We wanted to take it easy getting from Saigon to Phnom Penh so we decided to take a 3-day/2-night package tour. You know, the kind that you sit in a travel shop and look at photos of happy people in swish busses, posing gratuitously on big elegant hotel beds, and foreigners discovering new and exotic places...yep, that's the tour we booked, but as I've said before, evereything in this part of the world is an interpretation. Everything felt a bit too organized compared to what we're used too – a lot of head counts and super enthusiastic tour guides.

Life on the Mekong is pretty relaxed. Over the three days we toured a rice paper factory, a honey factory, and several floating markets, but the best thing was just to watch the colorful goings on of daily life. To experience the Delta properly you'd need to rent a longboat and just get lost for a few weeks.

I did, however, find it supremely ironic to see a woman and her friend chirping away on hammocks with a Dean and Deluca bag between them (2nd row down, 4th over). I guess they'll knock-off anything over here.

One question that arose while exploring the Mekong Delta was why we kept seeing graves haphazardly scattered in all the fields and in very close proximity to many homes. As it turns out, in order to keep their children from selling (or as we were told: "cashing in" on) the family property whilst experiencing postmortem grief, many villagers' final wish is to be buried on the premises, thus cementing the "back 40" in the family for many generations to come. Honestly, would you buy a home with someone else's grave in the front yard?