Cambodia onwards

So after Saigon i headed off with a sore head (purely self inflicted from $1 bottle of rum) for a tour of the Mekong Delta.  Having traveled on the Mekong up in Laos i thought it would be fun to have a look at the bottom of the Mekong.  The trip was fun with floating markets, fish farms etc.  

Floating markets are a great local solution if you don't want to buy a shop just park up a boat and sell from that (no rent to pay); in this case wholesaling of watermelons is going on 

It appears that floating fish farms are a bit of a booming market so the local construction teams keep a few in kitset form ready at all times

The term house boat here has a slightly different take; in the western world we start with a boat and modify it. Over here that start with a house tie a couple of 44 gallon drums to the undersides of the floor joists and hey presto your done (under the floor boards of these are actually fish farms as well as being the permanent residence for a family.

Following on from this was  couple of hours in boat up to the Thai border not nearly as enjoyable as the boat up the top of the Mekong mainly because down in Vietnam it is is big wide river with not much to see though the riverside farming was still interesting.

View up the Mekong in Vietnam

Onto Cambodia arriving in Phenom Pehn was interesting as soon as we crossed the border the horn no longer seemed to need to be used every 30 seconds and the roads improved so much (probably because aid agencies only got around to trying to seal roads in the last few years after the turmoil of the Pol Pot years so almost all seal in the country is less than 10 years old so not yet in need of  significant maintenance.)  So the drive into Phenom Phen was quite enjoyable.  Phenom Phen as far as a capital city goes is very relaxed with about 4 or 5 buildings over five stories and about one in every twenty vehicles belonging to an NGO of one sort or another.  Cambodia is definitely poorer than Vietnam or Thailand this is obvious if in nothing else least the fact that nobody even bothers to quote prices in the local currency everything is quoted in $US and the ATM's even give out $US (although US coins are not used so amounts less than $1US are paid in the local currency notes; even the local currency doesn't have coins).

The highlights of Phenom Phen are not really numerous and not overly positive i.e. they all relate to the Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) regime with a remembrance museum at the site of one of the death camps and at one of the worst interment jails (S21).  The violence of it all where Pol Pot and his party decided to create an agrarian society primarily by killing all educated and "privileged" people then slowly degenerating to a similar level of paranoia to that found in the Stalin regime where something like 1/4 of the population were killed or starved from the resultant famine caused by the political ideology during this regime which the Western World did nothing about.  Eventually Vietnam (who were repeatedly attacked by the Khmer Rouge) overthrew the government and exposed the truly horrendous nature of what had happened.  (note photos below not suitable for kids)

The girls with the shrine containing skulls excavated from the mass graves

The inscription reads "Magic tree... The tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were executed" 

 

The rules that existed at the S21 interment prison

The view from inside the prison note the wire over the openings was to stop prisoners from committing suicide before their interrogation had finished  (many prisoners provided thousands of pages of confessions to crimes they couldn't have committed)

The following are a few random shots from around Phenom Phen

 

I guess if sealed roads only arrived in the country a few years ago, asking them to understand angle parking is probably a bit much.

 

This one tickled my fancy; suggests that separation of state and religion is not a feature of the Cambodian government

Old style heavy lifter with a new style heavy lifter in the background

I took this photo sitting in my seat where i was having a beer at the Cafe when this elephant wandered down the road and popped his head under the awning for a feed of fruit etc which the cafe staff had on hand so i assume it is a regular occurrence.  Win win situation really; the cafe get rid of fruit off-cuts they couldn't sell and give tourists a thrill feeding the elephants so they come to this cafe, and the elephants owner gets free food. (NB this is not a zoomed in picture i actually wanted a wider angle lens to get in all that i wanted he was actually close enough that i could reach out and touch him)

 

The view from the balcony of my guesthouse where a sat and enjoyed a few beers most evenings in the city

No matter where you go home is never very far away me and a friend had desert in this restaurant  (unfortunately they didn't know what a pavlova was)

After few days in Pheomn Phen only the first of which was taken up visiting the Pol Pot stuff the rest was generally relaxing after i had been on the move almost everyday in Vietnam due to trying to get to everything i wanted to with the limited time on my visa I headed on to Kratie.

   

 Kratie is a small town about half way up the Mekong towards the Laos Border well known for its population of Mekong Irrawadi dolphins of which at last count there were only something like 69 left.  These are fresh water dolphins which is something i have always wanted to see.  It took about 8hrs to get to Kratie meaning that I didn't arrive till about 3pm luckily i had managed to meet three others getting from the bus t the accommodation so an hour later i had convinced them and organized to go see the dolphins that afternoon.  Sunset is a recommended time to see them. Quick feed was needed as eating much more than fruit at bus stops is pretty dodgy in the western world let alone in Cambodia hence we had all arrived pretty hungry.  It turned out the feed ate into our viewing time normally they do 90mins on the river but we arrived about 35mins before sunset so stayed until dark.  The time on the river drifting with the dolphins surfacing to breath every minute or so with the setting sun was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.  Mainly i think this was because these large mammals are probably not going to be around much longer very few are being killed by gil nets any more but there aren't many of them left and there is still a lot of pollution being pumped into the river upstream in China and Laos and these are apex predators.

 

File photo of the Dolphins i don't have mine uploaded yet and my photos aren't nearly this spectacular

My shot not nearly as good a shot of the dolphins but a much nicer setting (maybe next trip i will take a DSLR  to get a better photo)

The next day was a 10hr bus ride to Siam Reap which is a smallish town nearest to the temples of Angkor Wat.  The town mainly seems to exist to serve the temples and the resultant tourism boom for what some people have described as the 8th wonder of the world.  They certainly are special.

Angkor Wat actually only means one temple or "Wat" when the area around Siam Reap is actually littered with remains of temples and palaces of the Angkor Civilization which had many kings and almost as many palaces and Wat's.  While Angkor Wat is the biggest of them it is actually not the location of some of things people associate with it such as the Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones scenes which are temples that are overgrown with trees and vines etc.

Local kid seemed to be employed as the local grass mower with his water buffalo but i expect he made all his money from being paid to be in photos

We decided that either they were worried about their king getting fat or they wanted you to prove that you really wanted to worship by getting up these temples as the stairs definitely wouldn't meet current safety standards.

Me with the main Angkor Wat

Options for visiting these various ruins are either on the back of a motorbike, in a tuk tuk, or by bicycle, having eaten and drunk way to much recently and combined with a lot of hours sitting on buses  i decided i really needed to do it by bike.  I only intended to go to the nearer sites anyway which was about 15km return when i got there i found a nice ring road going a bit further and ended up doing about 35km the first day.  Despite sweating what must have been about half my body weight it was an amazing day where i managed to see everything i wanted except the two largest temples (Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom) so that was my mission for the next day which turned out just as good except that i found out after lunch that i had a slow leak in the back tire and the handle bars had come lose result was about 7km ride back to town on a fully flat back trye with handle bars that had a bout 10 degrees play in them so i rode home with the rear of the bike slewing all over the place and trying to hold the front wheel straight meant holding the handle bars in such a way as i could not turn or use the brakes so i eventually got back to town with a sore butt from the lack of cushioning the air filled tires normally give and aching wrists from holding the handle bars at an unnatural angle.

But despite all this i still had one of the  best experiences of my trip around the ruins one that i would thoroughly recommend to anybody.

In the evenings i had an interesting experience of fish foot treatment apparently they love to eat dead skin so you put your feet in and they just munch away getting rid of all the dead skin on your feet, definitely an interesting experience (having avoided getting a pedicure for the last 33 years it was an unusual experience; who said backpackers were dirty and smelly).

This put me in mind of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy quote regarding the babel fish that the existence of something so unlikely as a fish that would actually touch let alone eat filthy backpackers feet could not occur by  chance alone thereby proving the existence of god. (actual quote follows for the geeks among you; 'Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "'But,' says Man, 'The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic. "'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.') 

So on to Bangkok after two days in Siam Reap the bus ride was fun where we stopped for lunch and the guy with a hose came over and started spraying the radiator as soon as the engine had been turned off, I guess they didn't have much faith in the coolant system working properly.  So about 5km down the road from lunch the they pulled over to the side of the road and announced they had a problem with the brakes so were going to fix it.  A mechanic turned up on a moto scooter a couple of minutes later and proceeded to tinker away i figured this wasn't an entirely unexpected problem when he went in to locker on the side of the bus and pulled out what looked to be and entire new brake hydraulics system.  But that gave me a good chance to get some photos of some of the more interesting traffic going past.

The mechanic retrieving the spare brake mechanism out of the locker (because all buses should carry a spare brake)

Ma, Pa and the two kids on the bike (note the "health safety approved" scarf on the kids heads while the parents wear helmets)

 

Out for Sunday drive and the car is too fast? Take the tractor (a unique form of transport in S.E Asia, very common but i never did work out the design advantage to 3m long handle bars)

This guy challenges anybody to prove to him that the tailgate is any less load bearing than any other part of the deck, note the motorbike tied to the outside of the far side of the ute.

An hour later another bus turned up so we left our mechanic on the side of the road and headed off to the border. As per usual the border was dusty dirty and one side (in this case the no mans land between the countries) was full of casinos.

A kid going through the rubbish on one of the border towns

The 4th was a day to recover from the bus ride and visit the Royal Palace which is only about 2km's from Koh Sanh road (the main backpacker hangout in Bangkok and where i stay).  The palace and the temple of the emerald budda (in the same grounds) were very cool and made even more so by the preperations for the kings birthday the following day.  Not sure if i have talked about it before but the Thais are absolutely madly in love with their King (think of the UK forty or so years ago) so anything to do with him is like dealing with religion even to the point that it is illegal in Thailand to step on money if it is blowing away across the ground because there is an image of the king on all bills and to step on this would be disrespectful.

The palace with the kings colors white and gold

More shots of the palace

The fifth was the day before i flew back to Australasia so a few administrative tasks were necessary i had to buy socks and a belt i had both when i started the trip but i don't remember seeing either for some months now and they definitely aren't in my bag, i did have one pair of socks back when i flew into Vietnam and went walking up there (the last time i wore shoes instead of flip flops) but i have been missing the belt since right near the beginning of my trip. I have lost a bit off my belly so now when wearing jeans without a belt i am starting to look a lot like a kid from south Auckland i.e. crotch around the knees.

The evening of the fifth was the party for the Kings birthday the main reason why i came back to Bangkok rather than flying direct form Siam Reap to KL. I managed to go down to visit the parade grounds where it was all due to happen to check out the lie of the land before the start of th event and was about to cross the road when the police closed the road and everybody sat down on the ground where they were (with their feet pointing away from the road as it is rude to pint your feet at anybody important).  About 20 mins later a cavalcade of cars including a couple of stretched white rolls royce's whizzed past which i assume was the king during this time everybody had to stay seated and no photos were allowed. Once the road had reopened the number of people was pretty amazing but as i found out it was nothing compared to when i came back for the main event at 7:30pm. At this time all of Thailand was coordinated to light candles at the same time throughout the kingdom and make a toast (I think long live the king).

The masses of people arriving mid afternoon

the masses with the palace in the background

All the decorations around the streets

Getting ready for the lighting of the candels (this is normally a 6 lane highway that was closed and all roads in about a 2km radius were filled with people)

Then the fireworks; very full; on i was standing in the middle of the crowd about 100m away from where they were to be let off of course i didn't think about the fact that this was also downwind on a gentle breeze.  The result was after the first minute or so while i got some great photos i couldn't actually look at the fireworks due to the risk of the hot ash and other remanents of the fireworks raining down on us getting in my eyes.  But the photos did turn out fairly well.

Fireworks

And the remains of the fireworks that rained down on us

So that gets me to today the 6th of Dec.

Though i have still got Perth and Sydney along with the train ride from one to the other to go i feel like this is the end of something i guess i am heading back into easy familiar territory.  Not so much where i understand what is going on because Bangkok now feels familiar to me (having been here three times in the last three months), i think it is more that i am going somewhere that people understand my culture and have the same sort of value system as me so i can go back to considering how i would expect things to be and how i would want to be treated and that is generally what i will find is correct.

Overall the trip has been great i am feeling ready to go and use my brain again.  Did i gain any blinding flashes of insight into life no but then i have always thought that travel is about expanding your horizons and adding all the small lessons learnt to your existing knowledge base to make you a more rounded person. I don't think i have changed too much as a result of trip other than a welcome if not quite big enough reduction in my waist line (lugging a pack around and sweating all day everyday  will do that to you)and a pretty substantial tan.

I guess i have now "done" South East Asia which is a write of passage for so many young kiwis so it is one more of life's experiences that i can tick off.  Do i want ot come back? well there are a few things i would like to do.  I want to spend a coupe of weeks around Chang Mai in the north of Thailand to do elephant trekking, a few hikes etc. But this is able to be done in a couple of week holiday. Of course i would like to come back to visit the north of Laos but that could easily be tacked onto the back of a trip to China so all in in all i feel like i have visited the bits of SE Asia i wanted to see.

Lessons learnt (the dark side of the world)

The last week or so has been filled primarily with visits to memorials to the Vietnam war and the Pol Pot regime.   But back to where i left you all i headed from Hoi Ann up to a very cool place called Delat which the guidebook described as the home of kitsch in Vietnam and they weren't wrong filled with lakes with swan shaped paddle boats for two a cable car to a lake you can take a leisurely cruise on etc.  But primarily the place just had a nice friendly atmosphere the hotels had the best beds and full cooked buffet breakfasts eaten with the hotel hosts who were great conversationalists.  So i really enjoyed my couple of days there I didn't do a lot just visited the local market and on a walk about town to try to find the cog railway i ended up at a chairlift that i took out to lake where i spent a really enjoyable couple of hours with a Scottish couple i met there.

Never did manage to work out what these were supposed to be

Strictly cheesy

And one for all you honeymooners out there

Getting there involved my longest trip for awhile 8pm to 1pm the next day, overnight was understandably boring but the day trip was interesting leaving at 8am arriving at 1pm and covering 130km. We didn't actually  stop for any significant length of time the whole way, the road was just so bad that we actually drove at an average speed of about 30km an hour with the highlight being 15 minutes reversing back down the dirt track after the driver took the wrong fork at some road works.

Delat was like the greenhouse capital of the world these went on for miles

Vietnamese version of a car park (NB Vietnam has about 20 million motorbikes for 86 million people)

Leaving Delat was back down to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City depending on who you listen to) this supposedly 6hr journey (according to the travel agent) took 10hrs due to a lot of road works including one lot that we had to wait 1.5hrs at.  So i arrived in Saigon tired from a long day and as has been standard practice on this journey went out for a walk around the bars and restaurants to see if i knew anybody this time it took me about 5mins to run into a group of South African girls i had been traveling with up in the north if Vietnam so i hung out with them the next few days that was Friday i had planned to hang out in Saigon for only Saturday and Sunday then head off Monday but two of the girls that were on the boat trip up in the north of Vietnam had there birthdays on Monday night so i was convinced to stick around for the party.   (A bad idea as it turned out as i partied way too hard and the resultant sore head on the following days tour was not at all enjoyable).

In the wee small hours when everybody needed a hug

Saigons sights are pretty much all focused on the Vietnam war and particularly the nastier side of that was with the recreation of the tunnels (Chu Chi) focusing on the man traps that were deployed by the Vietnamese and the other major draw card being the war atrocities museum where the old maxim that the winning side writes history applies.  So it is fairly unique around the world in giving a very anti American view of history.
However no matter who tells them the reality of war is never nice to read about and despite all the propaganda (that only a communist government like Vietnam can come up with and still think that anybody will believe) the facts behind what happened were still horrendous and seeing the effects of agent orange and land mines as well as Napalm bombing and the torture that occurred in prisoner of war camps was a very sobering experience, one that was very similar for me to visiting and learning about the Nazi regime and soviet secret police atrocities in the Baltic states.

A little diversion in Saigon was to take a Cyclo (cycle taxi) this was my view you will note the road center line and the fact i am on the side of it with the oncoming traffic

This is what a cyclo looks like my (my friends Stace and JC taking the less adventurous and slower "correct" side of the road center line

Me climbing down the tiger tunnels (Chu Chi) that the Viet cong used to evade the American bombings (I know this entry does not meet the confined spaces requirements in NZ)

 

Tiger Traps

War Remembrance museum

Oops a gentle reminder from my lovely big sister reminded me i hadn't posted anything for awhile i am now back in Bangkok awaiting a flight back to Aussie in two days.  So i will try to finish this post today.

OK haven't quite managed to fully catchup yet but I'm getting hungry so will try to do the rest later in the day in day.

north to south the rice paddy tour

ok so trying to carry on the story things are all getting a bit complicated with I.T. between repeated viruses on camera memory sticks fast internet connections with keyboards that keep randomly changing back to vietnamese or the alternative of slow internet connections that stay in english and cost a bomb added to the fact that my main route for contacting fellow travelers, facebook, appears to have just been blocked throughout Vietnam.

My current status is on a slow internet connection with my memory card trying to copy 1.7gb of photos across to the local hard drive on a USB 1.0 port.  The hope is that i can then copy back to my portable hard drive which can be connected in the fast internet places.  Hopefully one of them will have something that can batch process photos as i was using the facebook uploader to upload photos at a manageable resolution.  All fun and games.


So where am i now? i am in a town called Hoi An which is a sleepy little old town on a river near to the beach about 30km south of De Nanag (or the more well known location of china beach)  The plan was to spend a couple of nights here hanging out on a push bike going to the beach etc.  Unfortunately it started to rain about 3am this morning and is forecast to continue to rain for about 1 week so i am thinking i might just get out of here tomorrow afternoon.  Soinstead i am enjoying the local food which is particullarly good

Hoi An town it is built around a quaint little river with restaurants and stalls everywhere

 

Hoi an food very nice they specailise in a type of noodle soup and dumpling and spring rolls

Back to where i got to in my last post I think I was talking about the walking in Sapa.  The walking wasn't too hard but it was still quite steep and most people had trouble dealing with slippery muddy patches etc.  Most fun was the local women who walked the whole way with us trying to get us to buy things. The art of having fun with while not encouraging touts too much seem to be one that is requiered everywhere in the world except NZ but i am getting quite good at it.  Of course the good healthy lifestyle aimed for was slightly marred by the homestay we were put up in for the night pulling out a few bottles of "happy water" and insisting we drink with them.  Happy water in this case is the local version of fire water apparently made from fermented rice and called rice wine.  In summary it is strong very alcoholic and the closest i can come to describing the taste is that it was very similar taste to when in the past i have had to resort to siphoning petrol  and sucked for a second too long and hence got a mouthful.  Basically a major component of drinking this stuff is to be able to subdue your gag reflex, luckily years in South America have honed this skill to a high level.

Rice Wine notice it is strored in a bottle that used to have drinking water in it the potential for a mistake is huge

So after the first day wandering around in the warm sun across rice paddy and dirt tracks i was looking forward to more of the same on day two when we woke there was a little fog around which just made it more atmospheric. Of course we didn't actually start walking till it had started to rain properly and the cloud had dropped so we were in the middle of it.  Hence day two's trekking was more an exercise in trying not to slip over on the muddy paths while pairing into the mist trying to imagine the beautiful view that would be there if only we could see it.  Mid afternoon we were picked up to be taken back to Sapa town a fun trip in itself as corners and on coming traffic suddenly appeared out of the foggy gloom by the time we arrived back in Sapa the mercury had dived to around 15 degrees (don't forget i brought no warm clothes with me as i was heading to hot places) at this point sightseeing around town was getting perilous as you couldn't actually see to the other side of the street to check for traffic before crossing the fog was so thick.  Eventually we did make it back alive to Hanoi after another overnight train trip.  My body was starting to fall over by this stage as previous sleeps going backwards in order had been;

1. train trip back to hanoi (we arrived at 4:30am) 
2. night in homestay (happy water and sleeping on thin mats on the floor in a room with 17 others)
3. train trip to Sapa (beers on the train with some english blokles i meet till mid night then train arrived at 4:30am)
4. 2 nights on the party boat trip to Haulong Bay

So in true traveller tradition arrive back in town rather than book a room to recover for the next night i booked a 14hr bus ride out of town starting at 8pm that night.  As i was now at the point of having to stop every time i climbed two stairs to cough up a lung (then spend five minutes trying to get my breath back) I thought it was probably only fair to my fellow bus mates that i go to the chemist pick up some cough medicine and finally lose the last of my dignity by donning one of these ridiculous masks you see asian people everywhere wearing.


The next morning i arrived in Hue, (an old town that used to be home to a number of dynasties that ruled Vietnam prior to the french being around), a little tired, and for the first time in a number of days, actually collapsed into a real bed on solid ground.  Unfortunately my timetable didn't allow for Hue to be a place to stop and relax rather a quick rush around to see the ruins of the dynasties then onto the next stop.  In the event i managed to see what i wanted to see in two half days sightseeing saving a bunch of time by taking motorbike taxis rather than hireing my own pushbike.

Ok i have been to the Ice Hotel in the Artic made of ice, and the Salt Hotel in Bolivia made of salt but what exactly have they made the beds out of at the Movenpick hotel in Hue?

Brief summary of Hue is a citadel that had the heck bombed out of it by the yanks but is still very nice and some tombs from the old emprors that were well worth the vist for the pomp and granduer of it all (my favourite was the lake and island the king had dug out and populated with rare birds because he felt it would help his poetry writting).  Other than this the DMZ (former border between north and south vietnam is also near here but like most old borders physical remanents are pretty well all gone so the tour apprently consists of looking at fields and being told what used to be there (hence the reason why i didn't bother with this tour)

Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue

Part of the complex of the tu duc tomb

So we arrive to where i am now Hoi An I arrived approx 6pm last night and figured after a number of nights on the road i deserved somewhere a bit nicer, of course the first 20 places that i went to did not have any rooms nice or not, so when i finally found somewhere with a free room i took it.  It is amazing how in the space of one hour looking for a room you can go from being certain that you will accept nothing less than a nice room in a place with a nice pool and attached bar to being happy with a room without an external window.  In  retrospect the whole pool thing has been rendered a bit pointless by the rain so probably just as well i didn't splash out.

Movement from here; if i can get on tomrrows bus (18hr hell ride) i will head down to a place called Delat in the mountains close to Ho Chi Minh City (known to everybody other than the leaders of the communist party as Saigon) then after a couple of days in Saigon up the Mekong to Cambodia.  Having cut Hoi An short i now am not soo pushed for time to get out of Vietnam before the 25th when my visa runs out so there maybe time to go and hang out somewhere down on the mekong delta for a day or two.