Day Five: Vinh Long

We woke up very early when its still super cold and dark. I didn't sleep much the night before because it was freezing! After our coffee, we took our boat to Cai Be floating market. The boat ride took 1h and its freezing cold on the waters too..


Gradually, the sun rose...

The floating market is not as busy as I thought it is. Even truyen thought its odd. Anyway, we spend sometime roaming around there, then went on to visit some handicrafts village, coconut candy factory, pop rice factory. We spend some time drinking tea, sampling the products and buying stuff. It was quite amazing how they could gauge the temperature of the fire from burning twigs, rice husks, longan husks etc. They can manufacture their products very fast! Really very 'pro'.

some kind of biscuits

netted rice paper (for their popiah)

pop rice

The two ladies 'threading' through the leaves to make the roof of houses.

We went on to visit rice paper factory, fish sauce factory, brick and pottery factory. At the brick and pottery factory, I'm kind of fascinated that the raw material is from the river bed! no wonder there are several cranes on the river. We had a very informative session when truyen explains to us the procedures etc.

So concludes our tour with Mekong Travel when we reached Vinh Long town. Truyen recommended us a cheap hotel to stay for the night and gave us directions to the night market so we can explore tonight. The hotel, Van Tram, is just beside Mekong Travel office! The room is very big with two queen size bed, and with AC, hot water, fridge. The lady charged us $200,000 dong for a night :)

I think i've mentioned before that the local market is near to Mekong Travel office. Even at night, there are many stalls selling fruits, food and many other stuff. We explored the surroundings and went to the bus station to buy our bus tickets to HCMC. There's a staff who can speak some english, so we bought our ticket at $65,000 dong per pax. Buses to HCMC are regularly departing every hour. We bought the 8am bus for the next day. However, the bus only goes to district 5 at HCMC. The uncle pointed to a big map in his office to show us. Well, it doesn't seems that far to walk to district 1 (where the backpackers district is). Luckily, M promptly took a photo of that big map. Back at our hotel, I drew out a map based on her photo and worked out where we should walk to go to district 1 =p kind of exciting ya?

We went to explore the night market too. Its' something like our pasar malam back in Singapore, but minus the food part. They are selling a lot of bags, clothes, shoes, caps, toys, etc etc etc. The area is quite packed with locals too. Think they enjoy shopping here :)

Its a fun experience trying to shop here, especially when they don't speak english and we are trying to bargain. The stall-owners are pretty clever, they took out their stack of cash and pulled out a note to indicate the price for the item i'm inquiring. Then i pointed to another smaller note in order to bargain! :D hahaha. Frankly, I should have brought a notebook + pen to write OR a big calculator! that'll be easier.

In any case, we packed our bags for our journey back to HCMC tomorrow.