to Chau Doc by bus

We ended up on a local bus with no air-conditioning, full of people with piles of bags, presumably coming home from Ho Chi Minh City with their morning's shopping. Every so often someone would be dropped off, so the bus got steadily less crowded. It reminded me of all my bus trips in Indonesia fifteen years ago.

It was hot when we stopped, but all the windows were open and when the bus was moving there was enough of a breeze that it was quite comfortable. I was sitting right next to a window and it was unusually easy to take photographs.

At Chau Doc the bus dropped us at the bus station out of town, where the remaining locals all disappeared somehow and left us to the tender mercies of the tuk-tuk, cyclo and motorcycle touts. The bus station had a lot of black asphalt and was hot in the mid-day sun. But we sat under the covered area and had lunch — simple instant noodles with an egg on top — in one of the little food stalls there, while I pulled out the netbook with the Lonely Planet guide on it and looked up hotels.

We hired cyclos — bicycle-pulled rickshaws — to take us to the central market (Richard being paranoid about commissions at hotels). From there we walked a little way to the Thuan Loi hotel, right on the waterfront.

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