Leigh started feeling a bit better yesterday evening and by this morning she was much more perky. She even had a swim in the very nice swimming pool at Ozon Hotel. I spent about an hour working on the bicycles - cleaning and oiling the chains, adjusting the brakes and the eccentric bottom brackets (used to tension the chains on Rohloff-equipped Thorn bicycles) and tightened my saddle.

We had booked a boat trip to do some bird-watching this afternoon. Not particularly cheap at 1.2 million Dong (almost eight hundred rand) and it turned out to be money poured into the muddy waters of the Mekhong Delta. We can't blame the hotel, who organised the trip for us, because it was soon clear that what we had thought we had asked for was not what they had thought we had asked for. The dangers of arranging out-of-the-ordinary activities when the communication gap is enormous. Their plan was to take us to crab and prawn farms and finish the outing off with a visit to a bird lover who kept water birds in cages. Given that Purple Heron and Bittern appear on the menu in the hotel restaurant, he is probably their source of "wild" meat. He did take us out on the water in his boat but his idea of bird-watching involved racing around a small island where a large flock of Little Cormorants and a few Black-crowned Night-herons were roosting to scare them into flight so that they would be easier to see. With the total time spent looking at birds being less than a quarter of an hour, this must count as our most expensive unsuccessful birding outing.