Situated about 3 – 4 hours from the chaos that is Ho Chi Minh City and you have the slower pace of life in Can Tho on the banks of the Mekong river. Here is very tranquil as the traffic seems to be split between the roads and the waterway, lovely wide promenades offer fantastic views of all the activity on this impressive river.

Our first mission is to have an explore before complete darkness sets in, we stumble across an evening market with various food stalls, being hungry (as always) sample a rice paper pancake and sugar cane juice. We also find a local restaurant that is very highly rated on Trip Advisor that we wanted to try….the only issue is that there are no menus in English, just pictures hanging on the wall. Undeterred we gamble on three dishes based on the photographs. Fortunately we strike lucky – crispy noodles with veg, a rice dish with pork and a tray of rice pancakes, sausages, leaves and a dip, copying the locals we roll it all together and dunk! Delicious and a bill total of 50,000 Vietnamese Dong, roughly £1.50.

Like many other tourists are main reason to travel to Can Tho is to visit its famous floating markets, the little rivers and islands on the way surrounded by paddy fields and the numerous noodle making factories (huts!) on route. Having booked our excursion it is a very early start – 4:45 am, darkness is  just fading but already the locals are about setting up their stalls for another days business.

The river is already busy, boats shifting sand, locals moving from village to village and of course the tourists. Our guides give us a ‘Southern Muffler’, a type of scarf and we are on our way, our guides are young but very informative and speak great English. First stop is Cai Rang, very much a local wholesale market – boats full of one item, watermelons, bananas, pineapples etc.. They advertise what they are selling by hanging one from the mast, so easy to find what your after.

From the markets we head to the smaller canals that run off the Mekong, seeing how rice noodles are made and visiting the paddy fields next door where the rice is grown.

These canals involve negotiating little ‘Monkey’ bridges, luckily by the time we get back in the boat we still have two flip-flops each!

The whole morning has been spent eating, fruit from the market, banana rice pancake, tasty potato cakes, watermelon – all pretty healthy, unfortunately counteracted by the calorie laden but delicious iced coffee.

We would definitely recommend Can Tho, as well as the obvious attraction of the Mekong it is so relaxed and slow placed. With us having plenty of time it was great to unwind before the  next leg of our tour.