratch a bit deeper, get away from the more touristed Vietnam and see rural Vietnam in all it’s beauty.

After only a couple of hours sleep we woke up early and prepared ourselves for the next day’s cycling.

We were due to be picked up by our boat to take us further along the river to meet the van and our driver but the tide was so low that we had to wait as the boat couldn’t come and get us. When we eventually got on the boat it took us ages to move a relatively short distance as the water was only a foot or two deep in places. Luckily we had a very experienced boatman who steered through the canals. Some boats we stuck and simply had to wait until the tide rose before they could move. It was a great experience though and was really interesting to see the river villages and the boat life from the water.

Once we arrived in VinhLong it was back on the bikes. The legs felt fine but my bum was a bit sore and we’d both caught a bit of sun the day before. Because we’d set off later than planned due to the tides, it meant that we were cycling in the midday sun and it was much, much harder. The temperatures were pushing 40 degrees and the sun was really fierce. To help matters we were also cycling into the wind. It was hard work and we had a long way to cycle that day (about 40km) so we just had to get on with it and kept stopping for breaks. We discovered that sugar cane drinks that you could get at little shacks at the side of the road were the ultimate energy drink and really refreshing – freshly squeezed sugar cane, freshly squeezed kumquats poured over some crushed ice. Delicious!

The area that we cycled through that day was much, much poorer and we saw many people who lived in what were literally shacks at the side of the road. The scenery was lovely and very rural. We had to negotiate cows crossing the road, kids on bikes on their way home from school, tractors filled up with tropical fruits and the produce from the area. There were also lots of paddy fields with water buffalo grazing at the side of them and people tending to their crops wearing the iconic Vietnamese conical hat.

The sun got hotter and hotter though and we were all really pleased to eventually reach our destination which signified then end of the cycling for the day. Exhausted, we fell in to the van, and drove to Cantho where we had lunch and then went to the hotel and had a long bath! Cantho is a lovely Mekong Delta town and that evening we sat on the riverfront and had a delicious dinner and a couple of beers before falling into bed and sleeping like babies!

We were picked up in the morning by our driver and our guide. It was just the two of us and them cycling through the Mekong Delta for three days and then taking the boat up the river and crossing into Cambodia.

We were a bit nervous as we didn’t really know quite what to expect in terms of distances and how we’d cope with the heat as it was very, very The bikes were pretty new hybrid bikes and our driver would take all our gear whilst we cycled. It was like having our own support team – brilliant!

After driving for a couple of hours we stopped and started cycling towards Mytho. It was great once we settled in to a steady pace and we passed through villages with everyone waving and saying hello and loads of children running out to see us and say hello. They were so excited to see us it was hilarious and sometimes we’d pass a house and hear a chorus of hello’s but not be able to see where it was coming from, only to spot some kids up a tree/in the river/in their house and they wouldn’t stop saying hello until we waved back.

After a couple of hours, we arrived in Mytho for our boat trip on the Mekong Delta where we visited an island and saw sweets being made out of coconut and tasted many different types of tropical fruit and we took a sampan (a rowing boat) back along small canals. The Mekong Delta is simply massive – it was more like being on a huge lake than a river at times and the geography of it was a bit confusing as it splits off into many tributaries etc so we weren’t really sure exactly which bit we were cycling on at any one time.

We stopped for lunch and then took the boat back to the van and drove on for an hour or so before stopping and cycling on to CaiBe. This was really good cycling as it was totally flat and we went down dirt tracks, crossed lots of monkey-bridges and passed through some really rural villages. It was lovely cycling at dusk and was so peaceful. We took a couple of local ferries across more tributaries on the river until we arrived at CaiBe where we boarded a boat to take us to across the river (where it was 1.5km wide!) to BinhHoaPhuoc and AnBinh island to a guesthouse.

The guesthouse was a very basic traditional building on stilts at the side of the river. It was beautiful but it was boiling – there wasn’t a breath of wind at all and it was stifling. We had some well earned beers having cycled about 25Km, watched the sunset over the Mekong and had some delicious dinner before falling into our camp beds and pulling down the mosquito nets.

It was at this point, that the evening river noise started! First of all it was the incessant cockerels crowing, then the local dogs barking and fighting, then the insects all started and so it continued…