Can Tho is about an hour boat ride to the Mekong Delta, where the Mekong joins the Gulf of Thailand. We hired a local boater, Laam, a very charismatic amateur English speaking woman, to take us to the floating market. The floating market was amazing. Thousands of small and large boats assemble and are well underway trading an imaginable amount of cargo by the time we arrive around 7:30am. Each craft had a stick/flagpole with goods tied to the top - this showed what they had to trade. Our guide tells us if we come any later than 8 or 9, one sees just as many tourists as traders - so we leave and take the small, back channels back to Can Tho. Our guide makes trinkets and jewelry for us out of water coconut trees and other flora she collects along the way.
En route to Ha Tien it's obvious (huge understatement) Kelsey and I are the only two white people on a rickety (huge understatement) old (huge understatement) bus when we start taking pictures rapid-fire as we launch down the highway in the [now] pouring rain. Kelsey says this bus should be condemned to a flowery field to be squatted in by hippies. All the small Vietnamese families rush to cover their rice that is drying in the sun.
Soon puddles form and children are playing in the street, then the puddles proceed to become a raging river that is the Vietnam Highway. If anything the bus driver drives faster and honks all the more frequent... now the children are screaming when our bus sends tens of kilograms of water into them and their homes - naturally, we laugh. Furthermore, the bus sprang a few leaks. The comical dripping turns into a torrential downpour (in the bus), and we laugh as almost half the bus moves or stands to avoid the waterfall/splash zone/cabin. For some reason the natives refuse to sit within 5 feet of us OR the waterfalls. We laugh even more as we contemplate throwing on our raincoats... inside the bus.
Turns out the joke is on us when we get off the bus, believing we have arrived. Our bus driver drags us through 3 inches of standing rainwater to a Mercedes minibus where 24 Vietnamese people make are already sitting, making clown cars look like spacious, leausurely rides. Another 3 hours of honking, screaming, and splashing.