Today started off well with a visit to the floating market but quickly deteriorated into shambles and disappointment when there isn’t enough room on the tour bus for us and two of our travelling companions – Janine and Steve from Australia. The upshot of this cock-up on the part of the travel company (TM Brothers – actually dubbed ‘Trouble Makers’ by our tour guide!) is that we are put on a public bus immediately after lunch and shipped straight to Chau Doc near the Cambodian border – our afternoon’s itinerary abandoned! This despite being assured by our tour guide – before she slinks off back to Saigon – that our itinerary would still go ahead. Anyone thinking of using TM Brothers – DON’T – they are completely untrustworthy and they lie. When we phone their office in Saigon to complain they tell us to take it up with our new guide the next day – what they fail to mention, we find out later, is tomorrow’s guide doesn’t work for them and is not the least bit interested in dealing with our complaint.
We leave the hotel at 7.15 am for the half-an-hour boat ride to the Cai Rang floating marketing. This is a local wholesale market for Chau Doc and the surrounding area and sells mainly fruit and vegetables. However most of the action is largely over by the time we arrive at 7.45am. And the market isn’t quite as colourful as the billing led us to believe. There are plenty of wholesale boats in evidence but the produce is mainly in the holds, whilst the number of buyers are few and seem to be out-numbered by the tourist boats.
From the market we continue on to visit a rice noodle factory. This is real eye-opener. Again ‘factory’ is used rather loosely is this context. This family-run business produces noodles in an open-sided barn with a black beaten earth floor and pig sties only a few feet away. We watch as broken rice is ground with water from an open stone trough to produce rice milk which is then mixed with cassava flour, The pancakes mixture is spread waiver thin on hot plates heated by fires fed with rice husks. The pancakes are laid outside to dry on bamboo racks and then cut into noodles and parceled up for sale locally. Noodles must be a certain length and thickness so hence the pigs – they eat the waste. Health and Safety would have a field day here!
The rice mill is an interesting Heath Robinson affair with all manner of motor-driven belt pullies powering an assortment of machinery to husk and sort, polish and grade the rice and separate the bi-products. But despite appearances this seems to work efficiently.
By 11.30am we are back at the hotel for a quick lunch (the Vietnamese eat lunch incredibly early) and to pick up the bus for our three -hour drive to Chau Doc. This afternoon’s visits to the crocodile farm, Queen Lady temple, Thoai Ngoc Hau temple and the Sam Mountain are all abandoned. We arrive at our destination by 3.30;pm having stopped several times along the way touting for extra passengers so that the mini bus is so full that people are standing in the aisle! Our travel mantra has become ‘never expect anything’ especially anything promised by travel agents – then you can never be disappointed. We are trying to learn to chill – but it’s still very difficult to shake off our western expectations!