Chau Doc is a smallish town and so noisy in the day, but by 8pm, the shops are shuttered, the little foodstalls disappear, the small cafes with tiny plastic seats are gone, the tempting smells of a pho or a bbq duck fade away and it becomes a ghost town. The mopeds are driven into the small hotel reception for overnight safety and the night watchman's bed roll and pillows are laid out. Looks like compulsory early nights are in order here. It's obviously not a place tourists linger, there are no signs of any Western type bars or backpacker places. Most people pass through staying just a night or two as it's a bit of a junction for Saigon, Phnom Penh, southern Cambodia and the rest of the delta.
No alarm clocks are needed here either, the streets come alive and the decibel level increases just after dawn. Good practice for Hanoi. They have odd little cyclo's here, sort of flat platform trays high up on two wheels pulled by a push bike. They are not just for tourists, they are also used by all the local people and often piled high with bags, boxes and all sorts of deliveries. Every so often a tour group of twenty or so Westerners snake through town, poshies from the tour groups at the Victoria...). You can almost hear the sigh of resignation as the poor sod who draws the short straw gets the heftiest person, twice the size of the guy powering the bike. No wonder they are all so thin and wiry. The Vietnamese look comfortable and gracious as they are being pulled along with their legs neatly tucked in. The Westerners on the other hand look very uncomfortable and not too sure how to get in any way comfortable!
I decide this morning to get my head around the money, mistaking a 50,000 dong note with a remarkably similar 500,000 dong note would be an expensive mistake. My purse is a bit of a mess with baht change, US dollars, Cambodian riels and now millions of dong. But the dong notes are like Aussie money, slightly plastic, and don't disintegrate in water, so at least look a bit cleaner than the filthy riels. Sorting this money, I realise that I have been deprived of retail therapy for a while so set out to see Chau Doc market. It's sort of "same same" as most others but is brighter and cleaner. Set out in areas, not many women's fashions but lots and lots of material shops. The men's section is all ready to wear, but it looks like most women sew their own. But my eye is caught by the designer labels and I have difficulty choosing whether to go Chanel or Louis. In the end I go for both. So now, 60p later,
I have two new designer face masks, no, not to wear as I ride on a moto, that love has still not materialised, but to use as a smell barrier in some of the less salubrious loo facilities in this part of the world! The old one I bought in Hoi An market years ago can be retired and replaced with this new designer gear.
I try out my language skills again but my "ga mon" (thankyou) only elicits gales of laughter from the market trader and his pals. He tries to teach me and to my ears it sounds the same, but obviously not to theirs... Something to do with the tones. But I tried and got some smiles in return. God knows what I was actually saying.
After my ant coffee in Cambodia I am struggling to disassociate the local coffee taste from ants so decide a latte at the Victoria might break that barrier. Their version of a latte and Starbuck's are rather different and I think I'm on frothed tinned condensed milk on top of local coffee. Roll on Hanoi for a Highland's! As I sit on the deck overlooking the river one of the posh river cruisers, the Lan Diep, is moored up and the passengers are finishing their posh buffet lunch before they pop off to explore the delights of Chau Doc. It looks a very nice boat, quite big but I want to tell them to get off and hire their own little rice boat for a few days instead, the one Ant and I did was magical.
The language here continues to puzzle. I had noticed there were many fewer dogs about than anywhere else in Asia. Trying to avoid the obvious connection I was taken aback to see "chien" on many menu's and street stalls. Given the historical French connection here, any mention of chien made me fear the worst. But thanks to Google Translate I discover I need not be concerned. The translation is "fried" and no connection to the Dyl...
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