Chau Doc: Vats of Goo and A Bad Hotel

Chau Doc is a busy border town with dusty streets and tin roof buildings and TV antennas. Our hotel sat on the edge of the river. Behind us, the motorcycles buzzed around offering rides, on the other side, river traffic floated back and forth, rowing or spewing fumes behind noisy diesel engines.

It’s impossible to tell where the town stops and the river begins. The houses are high and leggy off the water, but there are floating docks and floating buildings and then, houseboats… J and I watched the sparks fly from a floating welding shop while next door, a place that was stacked high with giant ceramic drums did nothing at all. “How’s that welding guy get his power?” J asked. “I don’t want to know.” I said, picturing an extension cord running through a plastic tube across the decks and through the water to a hookup somewhere on land.

We skipped the group motorcycle ride because I’d had enough motoring for the day, opting instead for a walk through the market. In retrospect, I think the moto ride may have been the more placid choice as the Chau Doc market was hot, close, intensely smelly, and full of mystery. The vendors fairly ignored us because there’s very little for tourists on display, though one funny dude seated in front of a pile of pig’s trotters shouted at J. “Mister! Mister! You want to buy?!” We both looked down at the pile of hooves before looking the comedian in the eye. Then we all started to laugh, the vendor showing a checkerboard smile of missing teeth.

Everywhere there were giant piles of produce and stacks of dried fish. There were great stinking vats of mysterious gummy substances, slick with goo and shiny in the hot light. There were piles of paper mache masks and decorations for Tet and noodles, noodles, noodles. There were kite shaped flags of dried squid and flip flops and plastic soup spoons and bonsai trees. Skinny guys pushed carts through the crowd, girls in dust masks rolled scooters around, it felt like we were the only Eur/Americans in a giant maze of food and noise and smell. I paid way too much for a couple of Mandarin oranges and we went back to the hotel to sit on the balcony and watch the light change over the water. It was very hot, in the high 80s or low 90s and even with sunset, the heat didn’t abate. I peeled the oranges and breathed deep of the skins to chase away the memory of the smell in the market.

Our hotel room was a cell with only a piece of glass block for a window. We had an air conditioner that made a shocking amount of noise and a fan that occasionally caused all the other electrical devices in the room to shut down. Our door was right next to the reception desk and to get in and out, we had to climb over the extension chord that was powering the twinkle lights on the tree in the lobby. The hotel restaurant was on a floating platform on the river, requiring navigation of a rickety series of gangplanks and stairs. The dirty sheets were a weird nylon substance and the mosquito nets were full of holes. The whole place was hilariously bad, a joke that would have worn thin in a big hurry had we not been staying only one night.

After a deeply unsatisfying sleep – interrupted repeatedly by a thwacking noise that I like to imagine was a circuit breaker repeatedly blowing, we shuffled into the early morning to board the boat to Phnom Pehn.