28 Mar 2025 - Chau Doc And The Fertile Waterways
My birthday Tai Chi then breakfast with some Vietnamese rice noodles . Very good, then an excursion at 8:30 am when we were taken off by a large sampan. It took us to an island on the river. Got on a six seater tuk tuk that took us through pleasant streets to a house where basket weaving was taking place. This involved the audience participation and as I couldn’t see and David had an injured thumb we did not participate. But basically, bamboo was being woven into baskets, And Mac then judge each Clients effort out of 100. An American who was a carpenter did the best.
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From here we proceeded again in the tuk tuks and transferred to another island on a ferry.. Here we visited the church which had various temples in the ground in true Vietnamese style: the island was a Christian island.
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Then we drove through more lanes to an impressive house built in 1930 in the French style of a mini Château. This was interesting and that it was very grand but several motorcycles were all in the same room as the dining table the lounge chairs and the beds. There was an upstairs but apparently the family did not use this. I thought this would make a rather superb hotel.
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Then back onto the sanpan again and a short ride back to the ship. Here I was surprised by our cabin been decorated with balloons, red roses and towels folded as turtles and a huge tower of other towels.
Soon it was time for lunch and after this, there was just a talk by Mac at 3 pm on the history of Vietnam and the Mekong: I went to this and quite enjoyed it. Then back on deck until after 5 pm when I washed my hair ready for the cocktails at 6 pm. Dinner followed this and we were invited to eat on the table of the new group that had joined us at Phnom Penh. This was a savvy move, as after the main course the lights went out and all the crew appeared with not one but two birthday cakes: the other David on the full Cruise was 83. And also three presents for each of us. These consisted of a white baseball cap, a white panda T-shirt, and a book on the history of Pandaw signed by all the crew.
I took my cake up on deck with the coffee David produced from the cabin and here we were invited to join another group where we sat and chatted for another 40 minutes or so. One of them suggested an app called Text to Speech which might enable me to read a book by my mobile taken a photo of each page. A truly marvellous 80th birthday.
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