Visit to Mekong Delta, Part Three

On the evening of day two we arrived in Chau Doc near the Cambodian border. September 2nd and 3rd are both holidays so as we arrived by “luxury boat” there were much activity going on
We stayed in this fairly nice hotel—I had to pay four dollars to have a room to myself rather than a dormitory. I didn’t pay the five dollars extra for air conditioning. The way the hotels are set up, the a/c is run by a remote control and you don’t get it unless you pay extra. It was a little warmer than I thought it would be. Rather than the wall mounted fans I had grown accustomed to this room had a ceiling fan which really didn’t seem to create much of a breeze. I also did not have a window to open, just a door opening out on a balcony which wrapped around the building and was therefore accessible to other rooms. I just laid on the bed without even unfolding the green terry cloth coverlet and fell immediately asleep, while the rest of the tour group prowled the city and found various places to eat.
When we awoke the next morning we had breakfast (which cost extra) on the roof of the hotel. There was a pleasant view of the area, and I saw that most of the building had television antennas coming off their roofs.

We took the bus to the so-called Cave Pagoda—up a very long flight of stone stairs. At the top I took a photo of the surrounding rice fields and across the river you can see over into Cambodia. But photos were not allowed in the Buddhist pagoda itself. We made our way into the pagoda and through it into a small cave with two large ceramic snakes. The legend was that a woman was set aside by her husband after three years of marriage due to no children being born. She was upset and set up the shrine in the cavern, and she was attended by two snakes who were people by night and snakes by day.
We then went back to the main boat pier and got into small boats rowed by women. The woman rowing my boat had a two year old girl who sat with us. We winded our way through a floating village—people who are too poor to afford to buy land but can set up housekeeping on a boat. Periodically we had to duck our heads to miss the low power lines running from shore to the boats. As always children waved and pranced whenever they saw us.

Our boat ride took us to a mosque—the local Cham people are Muslim. We then made our way back to the “luxury boat” we had ridden the previous day. The boat allowed us to sit on the roof if we wanted, and I got somebody to take a photo of myself. The last photo I took was what I imagined to be a typical farm for the area.

From here we made our way back via boat and bus to Saigon, arriving a little before 6 PM.