The alarm was set for 4:30 AM. At 5 AM we were ready outside out bungalow waiting for the German girls to join us and the young guy from our home stay who would join us as our guide this morning. It was still dark outside, and fairly cold. And quiet. We shared a taxi and after 10 minutes we were at the river, jumped in a small boat and headed down stream with the dawn slowly approaching in the horizon.
We made it to the first market just before 6:30 AM - the floating market with the "big ships" - also known as the wholesale market, which means that most of them were loaded with only one or two different fruits or vegetables. The way to figure out who sold what this morning was to look at the small flagpole on top of each boat and see which "flag" they would be flying. A pineapple, a melon, onions, carrots - well, you've got it. They just hoist a few of the goods onto the pole and when they are sold out they remove them again. Among the bigger boats there were also smaller boats selling hot breakfast, tea and coffee.
We did a couple of rounds through the market and then headed towards the next stop - a local rice noodle factory which turned out to be more like a very big kitchen with two women doing the frying of the noodle mix into big pan cakes and a couple of guys taking the fresh pan cakes on racks and putting them into the sun to dry before taking them through a machine that cuts them into noodles. Very manual and extremely repetitive. We then did another 30 minutes in our boat on the river before making it to the other floating market this one for "ordinary people". Women in smaller boats selling fruits, vegetables, fish and meat and a ton of other stuff from their small boats. Nice to look at a very quiet.
From the market we started to back track which included going on some canals, visiting a python snake farm and experiencing how they mistreat snakes before they rip the skin off them. Not nice at all. It was much more relaxing to do a 30 minute walk on the footpaths through the many fields they have in the area and watch all the farmers working. Our last stop was a fruit orchard where we also had some late breakfast. We made it back to the hostel around 12, relaxed for a while and went out for some local food for late lunch in the afternoon.
There was a place down the road serving BBQ at the table so we tried our luck and had a bit to eat but his the Vietnamese wall of communication. Still hungry when we left we found a woman who served the local sandwiches - Bahn Mi - and had a couple of those. Back to the home stay, get our stuff and head down the road to the airport for our 7 PM flight.
Can Tho "International" airport is a nice "white elephant" in the sense that it is a brand new, rather large airport with at least 20 check in counters - and five daily departures in total. Our flight was the last which meant they had switched off the light in most of the airport. We joked about them having to remember to turn on the runway lights and laughed a bit when we had to board a bus to take us from the airport terminal to the small plane we were flying with - a walking distance of maybe 40 metres or so. We made it to Phu Quoc island on time after some 30 minutes of excellent flying, this way spending 50 USD but saving 4 hours by bus and 2 hours by speed boat. A reasonable trade. Arriving at our hostel it took a few attempt for the taxi driver to find the back alley where it was located but we got there, had our room and went to bed. Long day - another good one in Vietnam.
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| 5:30 AM on the river |
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| Whole sale market |
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| The ship is loaded with..... |
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| Floating fast-food |
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| Rice noodle factory |
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| Baking |
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| Drying |
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| Done |
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| Morning coffee |
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| Breakfast-ish |
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| Floating market |
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| Hiking a bit |
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| Local butcher selling fresh meat |
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| Pineapple |
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| Fresh rolls for lunch |
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| Check in for the only departure |
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| Arrived at Phu Quoc |
