Angkor What?

After a night in Kompong Cham, it was time for yet another long bus ride to another city in Cambodia. I didn’t mind this one, though, because at least we were going to stay at our next destination, Siem Reap, for three days.

After arriving in Siem Reap, we took some time to clean up and went for an orientation walk. I had eaten breakfast in Kompong Cham, but it was getting pretty close to three o’clock and I was getting hungry. I cut out early on the orientation walk and grabbed some grub. Then I went and checked out the local market, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It ended up being an early night because we had to get up early the next morning for the fun stuff, so I’ll just skip forward to that.

At 4:30 am the next morning, we awoke in order to hop on a bus to head to Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the national symbol of Cambodia, it’s on their flag for Pete’s sake, and was built by a Cambodian king (or rather, his subjects) in the first half of the 12^th century. It is featured heavily in the Lara Croft, Tomb Raider film, or so I’m told – I haven’t seen it – but was a treasured site well before that.

Getting back to getting on a bus at 4:30 am, we headed to Angkor Wat to catch the sunrise coming up over the temples. It was quite impressive, even if my iPhone couldn’t completely capture it thanks to the position of the sun. The mirrored images in the reflecting pools added to the splendor. Or at least one of the reflecting pools. The other was pretty much full of algae, though even that cast a little bit of a reflection.

After the sunrise, we stopped at a little restaurant across from the temples for breakfast and then re-entered the site to actually enter the temples. We toured with a guide for about an hour and then had some free time to explore. The complex is surrounded by a moat and it would have been great to get a bird’s eye view of the complex but for some reason they are no longer doing balloon rides in the area. At the far end of the complex, we ran into some wild monkeys that were getting fed by the tourists. Even though it looks just like it does on television, it is still very impressive in person.

After Angkor Wat, we went to Angkor Thom, an ancient fortified city built at the end of the twelfth century. Specifically, we headed to the Bayon, which has 54 gothic towers, each with four smiling faces of Avalokiteshvara that, according to legend, look amazingly like King Jayavarman VII, the king who built (or rather, whose subjects built) the city. There are other carvings in the complex that depict Cambodian life at the time that the temple was built.

Finally, we headed to Ta Prohm. People were calling this the Tomb Raider temple, but I really don’t know anything about that. To me, the temple was a brilliant example of how nature ultimately triumphs over man. There is plenty of the temple still remaining, but much of it has been crumbled by the surrounding jungle. Interestingly, there are several sections that are now part rock and part wood because trees have grown through several buildings within the complex and it is not always easy to tell where the buildings end and the jungles begin.

I took lots of pictures of all of these places, but there’s not nearly enough room to post them here. If I ever get caught up on posting travel photos on Facebook, though, you can be sure to find them there.

Crickets and Spiders - Breakfast of Champions

On the nineteenth of November, we completed our beach trip in Sihanoukville and headed back to Phnom Penh. At this time of year, Phnom Penh is packed because it is the weekend of the annual water festival, and since we were staying near the river, tourists were in town in hordes.

Once again, we arrived in Phnom Penh in the afternoon and didn’t have a lot of time to do things that we wanted to do. As soon as we arrived, a few of us left for lunch and then headed to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. With the exception of S-21 and the Killing Fields, which I wrote about a few days ago, these are the most famous landmarks in Phnom Penh.

The palace and pagoda complex contain numerous buildings, some dating back to 1866, and have housed the royal family for the most part since that time. I’m still not sure what happened to the palace during the period of rule of the Khmer Rouge, when Phnom Penh was evacuated, but it seems to be in as good shape now as it was before that period.

We didn’t spend a lot of time at the palace complex because the day was waning and we still wanted to go to the Russian market. The Russian market is called what it is because Russians were the primary tourists who shopped at the market back in the 1970s (if I remember correctly) even though almost all of the stores in the market are run by Cambodians.

I think I can say that the Russian Market in Phnom Penh has been my favorite of all of the markets that I visited in Southeast Asia, and every city seems to have at least one, so that’s saying something. I bought some t-shirts and other souvenirs as well as some DVDs. I bought 44 Woody Allen movies for $8. He’s probably not going to be happy to hear that, but I was pretty pleased with it.

I seem to recall that we had dinner and a relatively early night on our second night in Phnom Penh because, once again, we had to get up early the next morning for another bus to another Cambodian town. This time, that Cambodian town was Kompong Cham.

The bus ride to Kompong Cham was one of the most eventful bus rides we’ve had on this trip, primarily because of the cuisine. About halfway between Phnom Penh and Kompong Cham, we stopped for a happy house break at a place that our guide called “Spider Town.” At the place we stopped, there were many delicacies for sale, including pineapple and mango. Oh, and there were also crickets and spiders, deep fried, for purchase. I tried a cricket and it was pretty good except that I got a leg stuck between my teeth. I also held some spiders; I think tarantulas, but I’m not really sure. In any event, they were large-ass spiders. I ate the leg of a dead one. Once again, the thing was deep fried and crunchy and tasted mostly like the sauce in which it was cooked.

Unfortunately, the bus ride was the high point of the trip to Kompong Cham. We only stayed there one night and that was primarily to break up the trip between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. There was a market, but there wasn’t much to it. We had dinner at a man’s house in the outskirts of the town. It was very good, especially because much of it was fried (pork, eggplant), but that was short. After dinner, some of us congregated at a makeshift bar that a woman ran on the sidewalk across the street from the hotel. Once again, though, an early night was necessary because of an early-morning bus. After that, it was on to Siem Reap.

Nothing Like A November Sunburn

On our second day in Sihanoukville, it was time to go back out on the water. In a boat. This time, most of the group was going snorkeling and heading to an island for some swimming, lunch and more fun in the sun.

Once again, we left pretty early in the morning to hop on the boat. We stopped in one spot for snorkeling, but I’m not a snorkeler, so I just sat and watched. After about forty minutes, though, we headed to Bamboo Island. Don’t let the name fool you, though. Just like there were no monkeys on Monkey Island and no unicorns on Unicorn Island, there was no bamboo on Bamboo Island. There were beaches, though. Lots and lots of beaches. This time I did participate and we swam and did regular old beach stuff. The one beach thing I didn’t do was put on sunscreen, but I assume I’ll get to that later.

At around noon, we took a break for lunch. We had rice and fish or chicken skewers with vegetables. The food was barbequed on the beach and was very good. This was followed by some mango dessert and then more swimming and beach stuff. We left Bamboo Island and returned to the harbor for some more snorkeling, followed by a return to Sihanoukville. I was a little tired and decided to head back to my room for a nap.

I got up and texted some folks and found that a lot of people were at the Purple Bar. That was where I had gotten the fifty cent drafts the night before and I decided to return to the scene of the crime. I read a review of the place that said it had some of the best hamburgers in Cambodia, so I tried one. It was the only hamburger I tried in Cambodia (or since China, for that matter), but I couldn’t come up with a reason to argue. After the burger and a few drinks, the second day came to an end.

I began my last day in Sihanoukville walking around the city for a while. Like all of the other cities I had seen in Vietnam and Cambodia, it was truly different from anything I have seen in the west, but I’m getting more accustomed to the typical southeastern Asia city. I stopped by a few cafes and eventually wandered back to my hotel. Lots of other people were heading to a private beach, but after two days of beaches and significant sunburn on my shoulders (I knew I’d get back to that sunscreen topic again), I decided not to go.

Instead, I walked some more around town to see if I could find anything interesting. For the record, I didn’t find anything all that interesting. I did stop at a different restaurant for a little more amok, this time of the chicken variety. The place was pretty deserted and the people who worked there, as well as another tourist, stopped by and chatted for a while. I really like how the people in Vietnam and Cambodia come by and speak with you when you’re eating alone. Anyway, the food was good, but this was closing in on the end of my Sihanoukville adventure.

Later on, I went to dinner with the group in the restaurant where I had eaten the delicious fish amok on my first day in town. In the evenings, the restaurant, as well as most of the restaurants around the beach, have a barbeque and served grilled food. I had barbequed beef steak with potato salad and grilled vegetables. I don’t reckon it was too authentic as far as Cambodian food goes, but it was pretty damn delicious. That and, of course, a couple beers effectively ended my evening because we had to get on a bus by seven a.m. the next morning.

I’ve never been much of a beach person, but I have to say that I did have a really good time in Sihanoukville and would recommend it to anybody looking for a good beach town in Cambodia.

Once More, Back to the Beach

After the homestay, it was time for three days of rest and relaxation, because if there was anything I needed after not working for sixteen months, it’s rest and relaxation, at the beach. To this end, we took an early-morning bus to Sihanoukville, which is on the southern coast of Cambodia.

We arrived early in the afternoon in Sihanoukville and checked into our hotel a little after one. After taking a little bit of time to clean up, we headed to a little restaurant across the street for lunch. I had heard a lot about the Fish Amok in Cambodia and saw that it was on the menu, so I decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed. It was steamed fish cooked in a coconut-curry sauce that was tremendous. It came served in a coconut shell and I vowed halfway during the meal that I was going to get much more amok while I was in Cambodia.

After lunch, it was time to hit the beaches. We went to Serendipity Beach, which was very close to the hotel. It was pretty crowded, but not overly crowded, as this is the beginning of the busy season for the tourist town. If you read a few entries back, you would have noticed how disappointed in the beaches of Nha Trang, Vietnam. None of this disappointment followed me to Sihanoukville, where the sun was bright, the beach was sandy and the water was clean, warm and beautiful. We spent a lot of time in the water and, in between swims, shot down vendor after vendor as people kept coming over to try and sell us watches, books, lobsters and, I think on one occasion, children. Don’t quote me on that, though, because my Khmer isn’t very good and I might have misunderstood.

At 4:00, happy hour started at almost every bar on the beach. Happy hour on Cambodian beaches means fifty cent drafts of Angkor beer as far as the eye can see. I indulged in a few, but didn’t want to get wasted before dinner, so I stopped a little early and went back to the room.

At seven, we met for dinner and went to yet another bar/restaurant on the beach. This place seemed a little sketchy, so I decided to stick with western food. I ordered pizza. It was my first pizza in like two months, so the standard to which I was holding it was pretty low. It failed to clear even that low bar. It was the worst meal I’ve had in Asia. It was the worst pizza that I’ve ever eaten. I mean it was bad.

The restaurant did have one redeeming characteristic, however. It had the aforementioned fifty cent draft beers. After several of those, a bucket of Red Bull and vodka and a few shots, it started to seem like a good idea to go for a moonlight swim. I wasn’t dressed for it, but the hotel was only a few blocks away, so I went back and changed. Five or six of us ended up drinking and swimming (kids, don’t try this at home) until around 10:30 or so. It was a lot of fun and ended up turning my worst meal of the trip into a rather fun night.

That was pretty much our first day in Sihanoukville, but we still had two more left. I wasn’t sure if there was anything to do but drink cheap beer and play on the beach, but I was game to find out.

(Actual) Homestay in Cambodia

After leaving Phnom Penh, it was off to a tiny little rice farming village to sort of get a taste of the local life. We had done these before, both in China and Vietnam, and I wasn’t anticipating much. The “homestay” in China was a visit to a guesthouse in a small village. We got to eat local foods, but we had very little interaction with local people. The one in Sapa, Vietnam was just a drunkfest with karaoke. Fortunately, the one in Cambodia turned out to be quite different.

I wish I could remember the name of the little village, but I do not off the top of my head. I’ll look it up and plug it in. The bus ride to the village took several hours and we arrived at the homes in which we were staying late in the afternoon. We wanted to go out and harvest some rice, but we arrived too late for that. We looked around at the homes in which we were staying and briefly met the owners of the properties. Afterwards, we were allocated to houses and we left for a short trek and dinner.

The trek was along a muddy road, since it had been raining, and across a few bridges. The biggest highlights of the trek were having local children run to the street when we passed by to say hello and a waterfall that was too far away to be very exciting. It took about 45-minutes to get to the restaurant. Once there, we had what I couldn’t call much more than a mediocre meal, but the people who served us were nice and I guess it served it’s purpose.

After dinner, we returned to the homes in which we were staying. All of us gathered with all of the hosts and their families and we sat together drinking rice wine and sharing food while we went around and asked questions of our hosts and they asked questions of us. This was tremendously interesting as we were able to learn much about rice farming and life in Cambodia’s rural villages. There also were some interesting information about life during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Overall, it was one of the most enjoyable evenings of the trip.

Around 10:30 or 11, we went to bed. Eight of us slept on sleeping bags or mattresses located in a room above where we had just met. Thanks to Advil PM, I slept really well, waking up occasionally between three and five because of a rooster that had problems telling time. Also, it was my first time sleeping while surrounded by a mosquito net, so that was interesting. I woke up for good around 6:15 and had a little panic attack because I couldn’t find my bank cards. Eventually, I found them in the pants that I had been wearing the day before and all was well in the world.

We said goodbye to our hosts and went back to the restaurant from the night before for breakfast. There, we had instant coffee, garlic bread and omelets for breakfast. I must say that I learned that garlic bread is a very underrated breakfast entrée.

That was it for the homestay. We all wished that it had been a little bit longer in order to spend some time in the rice fields and to go trekking to the waterfall that we had barely seen the day before, but such is life. From the homestay, we headed out by bus to go to Sihanoukville and the beaches. We’ll start that discussion in the next entry.

The Killing Fields

In the last entry, I spoke about the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. From there, we moved on to the Killing Fields.

Specifically, we went to Choeung Ek, which is a Buddhist memorial to the terror in the Cambodia Killing Fields. Before I talk about what we saw, maybe a little story telling is in order. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge set out to convert Cambodia into a completely agrarian state and, in the process, execute all of its political opponents as well as intellectuals and professionals. The current estimates are that the Khmer Rouge between 1.7 million and 2.5 million people out of a population of around 7 million died during this regime through disease, starvation and/or execution. The Killing Fields are where many of these people were brought to dig their own graves and were executed. Many were shot, but because of a shortage of bullets, many more men, women and children were bludgeoned to death. The children had to be executed out of fear that they may seek revenge when they got older.

Of course, there’s a lot more to this story but that’s some of what we heard before we arrived at the Choeung Ek site. The first thing you see at the Choeung Ek site is the memorial to the victims. It’s a Buddhist site and you have to take your shoes off to get close to it. When you do get close to it, what you see are skulls. Hundreds of skulls. Thousands of skulls. They are some of the skulls of the bodies that were excavated at the site beginning in the 1980s.

Following this, tourists are encouraged to walk around the site. I forget the exact numbers, but something like 84 of 126 mass graves located on the site have been unearthed, some of them containing hundreds of bodies. All are chilling, but perhaps the most horrifying is a pit that contained the bodies of approximately 100 naked women and children. Next to this pit is a tree, the Killing Tree, where many of the children, including infants, were held by their feet and slammed against the tree until they were dead, at which point the bodies were tossed into the pit. I apologize if that’s a little over-graphic, but it is very difficult to demonstrate the disgust and sadness that one feels at the site without repeating the graphic descriptions that we had been given. Of all of the places that I have seen in my travels, this is among those that have affected me the most.

The rest of this first day in Phnom Penh doesn’t really come close to matching the Security Prison or the Killing Fields. We got back to the hotel around noon, but our bus out to our homestay wasn’t leaving until 1:30, so we had time for lunch. I went to one of the touristy places up along the Mekong River and had some barbequed pork chops. It wasn’t very Cambodian, but after 24-hours in Cambodia, I still wasn’t sure what exactly qualified as “Cambodian food.” Yeah, that’s my excuse. Anyway, I ate, went back to the hotel and it was on to the rice fields!! I’ll pick up with those stories in the next entry.

Entering Cambodia

Early in the morning of November 14, my adventure in Vietnam came to an end as we boarded a bus in Ho Chi Mihn City on our way to Phnom Penh. The bus was a full public bus, but it was a pretty pleasant ride and fairly comfortable. We rode for about two hours to the border, went through the border formalities, which were pretty painless because the bus company did most of the work, had lunch at a local shop and then continued through Cambodia. From the border, we rode another two hours to Phnom Penh.

After arriving in Phnom Penh, we took some time to clean up and then we went on a short walking tour in the area around our hotel. Phnom Penh has about 1.7 million people, so it’s a pretty big city, but our little tour was limited to the area around the Mekong River. The area around our hotel was pretty touristy, so that was a bit of a disappointment.

The group went to a bar to drink before dinner, but the place was a little upscale and not to my liking, so I ditched the group and went across the street to a bar that had much more of a dive feel to it. I was glad I did. It was happy hour, so the Angkor draft beers were only sixty cents a piece. (Money Note: Everybody uses U.S. currency here. The only time you see Cambodian currency is when people have to make change. About 1000 Cambodian Riel equals 1 U.S. quarter.) After having a few beers, I met back up with the group for dinner. I had prawns cooked in butter sauce. It was good, albeit a lot of work taking the heads and shells off of the prawns, and that was the opening day in Cambodia.

We got up early the next day for the touristy part of our first stop in Phnom Penh. We started off by visiting Ek Tuol Sleng, a.k.a. Security Prison 21, in which approximately 17,000 prisoners were held and tortured prior to being executed during the regime of Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Now, it is the site of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The buildings are a converted high school that were transformed into a prison for political enemies of Pol Pot, as well as various other enemies of the state, such as intellectuals. According to the stories we heard, wearing glasses was enough to qualify you for imprisonment during this period.

We visited cells where people were held and executed. In some of the cells, there were pictures of bodies that were found there when the Vietnamese liberated the prison in 1979. You could almost feel the ghosts of the victims in the cells.

Inside other rooms were pictures of the guards and hundreds of the victims because the atrocities at the site were extremely well memorialized. In addition, there were paintings by an artist that was one of the seven people still alive at the prison at the time of liberation. The paintings depict the tortures and executions that took place at the prison. Of course, most of the executions didn’t take place at the prison, but rather were held in the Killing Fields. Since I think I have enough evil for one posting, I think I’ll save the Killing Fields story for the next entry. Sleep well.

Some More Passing Thoughts From Vietnam

At the moment, I am on the road somewhere in Cambodia heading from a little village to Sihanoukville, where I will get to spend some more time on the beaches. I am two or three days out of Vietnam, so I thought I’d get in some more passing thoughts before I’m too far away.

White Coffee: I should start this by saying that Vietnamese coffee has been one of my favorite coffees in the world. It’s strong and sweet and it doesn’t take much to give you your caffeine fix. In Vietnam, you can get Café Den (Black Coffee) or Café Sua (White Coffee). The White Coffee, which in most places is coffee with fresh milk, is coffee with condensed milk in Vietnam. It is very sweet and if you are not expecting it, and you add sugar before tasting it, you can be in for a very teeth-rotting experience. Again, the coffee in Vietnam is excellent, but if you don’t ask for it black, it’s likely to be very sweet.

Traffic: It’s not like anything that I have ever seen. Anywhere. There are thousands of motorbikes on the streets at all times. The farther south you go in Vietnam, the more cars you see, but there are always thousands of motorbikes. This, along with a lack of traffic lights, makes crossing the street a harrowing experience at all times. Thankfully, the Vietnamese drivers are used to this and are good at avoiding pedestrians as long as they don’t stop and/or back up. I’ve taken to closing my eyes and crossing, singing “Onward Christian Soldier” and surviving on blind faith. In all seriousness, though, I have seen a few accidents and I’ve heard that on average, there are about 35 traffic deaths per day in Vietnam. From the traffic that I saw, though, that number is amazingly low.

Westernization: As I sat in a KFC in Hanoi, I had to ask myself, “who won the war?” It is true that as you move further south, the more Western it gets, but Vietnam is still the most unique country that I have ever visited. The tourist spots are very Western, especially restaurants and bars and stuff like that, but the cities have a feel of being barely touched by Western influences, though the French colonialism period has left an obvious impact.

Soft Drinks: Like in China, I found a favorite soft drink in Vietnam. It’s 0 degrees, Khong Do. It is a lemon green tea that kicks ass. Fortunately, I can still find it in Cambodia.

Natural Beauty: The natural beauty that I saw in Vietnam is something that I haven’t experienced since I was in Jordan in January. There are beautiful bays and beaches as well as the greenest mountains that I have ever seen. We’ve travelled from north to south throughout the country and the views from the trains and busses have been phenomenal.

Weather: In the northern part of the country, we actually experiences some cool temperatures, especially in Sapa which is in the mountains, but since about Hue, which is midway down the country, we have hit the tropics during the wet season. The temperatures have been in the upper 80s during the day and the low 70s at night, with either rain or the threat of rain occurring almost every day. I can’t complain, though, since they call it the wet season for a reason and I chose to come here in the midst of it.

That’s it for here. I may have some more Vietnam stuff later, but I think we’ll cross the border into Cambodia for the next entry.

Goodnight, Saigon.

We returned to Saigon from the Mekong Delta at around 3:00 pm. If you recall, on the previous day, I had gone out drinking early in the afternoon. Because of this I hadn’t had a chance to see many of the sights in Saigon, like the Reunification Palace or the War Atrocities Museum. I thought I’d take advantage of our final afternoon in Saigon and do that.

Well, you know what they say about the best laid schemes of mice and men. When we returned to Ho Chi Minh City, a couple of guys decided that on such a beautiful afternoon, it would be a good idea to go to an outdoor café and have a few beers. I couldn’t really find anything wrong with that idea, so I decided to join them. Knowing that we had things to do in the evening, this meant that my sightseeing opportunities in Ho Chi Minh City had come to an unfruitful end. (Because of this, I’m including some random photos of Saigon that somebody else took. Hope you enjoy them because I have no better photos to add for this entry.)

After some drinks, we met with the people in our group that is going on the final leg of the group tour that I’m doing. Other than two departures and two new folks, the group is completely identical as the Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City group. We went through the formalities of insurance and visas and then we went on to dinner.

Sadly, my final meal in Vietnam turned out to be a Western meal because that was the nature of the restaurant where we ate. That wasn’t a problem, though, because I’m pretty sure that I had had enough rice noodles to feel that I hadn’t wasted my opportunity to try the local cuisine in Vietnam. The most interesting part of dinner was the various people who came over to try and sell us things, particularly books. One woman was selling a bunch of Lonely Planet travel books. The guy sitting across from me bought one for Cambodia, bargaining the price down from US$15 to US$3. It was really interesting to see how the market was set because other people in the group also wanted to buy some travel books. The seller had lost of lot of her negotiating ability because she had already set the price at US$3, so when I tried to buy two books for six dollars and she started by asking for twelve, all I had to do was point at the guy in front of me and say, “he only paid three for his, so that’s all I’m going to pay, “ and then refuse to budge from that price. Needless to say, I bought my two books for six dollars.

That pretty much was it for my trip to Ho Chi Minh City. I sincerely regret not taking an opportunity to get around the city more and seeing some of the museums and governmental buildings. As was the case in Shanghai and Hong Kong, I think another day or two in Saigon would have been beneficial. When I start planning my next trip to Southeast Asia, another visit to Saigon definitely will be high on my list of places to go.

Touring The Mekong Delta

Our second day in Ho Chi Minh City, actually our only full day in Ho Chi Minh City, wasn’t really spent in Ho Chi Minh City for the most part. Instead, we left early in the morning to do a brief tour of the Mekong Delta.

According to our tour guide, the Mekong River is the fifth-longest river in the world, starting in China and traveling through Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in Vietnam. All I really knew about the Mekong Delta is that it is often mentioned in Vietnam shows and movies. As beautiful as it was, it didn’t look like it would be a pleasant place to fight a war.

The trip started with a two-hour bus ride to a little town that serves as an entrance to the delta for tourists. There were souvenir shops everywhere as well as boats for hire to venture into the area. We already had a boat rented, so we went directly there and started on our journey through the delta.

We stopped at one of the largest islands in the area, which has been converted into a tourist stop. The star attraction on the island is the ability to watch the villagers make coconut candy (there were coconut palms everywhere on the island), from husking the coconut to the final stages. There also was a chance to sample some of the local wines and I had banana wine, coconut wine and snake wine. For the record, the snake wine was the best. The highlight of the island for me, though, was being able to hold an eight-foot python and to get my picture taken with the big dude.

From this island, it was time to head to the rowboats, though we didn’t do the actual rowing. We took about a 20-minute rowboat cruise down the river to a second island. The trip was hot and sticky and all I could think of the entire time was Apocalypse Now. I kept an eye out for Charlie, but I’m pretty sure I was safe the entire time. On the second island, we had lunch, which included fish egg rolls, soup and a few other items. We finished it off with a shot of honey wine, which I found to be a little too sweet, albeit tasty.

After lunch, we went on a little tour of the island in a cart seating six people that was hooked to the back of a motorbike. We had helmets, but the ride did seem a bit treacherous as we were going down narrow roads at a moderate speed and had to constantly be on the lookout for low hanging palm tree branches and electrical wires. We didn’t see a hell of a lot and I’m not sure what the purpose of it was except to demonstrate how the safety laws in everybody’s native country were inconsistent with those of Cambodia. Whatever, though. It was a fun-enough way to kill an hour or so.

We hopped back on the boat and returned to the little tourist town from which we started the trip. From there, it was a three-hour return by bus to Saigon – longer on the return trip because of the traffic. I think that I may have about 600 words left to say about Ho Chi Minh City, so I’ll try to finish it up in my next post.

Take Me Down To The Ho Chi Minh City

Okay, where was I. When I last posted, I was just arriving in Saigon at around six in the morning. From there, we went to the hotel in which we were staying but, because it was so early, we could not yet check in. Instead, we just dropped our bags off at the hotel and went to the Cu Chi Tunnels.

The Cu Chi Tunnels are the system of underground tunnels dug by the Viet Cong underneath the heavy clay in the Cu Chi area to the west of the Mekong Delta. It took a couple of hours to bus there. Once we got to the area, there were a couple of opportunities to go inside some tunnels, including crawling about 100 meters across and ten meters down into a tunnel. Personally, I can’t even sit in a window seat of an airplane because of my claustrophobia – and from the expressions that I saw on the faces of those who actually made the crawl, I think I made the right decision. It is absolutely amazing, though, that these tunnels could be built and that thousands of people actually could live in them during the Vietnam War.

Another display at the Cu Chi Tunnels demonstrated various booby traps that the Vietnamese set for the Americans during the Vietnam War. Many of them involved bamboo or steel spikes and were of the kind that you could see if you watched the Green Berets or various other Vietnam War movies. (I only mention Green Berets because I think it may be the worst war movie ever made.) There also was a firing range in which some people were firing off M-16s and AK-47s. At $1.25 per round, I decided to opt out of that particular experience, but those who did it enjoyed it.

We came back to the hotel and then I got a call from a friend of a friend who lives in Ho Chi Minh City and wanted to meet up. We walked around Saigon for a little while, including a trip to another memorial set up for a monk who cremated himself on the sidewalk in Saigon in 1963. Afterwards, we went to a little roadside bar that I liked because there were no other white folks in it. We had some beer and he taught me a little about Vietnam and we had some conversations with folks at other tables. Things started to get a little awkward when my new friend’s 18-year old boy toy showed up, but it was still fun. Around 9:00, I headed back to my hotel looking for dinner and a nightcap.

As I was walking on the sidewalk, up the street from my hotel, I felt somebody rubbing my arm. I was startled and first and turned around. It was a woman on a motorbike. On the sidewalk. She asked me if I wanted a massage and if I had a room. I politely declined her proposition, even though she was gorgeous, and went into a restaurant for dinner.

As I entered the restaurant, there were two couples dining and so I went to the third table in the restaurant. I ordered a beer and some dinner and around the time the beer arrived, the couples finished their meals and left. The waitress asked if I would mind moving up a few tables, so I did. At this point, I was the only person eating in the restaurant and I had four waitresses standing a few feet from my table because they had nothing else to do and no other customers to serve. It made me eat a little faster and stop after the second beer.

I left the restaurant to return to my hotel. As I got to the street on which my hotel was located, I felt – you guessed it – somebody rubbing my right forearm. Less startled this time, I turned around. It was yet another woman, more beautiful than the last, on another motorbike on the same street who was inquiring about my desire for a good massage. I politely declined once again and decided that I had better get to my hotel soon, while I still had the willpower to decline these invitations.

That was my first day in Saigon. I only had two, so we’ll get to the other one in the next post.

Another Day in Nha Trang

I still had another 24-hours in Nha Trang and I didn’t know what else I was going to do. I had gone to the beach, but the water turned me off of that. I had gone to some temples, but didn’t know if there were more that I needed to see.

On the final night in Nha Trang, we were going to a group dinner. Before that, however, a friend and I decided to have a few drinks. (I’ve really developed a taste for Bia Ha Noi.) We stopped at this little spot on the street that runs parallel to the beach and had some drinks. As an appetizer, we had “Crispy Onions.” As you can probably guess, those turned out to be onion rings. In a little unexpected twist, though, the onion rings came out with soy sauce and chili sauce. As it turned out, the onion rings with chili sauce may have been the best onion rings I’ve ever had.

Later, we went out for a meal at a restaurant set up in somebody’s home. (I may be off a day here and there. We were in Nha Trang for three days and all of them really did run together.) Later on, there was some drinking at a disco-type bar, which was fun.

We had to get ready for another overnight train, the last of the trip, but we had most of the day in Nha Trang while we waited for that. As I said, I already was running out of things to do, but at least the weather was nice. I spent a lot of time people watching on the beach. I also went from café to café getting a little bit of food here and a little bit of coffee there, trying to fill up both my day and my stomach.

Sometime around five, we all got together and there was time to grab dinner before heading to the overnight train. As Nha Trang is a tourist town, most of the food places are Western or mixed Western/Vietnamese. Three or four doors down from our hotel was a Spanish tapas restaurant that a couple of the girls wanted to try. It sounded good enough for me, so I went over there too. We had a ton of stuff – Patatas Bravas, Tortilla Española, Jamon Serrano, etc. It brought me back briefly to my summer in Madrid. The food wasn’t as good as it was in Spain, but it was pretty good and did the job.

After dinner, we met back up with everybody to go to the train station for what would be my seventh and final overnight train ride in Southeast Asia. This one was only about eleven hours, so we weren’t expecting much trouble. I got on the train at around seven; read for a couple hours; took some Advil PM and slept from around 10 pm until the train folks woke us up a 6 am to tell everybody that we had reached Saigon. Yes, I know it’s official name is Ho Chi Minh City, but almost everybody here still calls it Saigon.

Anyway, getting off the train in Saigon is where I’ll pick up the next entry.

Another Vietnamese Beach Resort Town

After Hoi An, it was time for another touristy beach resort town – Nha Trang. Nha Trang is known as the driest town in Vietnam and is also known for its beautiful beaches.

The trip to Nha Trang began with a bus ride from Hoi An to Da Nang. Once in Da Nang, we realized that the train was running a couple hours late, so we had a little time to run around and get some coffee and some last minute stuff. Unlike most of our other train rides, this was not an overnight train, but still it was a nine-hour trek. That was a bit of a pain, but after all of the 20-plus hour overnight trains we had in China, we could do a nine-hour ride standing on one foot. I laid down anyway.

We arrived in Nha Trang pretty late and took taxis to the hotel. Many of us were hungry, so we went to a little restaurant down the street for a quick bite and that was the first day in Nha Trang.

On the morning of the second day, we did a little tour of Nha Trang. We went to a Buddhist temple that is dedicated to five monks who set themselves on fire to protest South Vietnam’s policies against Buddhism in the mid-1960s. At this site, there was another giant Buddha. It wasn’t as big as the one in Hong Kong, but it was giant enough and I did get some better pictures of this one. Another thing that we saw a lot of at the temple is swastikas. The swastika, going in the opposite direction of the Nazi swastika, is a Buddhist symbol of reincarnation/circle-of-life and what have you. Still, it’s pretty weird when you run across unexpected swastikas.

Later in the day, I decided that it was time to take to the beaches. It was still cloudy, but the temperature was warm and the humidity was high, so I figured a little time in the water would be good. I went down to the beach and indeed, the beaches were beautiful. I took off my sandals and started walking in the tide. The water felt good, but it was a little nasty. Since Nha Trang is at the delta of a river, the water is naturally full of silt, which is okay. The real problem, though, is that there was a lot of garbage in the water. I saw clothes, boxes, bottles, bags, bodies, okay no bodies but all of the other stuff. It was harmless enough for me to walk in the tide at the beach, but I decided that I wasn’t going to go swimming in it.

Before leaving, however, I did manage to pollute the water just a little bit more. Just before I was planning to leave, I decided to put on my sandals when the Pacific Ocean (technically, it may have been the Sea of China) decided to come onto land and steal one of them. I waited for a while to see if the tide would bring it back, but it just wanted to tease me. I could see the sandal slowly floating out to the Philippines. Ultimately, I decided that my other sandal should have the same opportunity for freedom and sent it on its way to be reunited with its life partner. Since I was on the beach, I didn’t bring any money, so I couldn’t replace the sandals. Rather, I had to walk about ten minutes to the hotel across busy streets with no shoes. As I was walking people stopped me to try and sell me cigarettes and sodas. Nobody tried to sell me shoes. I guess Vietnam is still trying to get its hands around this whole capitalism thing.

All I Have To Say About Hoi An

From Hue, we went to Hoi An, which was about a five-hour bus ride away. We were in Hoi An for three days, but I may have only this entry to memorialize it because it wasn’t that exciting. I had a good time, mind you, but there’s not that much to write about. Anyway, that should help catch up the blog.

Hoi An is an ancient port city that thrived as the center of the Silk Road hundreds of years ago, but disappeared from maps and everywhere else until the past twenty years, when it was revived for tourism. At this point, I’d have to say that it is now one of the biggest tourist traps that I’ve ever seen. One of them. Don’t worry, Vegas, you still have the title.

The big thing to do in Hoi An is shop. There are tons of places to go to get custom made suits, dresses, shoes, rings and various other items that you may want to have made. These items aren’t necessarily cheap, but they are extremely inexpensive when compared to Western standards. The problem, for me, is that I’m not really a shopper. I’m a non-practicing lawyer. I have eight suits and no job. The last thing I need right now is another suit.

That is not to say that I didn’t buy anything in Hoi An. The stuff is so inexpensive, that I couldn’t help but buy some stuff. I got a couple pairs of shorts, some touristy t-shirts, some sandals, a sleeping bag and some souvenirs. As an example, the touristy t-shirts were $2 each, and could be bargained down to a quarter of that if you had the time or the interest in doing so.

There is also what is probably a nice beach in Hoi An. From our hotel, the beach is a 4 km walk, so I went down to check it out. It wasn’t bad – sandy instead of rocky and the water was nice. The problem, however, was that I happen to be in southern Vietnam during the wet season and the wet season in southern Vietnam is pretty freaking wet. It rained the entire time we were in Hoi An, so at the beach, I mainly just walked around and imagined how beautiful it might be in beautiful weather.

The food in Hoi An was fair to good, depending on where we went. Like other tourist cities, all of the restaurants offer “authentic” local foods as well as pizza, hamburgers and anything else that the restaurants think will bring in Western customers. I did have a delicious sautéed noodles dish at Café 96, though. That and a Vietnamese iced tea cost me 53,000 Vietnamese dong – or less than three dollars American. If you’re in town, I recommend it.

In addition, several of us participated in a cooking class. It wasn’t nearly as fun or interesting as the cooking class I took in Yangshuo because we weren’t actually cooking our individual dishes. We learned some recipes and ate what we “cooked” – though that basically meant we ate what we chopped and somebody else cooked. All the “cooking” we did was turning some spring rolls in a frying pan. It was fun enough, I guess, and I did think seeing the geckos crawling around the wall of the class was pretty cool.

The hotel that we stayed in was nice enough, with free wifi. It had a buffet breakfast which was passable, especially at $1.50 for all-you-can-eat. There was a café a few doors down with coffee and beer and across the street from that is a karaoke bar, where we were able to drink some Tiger beer and belt out some English-language songs.

Like I said in the beginning, Hoi An is a nice town and I certainly had a good time. There’s just not a lot worth writing about it other than about the markets, the beach and the restaurants and not a lot more about those than I’ve already said. In several hours, I will be in Nha Trang, which is another touristy beach area, so we’ll see if that is much different than Ha Noi. Don’t worry; I’ll let you know.

Passing Thoughts: Vietnam Edition

Currently, I’m on a train between Da Nang and Nha Trang. I’ve been in Vietnam now for roughly two weeks and it seems to me that it’s about time for me to do another Passing Thoughts entry, so here is my first one for Vietnam.

Food: As always, this is an important topic for me and, of course, this can be broken into several categories. Generally, however, I’ll write a little about the food. I have had very little western food since I’ve been here. What I have had is a lot of rice noodles.Whether it be in Pho or Bun or sautéed or fried, I have had rice noodles galore. In Vietnam, it’s not uncommon for people to eat them three meals a day. I’ve enjoyed them, though I have to say that the food here hasn’t been nearly as spicy as it was in southern China and I do miss the heat. You can get chili paste, though, and there’s some delicious chili sauces with garlic and onion that add quite a bit of flavor to the dishes.

Food, Part II: The other food of which I’ve had quite a bit since I’ve been in Vietnam is spring rolls. I’ve had them steamed, fried, I’ve rolled them myself, I’ve even fried them myself. I’ve had vegetable spring rolls, chicken spring rolls, pork spring rolls – okay, I’m beginning to sound like Bubba. I’ll just say that there are a lot of spring rolls here and most of them have been outstanding, especially if the sauce is good.

Food, Part III: Another thing that I’ve noticed here is that the bread in Vietnam is particularly good. It’s pretty easy to find baguettes and they are crisp on the outside and soft in the middle.I have to assume that it’s because of the French influence in Vietnam.

People: I have to say that, as a group, the people in Vietnam may be the friendliest that I’ve ever met. I’ve had meals by myself in restaurants and more often than not, somebody will come over to me while I’m eating and start talking to me about Vietnam or the United States or any other topic. And, on top of this, I’d have to rank Vietnam with Argentina and Italy as far as the places that I have visited that have had the most beautiful women. (And, no, I still have not visited Brazil.)

Vietnam War: As you can imagine, the topic is still very fresh here. The Vietnamese lost 3 million people during the war, and that’s just the official count. I have heard that there are still another 300,000 people still considered “missing.” Here, the war is known as the American War. (Makes sense, since every war here is a “Vietnam war.”) I guess that the level of bias that you hear here depends upon the story teller and his/her own story, but I have heard a lot about the atrocities of war since I’ve been here and it has altered the way I view the war, both from the perspective of an American and from the Vietnamese perspective. Most of all, though, I think that it has inspired me to learn much more about this period of American/Vietnamese history.

United States: Both here and in China, there’s been an odd phenomenon involving the following conversation. Local Person (“LP”): Where are you from? Me (“Me”): The United States. LP:Where? Me: The United States. LP: (Perplexed look of person who has no idea what I’m talking about.) Me: America? LP: OOOHHH. America. It seems that, despite the desires of nearly every South American I’ve ever met, the United States is better known as America here rather than the United States.

Okay, I guess that’s enough for my passing thoughts at the moment. I’m sure I’ll rip off another Passing Thoughts entry before I enter Cambodia. Later.