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.