Last day in Vietnam

Today was a long travel day with a 30 kilometer bike ride in the middle.  We drove in the bus a few hours outside of Can Tho before hitting the saddles for a lovely ride along a canal, with villages and rice paddies on the other side.  We saw lots of tents and cafes with hammocks in them, and the houses were clearly poor, so I thought people slept outside.  But I thought wrong.  The hammocks are for day use only in hammock cafes.  Since the main mode of transportation is bicycle and motorbike, the riders need to stop and rest after a couple of hours.  In a hammock cafe, they can buy a cup of coffee or a drink and use a hammock for an hour.  We had brought a picnic lunch, and after our ride, we ate at a hammock cafe.  I'll send the picture of us all in the hammocks which Suzanne took on her camera when she sends it to me.

After our ride, we continued in the bus to the Cambodian border village of Chau Doc.  On the drive we saw lush countryside and the first mountains we had seen.  Chau Doc has a mountain named Sam and we climbed it to watch the sunset.  Binh says Sam is not really a mountain, just a hill, but there are stairs going to the top and my knees were killing me.  Seemed pretty mountainous to me.  After about a million stairs I got to the top and discovered ... a road.  So after enjoying the beautiful view, for $1.50 I took a motorbike taxi back down the mountain while the others went down the million steps.  It took ten minutes on a motorbike.

While I was waiting for the others to descend, I watched a group of boys playing a game that looked like bocce but they were using their flipflops, skimming them across the paved park.  Suddenly nine boys who looked to be about twelve years old left the game and began to practice the dragon dance.  The dragon was about fifty feet long with long sticks about every six feet.  Each boy held a stick and they moved the dragon around in choreographed moves, sometimes jumping over a section.  It was like a combination of twirling and jump rope.  Very impressive.

After a quick visit to a Taoist temple, we returned to the hotel for dinner.  Tomorrow we take a power boat to Phnom Penh.