1 October

This morning we had breakfast on the top deck of our floating hotel, then we had to pack up and waited for the motorboat to pick us up for day 3 tour of the cave temple and "cham" village.
The temple in the cave was actually a small cave where a Vietnamese lady nun had mediated for a long time...then the was a long climb up to this temple but it was very well kept, a pond full of carp and turtles which symbolises long life to the Buddhists.
The next place was really intresting as we were taken to a Cham ethnic village..they all look like malays , the women wearing the "baju Kurungs"(long Malay dresses) and the mean in sarongs Malay shirt and songkok(hat) or the white skull cap the "haji's " wear..they spoke a kind of Malay dialect too. we were wondering why they were all dressed up that day in their finest clothes ,then we were told it was the first day of the Muslim new year 'hari raya"the village looks like a typical malay kampung( village) on stilts over the water, on the main road they had a Mosque as well, we went into the mosque compound to take some pictures with the people there..My wishes of "Asalamuailaikum"(peace be upon you) was happily responded back by all ..we stopped by a weaving shop where there was a Cham lady demonstrating their traditional way of weaving sarongs and other materials,here I bought my good friend Nanang a Muslim skull cap , the lady of the shop then brought out new year cakes for us to sample...some of the cakes were similar to our Chinese new year cakes,Then it was back to the floating hotel to collect our bags and board a slow boat back to Can Tho city where we were served lunch on board...fried egg noodles with a pork chop and veggies..it took 2 hours to get to Can Tho city by boat from there it was a long bus ride of 6 hours to Saigon...we got back to Saigon that evening at 7 ;30 pm I was so tired .