Can Tho to Chau Doc: delta crossing
Can Tho · Long Xuyen · Chau Doc
Illustrative regional or transport photo; not a promised stop. ©
Make the river plain the focus of a one-way day. Stop for a proper lunch around Long Xuyen and arrive with enough energy for a short evening walk in Chau Doc.
Upstream, against the silt
This is a one-way day up the right bank of the Hậu, from the delta's commercial capital to its border town, and the whole point of it is that you are riding upstream. Cần Thơ sits on land the Mekong finished making; An Giang is where the river arrives in Vietnam, and it is still busy. Both the Tiền and the Hậu enter the country here, and the province they enter — reorganised in 2025, when An Giang and Kiên Giang were merged into a single An Giang of 9,888.91 square kilometres and just under five million people — is now the largest in the delta by area. The land is flat and tilts gently from north-east to south-west, so the water does too, and everything about the year here is set by how much of it there is. The Khmer name for this country was Moăt Chruk; the Nguyễn chronicles call it Tầm Phong Long, the ground between the two rivers, and it came under Vietnamese administration only in the eighteenth century. You will see all three layers on one afternoon: Vietnamese communal houses, Khmer temples and, across the river at Châu Giang, Cham Muslim villages with minarets.
The canal that drew the border
Châu Đốc exists because of a ditch. In 1816 the fort here was finished and the governor of Vĩnh Thanh reported that a waterway west to Hà Tiên would pay for itself; Gia Long agreed in the ninth lunar month of 1819 and work began on the fifteenth day of the twelfth. The line was measured straight from the fort through the Ca Âm mud flats: 44,412 tầm, which the chronicle converts to 205 and a half dặm. They dug it fifteen tầm wide and six thước deep, and each labourer was paid six quan and a measure of rice a month. In modern units the Vĩnh Tế canal is 87.34 kilometres long, about 30 metres wide and two and a half deep, and it took from 1819 until the governorship of Lê Văn Duyệt to finish. The chronicle is blunt about the cost: open country, bad air, no medicine, and deaths from sickness, exhaustion, crocodiles and snakes. It is named after Châu Thị Tế, the wife of the man who ran the work, Thoại Ngọc Hầu. Today it runs beside the Cambodian border almost the whole way, which is not a coincidence: the canal is why the border is where it is.
Sam mountain and the lady on it
Five kilometres south-west of Châu Đốc a granite hill of 284 metres stands alone out of the rice — Núi Sam, also called Vĩnh Tế Sơn. The French quarried it for road stone from 1890; before that, and since, it has been the religious centre of the whole border country. Four monuments on and around it make up the national heritage site: the Bà Chúa Xứ shrine, the Tây An pagoda, the tomb of Thoại Ngọc Hầu and the cave pagoda of Phước Điền. The statue in the shrine was found on the summit before the eighteenth century and carried down, the story says, by nine virgin girls acting on the Lady's own instruction through a medium; when the French archaeologist Malleret examined it in 1941 he identified it as a seated male deity of the Vishnu type carved from red sandstone at the end of the sixth century — quite possibly an object of the Óc Eo culture. The shrine was rebuilt in brick in 1870 and again in stone in 1962. Its festival, the Vía Bà, runs from the twenty-third to the twenty-seventh of the fourth lunar month, with the bathing of the Lady at midnight and the procession of Thoại Ngọc Hầu's tablets from his tomb on the twenty-fourth; it has been a national festival since 2001.
Two more buildings worth the stop
Next to the shrine is the Tây An pagoda, put up in 1847 by Doãn Uẩn, governor of An Giang and Hà Tiên, to mark the end of a war: brick walls, a blue-stone plinth, tiled roof, and a name meaning 'peace secured in the west'. It was rebuilt in 1958 into what you see now, laid out on the character 三 and combining Vietnamese temple carpentry with Indian forms — the tower over the entrance is built in the manner of a minaret, most likely borrowed from the Cham mosques across the Hậu at Châu Giang, of which the Mubarak mosque is the nearest. It became a national architectural monument in July 1980. A few hundred metres west is the third thing: the Sơn Lăng, Thoại Ngọc Hầu's tomb. He buried his second wife here in 1821 and his first, Châu Thị Tế, in 1826, and was laid between them when he died in 1829. Nine laterite steps over a hundred metres long climb to a level yard; five stone tablets are set into the wall, and the middle one is very probably the Vĩnh Tế Sơn stele of 1828 — head-high sandstone, 730 Chinese characters, put up four years after the canal was done.
How to ride it, and where to stop halfway
Highway 91 runs the whole way and it is a working road: about 130 kilometres, four to six hours with the stops, and it carries rice lorries, buses and everything on two wheels. Break it at Long Xuyên, sixty kilometres in — the boats on the river off the Ô Môi landing are a smaller, quieter floating market than Cái Răng, and the ferry from that landing crosses to Ông Hổ island, where the house Tôn Đức Thắng grew up in was built by his father in 1887 and the memorial around it has been a special national monument since 2012. From Long Xuyên it is another fifty-five kilometres to Châu Đốc, and the Núi Sam group is a last seven kilometres beyond the town. Arrive with light to spare: the border zone has checkpoints, the canal road is unlit, and this is a place to sleep rather than to turn round in.
We lead this ride ourselves.
The guide is from our team, the route is one we have ridden, and you have one chat with us for the whole trip.
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