Saigon 3

Today I went on a bus tour of the Mekong Delta. I was only going to "do" the place in one day despite my guidebook devoting almost 100 pages it. Got picked up early in front of the travel agency and took a nice clean bus the two hours out to the river. Here we learned about making sweets from cocoanut, drank some honey tea and listened to some traditional music. But they were all the side steps you had to make as part of the tour to see the main highlight..a boat ride though the mangroves in a small canoe being paddled by beautiful local girl in a conical hat. So I felt right ripped off when we got some school kid still in his uniform to row us instead! To make up for this fact, the four of us tourists in the boar were given our own conical hats to wear. Much laughing and pointing had by all. Half of our tour bus had been filled with Japanese tourists and I happened to talk to one in the row boat and discovered they paid over twice what the English speakers paid for the tour. We paid 9 dollars, they paid 20. On the way back into the city everyone took turns getting up to stand at the front of the bus and take photos of the traffic. Guess what. I got lost going back to my feckin impossible to find guesthouse.