Ahoy!

The Boat Ride
(this was also written on Wednesday. i will be catching up over the next day or so) We boarded our boat (about a twelve-seater) right on schedule. Everything thus far had been coming together exactly as planned. All of our travel plans and arrangements were made via internet, whether it was the booking of the flights, hotel rooms, or the river tour. The internet is an amazing tool, and while some of us complain about the shrinking of our world, the big picture is that things are becoming more and more efficient because of it.

We shared the boat with a Portuguese couple, Joao and Christina. Joao (John in English) is a j`1``udge (at the ripe age of 32) and Christina works for the Highway/Road council in Finance. They are very nice, and we ended up hanging out with them a lot. They are also confirmation of paragraph one in this post, since they made all of their arrangements and found all of their tour information and places to visit online as well. I wonder how travel agents will stay in business? They’ll need to find ways to add value, because in my eyes they’re completely unnecessary (no offense to anyone). Just stating an opinion. If you have any thoughts on why I’m wrong, please post a comment. I’d like to hear it. A lot of times, I have my head up my rear-end and I overlook the obvious.

Back to the ride. It started out as a beautiful day. The river is brown (it’s rainy season here, in advance of the monsoons that will hit Vietnam in September, and the water level is already high. As we’d learn later, many of the vast expanses of water we saw were rice fields just a few months ago, and in 3 months they’ll be rice fields again. Now, however, they’re under water. Pictures taken from the cave pagoda that show fields of water illustrate this.

On our ride down the river, we chatted with our new friends, made fun of each other and took lots of pictures. Too many pictures! One note—the Blackberry Pearl is a great camera in a pinch. My camera’s battery finally died all the way, so I used the phone. Between the 3 of us, we took more than 700 pictures yesterday (includes time in Cambodia, on the river, and in Viet Nam at the Buddhist temple (cave pagoda). By the end of the day, all three of us had used our batteries completely.

Our “captain” didn’t speak English, so we weren’t sure what was happening, where we wer going, etc. There was a snack set up on board that was obviously for us (there were five trays, and five passengers on board), but when Christina asked about the snack, his answer was no. Interestingly, one thing that we’ve found here is that usually when you ask a question of someone that doesn’t quite understand you, the answer is usually a smile and “yes, Ok.” In this instance, however, the answer was a curt no. Luckily, I had some Clif bars, so all hungry people were able to eat those.

Along the way, we passed many small huts and shacks on the banks of the river, many of them with kids standing outside waving and jumping into the river. One kid did an awesome flip off the bank! Many houses had Brahma bulls, corn, sugar cane, mangroves, etc. Self-sufficiency. Lots of adults waved at us, too.

As noted, the river level is up right now, and the current was pretty strong too. The buoys were a good indication of that in two ways—the water could be seen to be high, and the buoys appeared to leave a wake though they were stationary.

A few hours in to the trip, we arrived at the border. This is where the story gets a little more interesting. Leaving one tightly controlled country and entering another can be a delicate exercise.