Neighbouring Trang An is less popular than Tam Coc, but offers a similar experience: foot-paddled boats take visitors through the water wonderland and under cave arches to remote temples hitched to tiny wedges of riverbank.
After an hour, we came to rest and we climbed up the riverbank to the tiny stilted-house settlement of Don Khoun, where we were joined by an additional village guide, provided as part of Tiger Trails' initiative to involve locals in the tourism activities.
You're walking a narrow gangplank over a muddy shore, and then ascending a sandy riverbank to discover a tiny village or a vibrant town full of people who are thinking about daily life, not tourism.
It took a seven-hour ride on a horrendous road, a 45-minute canoe ride and a scramble up a muddy riverbank to get to a tiny village in Mexico's embattled Chiapas state, but Los Angeles lawyer Terrence Grace reached the people he was seeking.
This was a period of extraordinarily expensive bridges to sparsely inhabited regions, multi-lane roads between tiny rural communities, cementing over the few remaining natural riverbanks, and pouring ever greater volumes of concrete into the sea walls that were supposed to protect 40% of the Japanese coastline.
This 40-year-old so-called resort is actually a collection of tiny bamboo eating places spread out along 500 yards of riverbank.
It turned out that water voles don't actually travel around in tiny cabin cruisers, with friendly hamsters, as previous television accounts of riverbank life might have lead you to expect.
The Elk shares its narrow band of flatland with two-lane roads, train tracks, and tiny vacation shacks perched on the slope between the berm and the riverbank.
Her "Oxbow" includes cookie-cutter suburban houses along the shoreline, while on the riverbank in her "Twilight in the Wilderness," she has added tiny lettering, phrases taken from Bruce Nauman's 1984 neon "One Hundred Live and Die".
