Indochina Holiday: First Night on the Mekong

6^th April 2013

We say farewell to Saigon today after s free morning to do a bit of final sightseeing and a bit of shopping.

Our guide meets us at our hotel at 12 noon to transfer us to the Renaissance Hotel nearby where we will meet up with other passengers on our Mekong River Cruise, go through some formalities for the cruise, and travel by bus to My Tho, where our vessel is waiting ( about 75 km away). The bus ride takes around one and a half hours.

On arrival at My Tho, we are welcomed aboard, given a welcome drink , some sandwiches and a briefing on the vessel, after which we are free to explore the ship and settle in to our cabins. The ship is scheduled to sail at 4.30pm.

Our ship is called the Jayavarman (but it's registered name is Mekong Explorer) and it was built in 2009. There are two tour groups on board, our group from Indochina Tours and the other group is from Captains Choice. Most are Australians with a sprinkling of Germans and Americans.

Briefing takes place in the Funnel Bar

Our cabin is not as luxurious as the one at Halong Bay, but is comfortable, and more importantly , air conditioned. Today is another very hot one, and everyone retreated to the air conditioned sections of the boat as soon as possible after the briefing.

Our cabin

The wharf we are partly secured to is a hive of activity (one half of the vessel hangs of the end of the wharf and is held by an anchor out in the river and a long bowline to shore). On shore there is a crane loading sand and aggregate onto little trucks (there must be a concrete operation nearby). Soon a large barge full of aggregate arrives on the scene off our bow, and proceeds to squeeze in between us and the shore, whilst the crew try to lift our bowline over the top of the piles of aggregate as they come in. When they are close enough, on crew member is dispatched overboard to swim the mooring line to shore. Once secured the crane empties a few buckets of water over the load to suppress the dust, and begins unloading the barge.

Aggregate barge sneaking under our bowline

Crew member swims ashore with the mooring line

Filling a small truck with sand

At our stern, another vessel has come into the wharf and another crane is unloading bags of cargo onto a truck. The river is full of activity, and you could sit up on the sun deck for hours taking it all in without getting bored.

At just after 4pm, we cast off and are under way to our first destination, Cai Be where we will anchor overnight.

The moment we leave the wharf our space is quickly taken by a fuel taker who come in for a refill.

We spend a good deal of the trip up on the top deck, (sun deck) taking in the scenery and taking lots of photos. The river is alive with fishermen, barges moving sand and aggregate downstream, dredges that are dredging for sand and lots of small vessels carrying bags of unknown cargo.