Vietnam and Cambodia Highlights

Spend your final morning in Ho Chi Minh City enjoying your selected sightseeing activity. Afterwards, transfer to My Tho to embark your ship, the Mekong Serenity.

Romantically referred to by the French as the Pearl of the Orient, Ho Chi Minh City today is a super-charged city of sensory overload. Motorbikes zoom day and night along the wide boulevards, through the narrow back alleys and past vendors pushing handcarts hawking goods of all descriptions. Still called Saigon by most residents, this is Vietnam's largest city and the engine driving the country's current economic resurgence, but despite its frenetic pace, it's a friendlier place than Hanoi and locals will tell you the food—simple, tasty, and incorporating many fresh herbs—is infinitely better than in the capital.This is a city full of surprises. The madness of the city's traffic—witness the oddball things that are transported on the back of motorcycles—is countered by tranquil pagodas, peaceful parks, quirky coffee shops, and whole neighborhoods hidden down tiny alleyways, although some of these quiet spots can be difficult to track down. Life in Ho Chi Minh City is lived in public: on the back of motorcycles, on the sidewalks, and in the parks. Even when its residents are at home, they're still on display. With many living rooms opening onto the street, grandmothers napping, babies being rocked, and food being prepared, are all in full view of passersby.Icons of the past endure in the midst of the city’s headlong rush into capitalism. The Hotel Continental, immortalized in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, continues to stand on the corner of old Indochina's most famous thoroughfare, the rue Catinat, known to American G.I.s during the Vietnam War as Tu Do (Freedom) Street and renamed Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street by the Communists. The city still has its ornate opera house and its old French city hall, the Hôtel de Ville. The broad colonial boulevards leading to the Saigon River and the gracious stucco villas are other remnants of the French colonial presence. Grisly reminders of the more recent past can be seen at the city's war-related museums. Residents, however, prefer to look forward rather than back and are often perplexed by tourists' fascination with a war that ended 40 years ago.The Chinese influence on the country is still very much in evidence in the Cholon district, the city's Chinatown, but the modern office towers and international hotels that mark the skyline symbolize Vietnam's fixation on the future.

In Cai Be this morning, visit the French Gothic cathedral and port area. Then, at a rice paper manufacture, learn how this Vietnamese staple is made. Continue to the quaint town of Sa Dec where French writer Marguerite Duras met her Vietnamese-Chinese lover, Huynh Thuy Le. Tour his former home and learn the story behind Marguerite Duras’ best-selling novel, The Lover. Afterwards, visit a traditional Cao Dai temple.

Step ashore in Tan Chau today for a rickshaw tour. On board your rickshaw, you’ll glide past shops, rice wine rooms and friendly locals who are always eager to say hello. Stop to pay a visit to a local silk and rattan weaving workshop. Later, step back in time during a visit to an evergreen island aboard a small boat, where you’ll experience authentic rural Mekong life. The remainder of today is left free for you to relax back on board your river ship.

Disembark in Phnom Penh after breakfast and enjoy today’s chosen activity. The evening is yours to relax.

Disembark in Phnom Penh and discover Oudong, an important place of pilgrimage in Cambodia where you’ll be treated to a special Signature Experience. Return to your ship via the village Koh Chen, where you will perhaps visit some home workshops that manufacture copperware. Later, your ship glides along the lush banks of the Mekong to Oknha Tey, a small island renowned for its skilful silk weaving traditions. Enjoy dinner onboard tonight.

Join a walking discovery of Angkor Ban, one of the few villages in Cambodia that was not destroyed under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Experience rustic agricultural life as you wander past the wooden stilted houses in this quiet, rural place.

Those who wish to climb Wat Hanchey this morning will be rewarded with stunning hilltop panoramas and some of the best views of the Mekong River. Following lunch on board, take a tuk tuk to explore the island of Koh Pen with its wooden stilt houses and local farming culture. This evening, a Farewell Dinner awaits onboard.

Disembark at Kampong Cham and transfer to Siem Reap. Afterwards, head to World Heritage-listed Angkor Archaeological Park to visit the enduring capital of the Khmer Empire, Angkor Thom, and the 12th-century temple of Bayon.