I’m now writing this from my temporary apartment in Bangkok, where I’ve been making great progress on my new site – Price of Travel – and that made it hard to motivate myself to keep up on my travel tales. Nevertheless, I do want to at least write some thoughts and share some photos of each stop, so here we go.
After Saigon I was on my way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the popular thing to do in between is visit the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. For some reason this never brought up wonderful images in my mind so I was always kind of on the fence over even checking it out. But I did leave myself time for six days before my visa extension expired, so I could either stay in Saigon or head straight to Cambodia if I wanted. Saigon was relatively expensive and very crowded, and I did want to see what the Mekong Delta was all about, so on I went.
There are actually around 8 or 10 towns in the Mekong Delta that have some kind of tourist infrastructure, and in the end I chose two of them to spend 3 days each in. First I would go to Can Tho, which is the largest city in the region, and then I would go to Chau Doc, which is near the Cambodian border and hosts various boat trips directly to Phnom Penh.
I had mixed feelings about finally arriving in Ho Chi Minh City after three months in Vietnam already. It’s even larger than Hanoi, and I’d consistently heard from people who’d spent time in both of them that they prefer Hanoi over Saigon. I found Hanoi to be fascinating, but also overwhelming, so I had a feeling that this might be a bigger and more crowded version of Hanoi.