Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon turned out to be Dave's favourite city in South East Asia (so far), though I think I still prefer Bangkok and Vientaine. The traffic there is every bit as crazy as rumour has it, and really has to be seen to be believed. On busy roads there is a separate lane for motorbikes, and it is necessary to cross the road in stages. Sometimes I admit I just looked at the pavement, held my breath and let Dave drag me across, my fingers clenched around his wrist...In parts of the city where the traffic was particularly jammed or there was a one-way system we also saw (and dodged) motorbikes which suddenly cut away from the road to zoom along the pavement instead.

We stayed in the central backpacker district, on a busy boulevard called Pham Ngu Lao.It is a street which combines glitz and chaos, yet narrow alleys full of character wind off it in every direction. The area had some of the neon insanity of Khao San Road, but somehow didn't feel quite so touristy. The locals around the area seemed to be going about their daily lives as well as selling things to tourists, which is not the case at Khao San.

Our second day in Saigon we spent wandering the city and doing various touristy things. We checked out the Reunfication Palace and spent a couple of hours in the War Remnants Museum. The museum was extremely harrowing but very informative and definitely worth a visit. I learned a lot of things about the conduct of the US at the time which made me very, very angry - for example, the use of toxic chemicals by the US on civilians means that the effects of the war are not over even today, as the children of people exposed to it are often born with deformations. Looking around the museum made me realise how much of my information about the Vietnam War was just gleaned from Hollywood movies -  not the most reliable or objective source - so it was good to get another perspective. We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling out at the Zoo and Botanical Gardens, before we went out for pho for dinner. Pho is a famous traditional Vietnamese dish, which crudely explained is noodle soup containing either rare or cooked beef, or chicken. The soup is flavoured with lemongrass and other herbs and usually contains beansprouts and green veg. Chillis, fish sauce and soy sauce are often served alongside it so you can flavour it to taste.

On our second full day in Saigon we eschewed a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels (kind of Disneyfied apparently...) in favour of more wandering of the city and a visit to the History Museum which was incredibly boring but did have a little sweetener at the end when we discovered a photo of George W Bush visiting it in 2005! We went to a posh ice cream parlour for gigantic ice cream sundaes afterwards, where we people-watched before walking back through town. Dinner was at a busy Indian restaurant and was pretty tasty although not the best Indian food we've had on our trip so far. A drink at a rooftop bar finished our trip to Saigon - the next morning we were up at six to get a bus to the mountains.

Around the Mekong Delta: Chau Doc, Rach Gia, Phu Quoc

For the crossing into Vietnam we opted to take a slow boat down the Mekong to Chau Doc in Vietnam. We organised our visas in Phnom Penh - they were expensive compared to the Cambodian ones, but took just four hours to process. The 'border' consisted on each side of just a quiet office on riverbank, although to enter Vietnam we did have to undergo a 'health examination', which involved walking past a doctor and promising we didn't have swine flu... The boat along the Mekong was much more interesting after entering Vietnam - we saw water buffalo wallowing at the side of the river, as well as people fishing, washing and swimming.

Chau Doc itself was a vibrant and bustling town, although we both immediately felt a sense of disorientation as Vietnam is so different to Laos, Cambodia and Thailand - a lot of people have told us it is more like China. The Mekong Delta is very heavily populated and the river is at the centre of most peoples' lives. Houses on stilts line the riverbanks, and many people keep fish farms in the water below. The riverfront in Chau Doc was very pretty, although the rest of the town was more chaotic than attractive.

We stayed just one night then headed off to Phu Quoc island the following day. It was an exhausting journey - along with four English guys (who gratifyingly seemed even more clueless than us) and 13 locals we were crammed onto a minbus designed for ten people. Other passengers included a muzzled dog and a bucket of fish. The scenery en route was pretty interesting - we saw a lot of rice paddies, as well as sprawling towns all boasting many identical roadside cafes advertising pho, and water buffalo pulling carts. From Rach Gia, we jumped on the back of motorbikes to head to the port then caught the hydrofoil to Phu Quoc island.

The island is 150km off the Southern coast of Vietnam, close to the border with Cambodia. There are plans to develop it further but at the moment it remains blissfully quiet, with long stretches of pristine beach. On arrival, we hopped like pros onto the back of two more motos for the 13km journey to our chosen beach. I was a bit nervous as the roads were either loose gravel or dirt so a spill could have been nasty, but all went well.

We stayed in a bungalow five minutes walk from the beach, down a rough dirt track which at night was entirely unlit and quite scary. My led headlamp finally had its day! Our time on the island passed in a haze of sunbathing, swimming and snacking on great food at the many quiet beachside restaurants.

Some of the main beach was taken over by big resorts but there were still stretches of sand where it was possible to lie under a palm tree and see no one else to either direction. All the tourists we saw wandering the beach had the same dazed expression, as if they couldn't quite believe how picture-perfect the island was. During our time there we discovered lemon rum - a dirt cheap concoction of Vietnamese rum and sweetened lemon juice. I also ended up ordering nem - Vietnamese spring rolls - every day we were there. They are infinitely superior to spring rolls from any other Asian country! Our favourite restaurant was on the beach right next to the sea - in order to see the menu you actually had to walk through the sea. It had little wooden tables and red plastic chairs, with one dim romantic lamp adorning each table. We went there several nights in a row for the excellent marinaded bbq chicken, served with rice and salad.

We ended up devoting quite a large chunk of our time in Vietnam to the island, partly because lack of advance planning meant we had to get the hydrofoil back a day later than we had intended. The journey to Saigon took about 11 hours in total, but we eventually got there at 10pm on the 22nd of March.

Phnom Penh - No pavements but a lot of bars

We arrived in Phnom Penh on Friday 12th of March full of trepidation - we had read that armed hold-ups were not unheard of and that drive-by bag snatching was pretty common. Luckily our stay there was entirely without incident and the worst threat we faced was from the traffic. We stayed on the riverfront, which is one of the more expensive areas for accomodation. The riverfront itself embodied all the contradictions of Cambodia - street-children begging in front of glitzy hotels, and metres of perfect promenade followed by areas where the 'pavement' was just a stretch of sand.

Our time in Phnom Penh was spent mostly in a series of cafes and bars - venturing out onto the street became exhausting due to the constant cries of 'tuk-tuk?' and the invitations to buy sunglasses, books or drugs. Walking around the city was incredibly interesting but difficult to do for long, as the narrow pavements became non-existant for long stretches due to the tables, chairs, stalls, shops and motorbikes which spilled our over them. We were forced to walk on the road instead, which meant constantly being on guard against the frenetic traffic...

We skipped the Royal Palace, both feeling a bit sick of sight-seeing after Angkor Wat, and baulking at the $6 dollar entrance fee. One 'tourist' site we did visit was Tuol Seng Prison, also called S-21. It was the major detention and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge and today stands testament to the atrocities committed there. The graphic photos and victim accounts were a real eye-opener for me, and I found it especially shocking to learn that the UN recognised the Khmer Rouge as a legitimate government until 1990. The genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge is so difficult to connect to Cambodia's vibrant present, and even more difficult to try and make sense of.

 Every night of our stay in Phnom Penh found us at the Foreign Correspondent's Club for their happy hour between 5 and 7pm. The bar has a rooftop terrace (where all the street view pictures in this post were taken) and a great range of cocktails. It was a good place to sit with a Singapore Sling and feel decadent, while people-watching and nibbling bar snacks.

We enjoyed our stay in Phnom Penh but were keen to get to somewhere a bit less chaotic to recover from its madness. On Tuesday 16th we travelled to Vietnam, and soon found the perfect beach hideout - a deserted island 150km from the mainland. Not a tuk-tuk in sight!

Angkor Wat - eighth wonder of the world?

***Apologies for delay in posting, brevity of this post and scarcity of pictures - facebook and blogger are both blocked throughout Vietnam, so the entire process of uploading pictures, transferring them to my blog, and blogging at all involves hours of fiddling around with proxy servers, which are painfully slow....Also apologies to everyone on facebook I should have been in touch with. Censorship sucks! ***

We liked Siem Reap so much we stayed there for a week, far longer than we had intended to. Post-orphanage visit, our remaining time was spent during the day wandering the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, and at night on Pub Street, a pedestrianised road lined with cosmopolitan bars and eateries. We ate at one place, the Khmer House Restaurant, no less than three times - Mick Jagger has reputedly eaten there in the past, and the food really was excellent. Among the things we tried were amok (steamed fish with coconut), a sour winter melon and tamarind curry, Khmer laap (which we preferred to the Laos version) and a Khmer lemongrass soup. We also liked a French restaurant called Le Tigre de Papiere - it served lovely pizzas which had cream atop them as well as cheese... We were going to have dinner at a bar Angelina Jolie visited but the drinks were twice as much as the pub next door so we left!

 Angkor Wat is really a massive complex of temples set in a large wooded park. We opted for a three day pass to the park although even that length of time does not allow you to see all of them. On our first day we cycled in from Siem Reap, a journey of just 7km. Our route around the park was about another 20km. Cycling was very pleasant, as although it was extremely hot, much of the road was shaded by the overhanging trees. The temples we visited on our first day were smaller and more remote, and so a lot less touristy. It was easy to feel at times like an explorer coming across ruins in the jungle, especially considering Angkor Wat was not rediscovered until after the second world war.

On our second day at Angkor Wat, Dave persuaded me to get a tuk-tuk around the park, which admittedly was very comfortable and meant we didn't have to cycle back in the dark. We were visiting some of the more famous temples, which meant inevitably there were more people there and it was harder to fully appreciate the beauty of the ruins. We started with Angkor Thom, itself once a walled city of over a million inhabitants. It had some temples with incredibly preserved stone carvings, and another with mysterious faces carved into each of its towers.

We checked out a couple of smaller ones after that, before visiting Ta Prohm, where much of Tombraider was filmed. The jungle is devouring it - massive trees jut out of the ramparts, and vines creep over piles of fallen stones. For sunset we went to a temple with views over the park, but there were hundreds of people crowded onto each available inch of the walls, so a lot of the romance was lost.

On our final day at Angkor Wat, we got up at the horrendous time at 4.30am, and left our guesthouse at 5am in order to be there for sunrise. The park was pitch black when we arrived, save for the occasional flash of someone's torch. Walking across the drawbridge which spans the moat encircling the main temple felt like some kind of ancient pilgrimage. Closer to the temple itself, some entrepreneurial people were selling seats overlooking the lake, with a free hot drink. The sunrise itself was beautiful to watch.

At around 6am we left our chairs to wander around the main temple, Angkor Wat itself. It was virtually deserted, which gave it a kind of magic. I would definitely recommend making an effort to visit Angkor Wat at quieter times as the experience is so much better if you do. For those interested, there are more pictures on Dave's facebook and I should have mine up soon, provided I can get access....

Cambodia - corruption, street children, cocktails

Our journey from Laos into Cambodia began early in the morning at our guesthouse, where we had bought tickets for a "VIP" (read: aircon) bus which would take us all the way across the border and then onwards to Kratie. But in order to get to the bus, we first had to be transported individually by motorbike to the boat landing 2km out of town. Along with me and Dave were the two English women in their fifties from our guesthouse - they hopped onto the motorbikes nonchalantly and zoomed off, leaving me no choice but to do the same. My first motorbike ride was pretty exhilarating - it helped that the only traffic was chickens, and also that it wasn't Dave driving...

Once at the border, we filled out the Cambodian visa application forms, and handed over no less than $3 dollars each in bribes, on top of the visa fee, in order to get the officials to stamp our forms. For some reason, I was asked for an extra dollar at one of the stages, my first one having mysteriously vanished. The bribe money was stuffed into brimming briefcases after we handed it over, a stereotype of corruption which turned out to be pretty accurate.

Kratie, where we spent our first night in Cambodia, did little to dispel the unfavourable impression made by the border guards. It has a lovely riverfront, but this is made difficult to stroll down by the crowds of moto and tuk-tuk drivers who hound you as persistently as the mosquitoes. After Laos, that kind of in-your-face soliciting came as quite a culture shock. Sadly Cambodia also seems to have a great chasm between rich and poor; on the bus into town we saw many expensive, walled colonial-style house, yet 2 km out of the centre the road becomes a dirt track and the houses ramshackle huts. The country is much dirtier than Laos or Thailand as well, with piles of refuse lying uncollected.

Luckily, Siem Reap (gatehouse to Angkor Wat) charmed us both when we arrived there the following day, and we ended up staying much longer than we had intended. It is an attractive, safe and friendly place, which manages to be at once touristy and foreign. The centre has a market selling tempting souvenirs and a couple of streets lined with restaurants and bars, reminiscent of Ashton Lane. One of our favourite hangouts while we were there was a Mexican restaurant called Viva, which sold excellent frozen margaritas and even better nachos.

Cambodia's poverty was still painfully visible in Siem Reap and in stark contrast to the glitzy bars. Street children and land mine victims approach you as you sit at a cafe, selling crap you don't need but feel guilty not buying. The feelings of guilt and sadness were difficult to handle, so when we were given an invitation to visit a local orphanage and attend a dance performance I felt glad of the chance to do something positive. 

 

When we arrived at the orphanage by tuk-tuk we were surrounded by crowds of chattering children, who clutched our hands and hugged us, while pulling us in to sit down. The performance lasted about an hour (pictured above) and was of traditional Khmer dance. It was really interesting and we were given refreshments and food as well. Afterwards we danced with the children and talked to some of the volunteers, including a French guy with movie-star good looks who had been coming every day for three weeks, giving up his  planned trip to Vietnam. We left as much of a donation as we could afford and asked if we could come back the following day to help out.

 

 Our reception the following morning was just as enthusiastic, and our first few hours there were spent primarily playing with the children and helping them practice their English. They could all speak more than basic English and were glad of a chance to show it off. They all seemed happy, and they were all well-fed although books and toys were very rare. The orphanage was pretty anarchic - it was clearly under-staffed and under-founded, but several more volunteers turned up later that day which was encouraging. Among them was the French guy (Benjamin) who started a maths lesson shortly after his arrival. We all helped out, in between reading English primers - the children kept asking for more and more sums to work out. David ended up spending a couple of hours on maths with one particular boy, who showed a natural aptitude. He was just eleven, but grasped the principles of square roots and equations as quickly as Dave could teach them. In the meantime I spoke to some of the older girls and played with some of the little children, who just seemed to want attention. The whole day was incredibly rewarding for us, and hopefully beneficial at least in a small way to the orphanage as well.

Island Hopping in the Mekong

***Apologies for the delay in posting - I blame it on a combination of writer's block and exhaustion after days of traipsing around ancient ruins....***

The Four Thousand Islands is an area of Southern Laos right next to the Cambodian border, where the Mekong fans out and becomes even wider and slower. Hundreds of little islands and outcrops of land are scattered around these waters, which are also home to the rare Irrawaddy dolphins. The islands feel almost as if they could be in the Caribbean - they have sandy beaches and palm trees and the Mekong here is a clear and clean blue. 

  

We travelled on Monday 1st of March to the largest of the islands, Don Khong. We went by local bus, a journey that was meant to take four hours but instead lasted six. Along the way we saw women on the roadside selling bunches of a large, white fruit/vegetable which appeared to be a cross between a garlic bulb and an onion. Most of the people on the bus bought a bunch and began eating them like apples. A local woman, seeing our curious faces, offered us one each to try - they turned out to be bunches of water chestnuts, but much fresher than the tinned kind we're used to in Britain. 

Don Khong's riverfront in the main town was lined with restaurants, all selling cheap beer and good food and boasting romantic views of the river, lit only by dim strings of fairy lights. We spent the night out there with our books, after bumping into some backpackers we'd met at the waterfalls on the Bolaven Plateau. The following morning we hopped on a boat going to another of the islands - the rugged and unspoiled Don Kon - or so we thought.... After a picturesque boat journey, we ended up instead on Don Det, a more touristy island joined to Don Kon by an old railway bridge built by the French. The boatmen claimed that water levels were too low to take us all the way round to Don Kon....hmmm. 

We could have stayed on Don Det but opted to head over to Don Khon anyway, where we settled into a bungalow on the riverfront, with a veranda and of course a hammock. While excellent for relaxing on, the open-plan nature of the bungalows meant we spent a lot of time inadvertently eavesdropping on our neighbours, an odd couple comprising an arrogant American and a weedy-looking English guy with hair twice the length mine is at the moment. We also saw two English women who were around fifty about a lot - they were easy to spot as they were surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke and cheerful exclamations. The islands are for the most part uninhabited, and electricity is fairly new to these parts. Don Det is developing into a bit of a backpacker scene, and the riverside there is thronged with cafes and travel agents. At the moment it is still fairly easy to escape/ignore this but in a few years I suspect it may be more similar to Vang Vieng....

 While on the islands, we tried another Lao speciality - steamed fish cooked in banana leaf,pictured above. It tastes of lime and lemongrass and melts in the mouth, although the soft texture is a bit odd. As you would expect, fish is very prevalent in the islands and I also tried fried catfish and chips. It was very good although it did make me a bit homesick!
       
A lot of our time on the islands was spent reading and drinking fruit shakes, but we also managed to rent bikes and go on a trip to one of the waterfalls on the island. It was a brutally hot day and even in the shade we dripped with sweat. After a while we were looking longingly at the foam of the rapids and fantasizing about leaping off the craggy rocks. There was a popular swimming spot nearby which we headed to afterwards - the river there was almost as warm as a bath, and the sand burnt our feet when it spilled into our sandals.

 On our second full day on the islands we woke up early and biked across Don Kon to the rusting French pier at the southern tip. There we organized a boat trip to see the Irrawaddy dolphins in the wild, along with a chatty Canadian girl travelling by herself. She was going to be starting a Phd on dolphins in September, so she was pretty excited about the whole excursion. Personally I enjoyed the scenery and the boat trip more than the glimpses of the dolphins, although the day was so still we could hear them making snuffling noises. We saw them several times in the hour, usually just glimpses of fins and slippery backs as they slid through the waves.

On Friday 5th of March we travelled to Cambodia, by motorbike, (!!!) bus and boat. Details of bribery, poverty and decadence to follow....

Into the Wild: Around Tha Khaek and the Bolaven Plateau

To backtrack to a more innocent time, before lost passports and days spent hanging around the police station, you might recall we were heading south on the 7am bus yo a famous cave, which you can travel through on a boat. We missed the bus by 5 mins, and as there wsn't another till the next day, decided to head to a small town in the south called Th Khaek instead. As we later found out the cave is home to the world's biggest spiders (!!!) perhaps it was for the best....
          Tha Khaek is a nice little place but there's very little to do in the town itself. However, it was fated to become the site of an epic battle, known to history forevermore as the Motorbike Dispute. Many people use Tha Khaek as a base for exploring the surrounding countryside, dominated by limestone crags and peppered with caves. The most popular way of doing this is by motorbike. Now, while cars are relatively rare in SE Asia, at times it seems literally everyone has a motorbike. I've seen children who by law in Britain would have to sit on a booster seat in the car driving them, as well as four or five people riding the same one, usually with a baby right up at the handlebars. Helmets and leather protective gear are as rare as snowflakes. It starts to seem so normal and looks so easy that it's unsurprising Dave was seduced, and suggested we rent one. As I like my limbs more or less intact I suggested bicycles instead. The 'discussion' was...lengthy, but in relationships it's generally not the done thing to force someone into activities which terrify them, so I ultimately me and my fear won the day.

 We rented bikes and headed off on the 35km round trip of the main caves in the area. The heat was brutal, and the area so untouristy that most of the caves were not signposted and proved virtually impossible to find. We never got to the first one we looked for, but found instead a tiny village full of pigs and chickens. We cycled through it followed by clouds of red dust - children came running from the bamboo huts to shout "Sabaidee! Sabaidee!" (Hello) after us, and sometimes to run down the road after us.
          
The second cave proved equally unreachable, but we met three Japanese guys and an English girl from our hostel, coming from the opposite direction on motorbikes. They shared their juice with us and said they'd had problems finding the other caves too. As we set off, they looked doubtfully at us, down the long road ahead, and said "Maybe you should have got motorbikes...."

We carried on down the road and found a little wooden sign for one of the caves we had been searching for. We cycled down a dirt track, followed by some children from a nearby house. The way to the cave was a barely visible, overgrown path through thick scrub and trees. One of the boys took pity on us and ran ahead to show us the way, which involved walking across a fallen tree trunk over the river. (Above.) That isn't usually the kind of thing that freaks me out, but with my knees threatening to give way after one step, I was reduced to crawling across it, watched in silence by about ten Lao boys playing in the river.

After checking out the cave and a bit of paddling in the stream, our guide - called Sala - took us back by a different route, presumably out of deference to my cowardice. On the way we saw pineapples growing wild among the bushes, which was cool - David has a picture on his facebook. Back at our bikes, we gave Sala 10000 kip for his services as tour guide, because we'd probably still be there looking for the cave if we'd tried to find it ourselves. We cycled on a bit further, met a mysterious Irish biker who directed us on a detour, then headed back to our guesthouse to sit around the campfire.

 

The next day we arrived in Pakse, where the Unfortunate Event happened. I'll skip over that to talk about about the organised day trip we went on to kill time while the police were taking the weekend off. Along with two Germans and a French couple we visited the Bolaven Plateau, an area of virtual wilderness, where much of the world's Arabica coffee is grown. First stop was a coffee and tea plantation, followed by no less than three waterfalls and a minority village. It was a nice day but I definitely prefer the freedom of doing day trips ourselves even if that means spending half the time wandering around lost. We've travelled even further into the wilderness at the moment and will stay here and lounge on hammocks for a couple of days before crossing the border to Cambodia...