We caught a local bus from Ben Tre to Vinh Long. Getting the ticket was tricky as as no one spoke english, luckily there were some translations in the back of our guide book which helped. Well, the bus was going to Can Tho but the woman in the ticket office said it stopped at Vinh Long, it didn't. We realised as the signs were pointing in the opposite direction, Pete got the guide book out and pointed to Vinh Long, even though we said this to the assistant when we got on the bus but they just seemed to ignore it. The assistant waved his hands at us. Still not sure what was going on eventually the bus pulled over in the middle of nowhere on a highway and we jumped off. The assistant just pointed in the direction we needed to go, we looked on a map and realised we we were ages away from where we needed to be, so we managed to hail two moto's and made it into town.

We had read about a tour company that organised home stays here and we really wanted to do one. We booked on to one and ten minutes after arriving we left for the island on a small boat. On the boat the lady told us that there are rats in the roof that run across the beams but they never come down, from this we weren't expecting it to be a nice place but we were surprised when we arrived. They call it a home stay but they have extra, specially built rooms and a large kitchen, it was a great location at the side of the canal and the building was lovely.

We then went for a bike ride with the guide and a Swedish couple, also staying there, around the local villages. Most people here are farmers so there are lots of rice paddies and flower farms; the flowers were being grown for the lunar new year.

Once back at the home stay we had a beer and started to prepare dinner. We chopped up the veg and made some spring rolls, the other lady prepared a curry. We then sat and enjoyed are meal.

We were up early the next day to visit the floating market, we were surprised as it wasn't very big, there were only a few boats there. We then visited a factory making popped rice, rice paper and rice wine. They ferment the wine with other ingredients to make different types. There was vegetable rice wine, snake rice wine and snake penis rice wine. The idea of the snake wine is to make the men stronger so we all tried some, it was more like whisky, a lovely drink at 9AM.

We continued on the boat to a smaller canal where we changed on to some smaller boats, the local woman rowed us further up the canal where we stopped for lunch and then headed off on some more moto's to the bus station to head to our next destination.