By bus and boat to the mekong and back.

Ended up going on a Mekong river tour instead of the tunnels and temple, figure the tunnels will still be there when I come back next time but that China's spectacular damming efforts upriver on the Mekong might mean it was not so good later on.

So I went to the appropriately named Sinh Cafe, booked my tour and handed over the princely sum of $7 US for a full day tour, with aircon bus, tour guide, 2 river trips and lunch.

Boarded my bus at 8am in Saigon. Not normally a tour bus kind of girl but there was no way I could have done it cheaper so there you go. The Mancunian midwife on her midlife OE (beginning with an unplanned volunteer stint in Banda Aceh) that I sat next to was more than enough to keep the tour bus blues away.

After an entertaining toilet stop in which all the women piled off the bus and ran for the loos, only to recoil as they realised they were squat toilets (I on the other hand don't leave home without ample supplies of tissues or the ever-handy immodium: 2 of the traveller's best friends!) we carried on to our destination and were loaded on to a dinky authentic rickety tourist boat on a tributary of the Mekong.

From then on it was foreigner hijacking happy hour as we conducted our tour of the nifty rice paper making/coconut sweet making/puffed rice thingy making village while running the gauntlet of postcard sellers and everything else sellers. After tea and a prolonged opportunity to purchase the items we had seen produced it was back on the boat to have a look at a very cool floating vege market. It was pretty amazing to see that all the things you see on the movies are for real. Vietnam outside of the main cities doesn't seem to have changed in hundreds of years (give or take the postcards and the fact that the old wood boats now have outboards on the ends!).

Then it was on to the Mekong proper which is - to put it mildly - fucking massive! Crossing from one side to the other took about 40 minutes but was pretty mindblowing to do. The rivers I know come in smaller packages.

Lunch at a restaurant up one of the tributaries was allright but the monkey chained to a tree at the back for our benefit was not. Nor was the classical Vietnamese music performance given by a woman who worked there with her band. Full points for angst-ridden enthusiasm but I can now see why the overal effect has been compared to cats being strangled.

Back on to the boat after lunch and to the waiting tour bus. A quick whip around a local market and then home made for an exceptionally good way to spend $7 US and a good chance to check out the world outside the HCMC chaos.