As soon as we crossed the border from Cambodia to Vietnam, two things changed. The land was suddenly more cultivated and the people wore the characteristically conical hats made famous by any picture of a farmer tending his paddy field.
The fast boat from Phnom Penh delivered us to Chau Doc in Vietnam in a respectable four hours, one ahead of schedule. The Tonle Bassac River had changed colour suddenly, from brown to blue to green and back again several times as we entered new areas of confluence, as if rinsing some giant paint brush. The delineation between colours was immediate and impossibly precise for a body of water of such dimensions. Five hundred miles long from Lake Tonle Sap to the coastal Mekong delta, 20 metres deep and a thousand metres wide. At some point it became the Mekong but nobody is really agrees where.
Chau Doc has a population of 100,000 people, and life revolves around the water. At the confluence of three river channels, the trade, residences, and culture of the place are dominated by the river even though the majority now live on dry land.
The Vietnamese seem at first to be a more taciturn race than the Khmer. Even as we disembarked from the Hang Chau Express to the Thuan Loi Guest House on the water side and set out to explore, the faces seemed to smile a little less.
We got as far as the evening market, 100 yards from Thuan Loi, and no further.
It was an assault on the senses; a cacophony of sounds and a kaleidoscope of colours and smells. We picked our way down the narrow paths between stalls stacked high with produce, stepping carefully over the after sales debris and around pools of suspicious fluids flowing from under hanging tarpaulins.
Crying babies and hooting mopeds, barking dogs and crowing cockerels, crackling charcoals and the cries of five hundred stall holders all competed for attention in the half light of the market, protected from the sun and rain by a network of awnings. Jasmine and lilies overflowed from buckets. Mango and guava were piled high in wide, shallow baskets alongside huge lemons and small watermelons. Garlic rubbed shoulders with sweet potato in colourful plastic pots and onions of half a dozen different varieties hung from the stanchions of each stall.
Smoke drifted from the barbeques on every corner, catching the intruding sunbeams like incense during Mass. Dust danced in the shafts of light and dogs lay inert in the shadows, waiting for the cool of evening.
Later, we ate on a floating pontoon projecting dangerously, as we were soon to discover, into the reed-clogged waterway created by the network of floating houses. Hundreds of house boats and wooden freighters fight for space in the crowded river. Small Sampan craft, often rowed by standing women, appear to be in imminent danger of being swamped by the wake of the larger vessels that pass at alarming speeds.
As the light faded, the waterway became invisible, particularly as on board lights on the freighters are in short supply, and rarely used.
As with the roads, the movement of vessels is chaotic but collisions are seemingly rare.
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