Miles and miles of ultra-green rice paddies and well-worn narrow roads winding alongside canals and children shouting 'hello' at our backs as we zoomed into a new world of Vietnam...
It was our second last day in the Mekong Delta and we spent it on the back of a motorbike cruising past the millions of canals ands crossing five ferries over the large rivers that have spread like tentacles from the mighty Mekong River. Our guides attempted to add to the already amazing experience by taking us to visit orchards and topiary factories, all unnecassary things that they think tourists would like. Phat (our main guide) made us pose beside rice paddies, taught us the names and tastes of tropical fruit and answered any of our questions. In the afternoon, after the orchard, he announced it was rest time and bundled us into hammocks and encouraged us to eat plates of fruit. Actually, this was all a ruse, really it was he and his brothers chance to play their favourite chinese board game away from their pesky families and gamble on who would buy the beers and food that evening. This took hours and was to be a feature of our tour. During the games Phat would giggle and clap his hands like a small child if he won and sulk if he was losing. They kept calling out 'just one more, one more' before I stood up and sternly said 'no, no more, we go now'- miraculously this worked and they packed up the board and we were finally off.
Late afternoon we arrived in Can Tho, this was to be our base for exploring the rivers in the area. Rested and ready we met Phat and co. (he had collected an assortment of his town friends) for dinner and drinks. Before long we were toasting each other shouting 'Mawt, Hai Ba...Yo' as we 
worked our way through 27 beers, won some key rings and communicated to Phats old drunk friends with ease the more drunk we became. Later as we headed back to our hotel room we ran into Phat, he was going out and looked very suspicious, after some harassing (he is a family man) we left him to it. Early the next morning as we boarded a boat having waited for Phat in the rain- he hadn't stayed in his hotel room, meka commented quite wisely that we were basically sponsoring his philandering and gambling. We were.
The river cruise was pleasant and long and hot. We went to some floating 
markets and bought a much needed coffee from the drinks boat and some pineapple on its stalk from the pineapple boat and looked at all the other fruit and vegetable boats, they had a long pole with the fruit of vegetable they were selling tied to the top- shopping made even funner. Sadly the smaller floating market had more tourists then sellers and our useless tourist boat clogged the river along with many others which must have annoyed the people trying to actually make a living. We asked to leave that market early much to the suprise of our guides- they didn't care though, they had setup the board game behind us on the boat and were cheerily playing and arguing the entire five hour boat journey. In fact, they became part of the experience as tourists flaoted past taking photos and locals floated up and contemplated gaming strategy.
Soon we were back on dry land, forced to write nice things about our guides in a guest book and shuttled off to a bus station. We were going to Phu Quoc Island.
