Breakfast, then bill-paying and farewells to the Little Riverside. A hotel car took us to Da Nang and the airport. Unfortunately I began to feel a bit off—slight nausea mostly, so it wasn’t a very pleasant flight to Can Tho, though it was mercifully short, just a bit over an hour. As usual, the plane was a coughing, snorting, and sniffing convention. It’s astonishing how unhealthy people are, in general.
In Can Tho our driver was a bit late and a bit surly, but eventually we began the 20 minute or so drive to our accommodation, the Mekong Rustic. And it certainly is rustic in comparison to the last 5 days: a ramshackle collection of bungalows and buildings around some muddy ponds. It’s pretty warm and the mosquitos are out, so we smothered ourselves in repellent to sit and read outside our bungalow, the sound of religious chanting and a regular gong filling the evening from a nearby Cao Dai temple (a Vietnamese religion that’s a bit of a grab bag of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity). Also, unfortunately, the sound of two precocious, loud, completely undisciplined little brats that are staying in the bungalow one down from us (luckily they’re not right next door).
The place is very casual indeed but a much needed contrast to very touristy Hoi An. We feel like we’ve parachuted into the middle of nowhere, which I must admit is one disadvantage to flying from place to place within a country: the transitions can be jarring. Anyway, tomorrow we meet our guide at 5.30am for a cruise to a couple of floating markets on the Mekong—should be fun.
We slept in separate big beds with hard mattresses and mosquito nets. The shower is outside, out the back. We do have air conditioning though, so we can’t complain! Went to bed about 8pm.
