Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [108]
The Mekong Delta | Bac Lieu |
Practicalities
The Bac Lieu Tourist Company, at 2 Hoang Van Thu (daily 7–11am & 1–5pm; 0781/392 2922, 0781/382 4273), is conveniently situated next to the Bac Lieu hotel, and the staff are reasonably helpful with local information. The post office is in the centre of town at 20 Tran Phu, and a little further along the road at no. 82 is Sacombank, where you can exchange money. There’s an ATM conveniently located in front of the Bac Lieu. The bus station is 1.5km west of town, and xe om shuttle back and forth to the centre. Moving on, it’s best to get back on Highway 1 and flag down express buses passing through.
The town’s main hotel, Bac Lieu (0781/395 9697; US$11–30), in the centre of town at 4–6 Hoang Van Thu, has clean but dull rooms, complete with air-conditioning, cable TV and hot water. For more character, head next door to the Cong Tu (0781/395 3304; US$11–30), whose main entrance is on the riverside at 13 Dien Bien Phu: this palatial colonial villa has just ten rooms with fancy furnishings and high ceilings. Kieu Hoi, 8 Ly Tu Trong (0781/395 8080; US$11–20), is slightly cheaper though its surroundings are distinctly drab.
The Bac Lieu’s ground-floor restaurant offers set menus as well as a la carte dishes at around $3–4, while the cafe at the Cong Tu is much more atmospheric, though its menu is long on drinks and short on food. Your best option for nightlife is to join the overseas Vietnamese at Kitty, on the corner of Ba Trieu and Tran Phu: this first-floor bar wouldn’t look out of place in Ho Chi Minh City and serves expensive cocktails, beers and coffee, as well as a reasonable range of Vietnamese dishes.
The Mekong Delta |
Ca Mau and around
With its left shoulder braced against the Bac Lieu Canal, Highway 1 now heads westwards from Bac Lieu towards the Ca Mau Peninsula, which constitutes not only the end of mainland Vietnam but of Southeast Asia as well. In this part of the country, waterways are the most efficient means of travel – a point pressed home by the slender ferries moored in all the villages the road passes. Much of this pancake-flat region of the delta is composed of silt deposited by the Mekong, and the swamplands covering portions of it are home to a variety of wading birds. In addition to rice cultivation, shrimp farming is a major local concern – along the way you’re sure to spot shrimp ponds, demarcated by mud banks that have been baked and cracked crazily by the sun.
CA MAU itself, Vietnam’s southernmost town of any size, has a frontier feel to it, though rapid development is changing that fast. Things have changed since 1989 when travel writer Justin Wintle described it as a “scrappy clutter…a backyard town in a backyard province”, though there are still pockets of squalor between the glitzy new buildings. Ca Mau sprawls across a vast area, with broad boulevards connected by pot-holed lanes and a couple of busy bridges spanning the canal that splits the town in two.
As yet, few Western travellers visit Ca Mau, which is hardly surprising; it is nearly 350km from Saigon and until recently was a dead-end destination. However, there are now speedboats to Rach Gia that cover the journey in less than three hours, and improvements to Highway 63 make the journey by road less arduous, so incorporating Ca Mau in a circular tour of the delta is now a possibility.
The Mekong Delta | Ca Mau and around |
Arrival and information
Vasco Airlines (www.vasco.com.vn) operates a daily flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Ca Mau airport, a few kilometres southeast of town on Highway 1. Almost next door is the bus station, where buses from Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho and other destinations