Early on Friday morning we headed out of Saigon and had a bumpy (even
the local tour guide admitted the road had loads of potholes in it!)
drive for a few hours to Cai Be in the lower Mekong Delta area. We
jumped on a local motor boat and cruised around, seeing the floating
markets and the locals going about their daily business from all their
boats. Then we stopped off at a little local product making shop
where we watched how they made rice paper, coconut candy and popped
rice and also got to try some.

After that we went down some smaller waterways to one if the islands
where we each hopped on an old, rusty bicycle which seemed to just be
abandoned at the side of the road, and rode through the little village
to a cafe where we stopped for lunch and Em ordered one of the local
specialities - Elephant fish, which was huge and we all had go at
rolling ourselves a pancake.

After a really nice morning we then got back on the bus again and had
another 3 hours of being thrown about, though we did stop of at a
crocodile farm to break up the journey. At one point we had to cross
the river and as we were all waiting to board the ferry a steady queue
of motorbikes accumulated as they too waited to get on, and all the
locals seemed as infatuated with us as we were intruiged by them! As
we were leaving the ferry one of the moto drivers got his dismount a
bit wrong and sent his wife and little girl flying off the back onto
the floor! It's a miracle we haven't seen more accidents like that!

We got to our floating hotel in Chau Doc around 6pm and had just
enough time to get freshened up before we set off on a little dinner
cruise down the Mekong (which we didn't even know was included!), and
despite the fact that the portions were pretty minimal, we had a nice
time chatting with everyone on board and it capped off a really good
day.

We woke up for sunrise on the morning but there wasn't really much to
see and after breakfast we stopped off at the local fish farm at the
raft village where a unit of a woman nearly made the house sink and
our guide had to ask her to step off! Then on to the village of An
Giang, which was really nice to walk through as it wasn't touristy at
all and we were able to just stroll around and watch the local way of
life.

With the trip over, we then started the speedboat journey all the way
to Phnom Penh which included the most scenic and chilled out border
crossing by the river that I reckon we have ever had!