Oasis in a Bustling City

The tuk tuk approached the hotel up a little and dubious looking alley. Outside a rather big and solid looking sliding gate a young man with a big smile approached us and took our heavy bags with ease. We passed the gate and into what looked to be the beginnings of nice stay at a lovely hotel.

The hotel was very tastefully if a little bizarrely furnished. the furniture in the room was mostly made of concrete - a concrete bed frame, concrete desk, concrete sofa and even a concrete ledge on the wall with a reinforcing iron bar underneath on which to hang clothes! It was great - very simple but effective.

Right outside the room and for the first time on the trip, there was a pool! It looked great and it was not long until I was swimming in the clear (but slightly warm) water.

The hotel staff were a little shy of a tall white man but there smiles were beaming. this was going to be a nice place to stay (despite an odd smell in the bathroom every now and again!)

The Fields of Cambodia

A few miles out of the frontier crossing town, things started to look up. A rural environment replaced the dusty and dirty scene that first greeted me. It immediately struck me that Cambodia is so much poorer than Vietnam, but I could see from the smiles of the people that they were happier than most of the Vietnamese seemed to have been. The scene of rice fields, water buffalo and tall palm trees across the landscape was very tranquil looking and it was hard to imagine what it must have been like during the deep dark days of the Pol Pot regime just 30 years ago.

For most of the journey towards Phnom Penh, the road was in good condition and not too busy. The bus driver though had to keep his wits about him as the cows that were roaming freely often decided to cross the road right in front of our bus. We got to use to sudden and unexpected braking!

After about 2 hours on the Cambodian roads, the bus pulled up in another 'Wild West' looking town - time to cross the mighty Mekong river! The bus gingerly went down a rather steep and muddy slope onto a waiting ferry that was already laden with overloaded trucks and shiny 4WDs. The journey across took just under 10 minutes and it was nice to see the river we would see a lot more of later in the trip. There were some very poor kids on the bus who started singing in front of my bus window in attempt to get me to give them something. What they didn't realise is that windows on the bus did not open. Hopefully someone else was able to five them something for their supper!

As we approached Phnom Penh, the traffic levels increased dramatically and the quality of the road deteriorated. It was a busy scene on the streets with all sorts of small industries on the go and simple market stalls set out with fruit. There is though a very obvious wealth gap in Cambodia. There was a start contrast between the bright shiny 4WD vehicles with blacked out windows and small trucks carrying 40+ people in a rudimentary truck taxi arrangement. I did sit a little uneasy in my comfy luxury bus seat when I saw the cramped conditions of other travellers.

We arrived in Phnom Penh and it was a busy city with motorcycles and tuk tuks vying for space. The old French way of 'priority coming onto a roundabout' caused the expected chaos of such a bizarre rule and the roundabout was a clogged mess of a wide variety of vehicles.

the bus was met my a throng of tuk tuk drivers and after our less than happy experiences of attempts to 'over-charge' us in Vietnam we expected the worse. Happily the tuk tuk driver that approached us offered us such a reasonable fare to the hotel that we accepted it! Off we went through the mad traffic to the Blue Lime Hotel.

Frontier Town

It was with renewed anticipation that we headed out of Saigon on our 6 hour bus journey to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

The bus company provided assistants on board who managed all the immigration paperwork and this proved to be a blessing as the whole process seemed a bit chaotic. After clearing Vietnamese immigration we entered a 200 metre stretch of a no-man's land up to the Cambodian border control point which beckoned. All the passports were taken from us and we were shuttled off to a restaurant while all the formalities were seen to by our helpful on-board assistants. The drive to the restaurant was a bit of a shocker... we had heard stories that parts of Cambodia were a bit like the Wild West and the border town seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Dusty streets, ramshackle buildings and some scruffy looking kids. there were even 'saloons' - well, Casinos actually and lots of them. These casinos are operated by Thais and attract Vietnamese gamblers. They all looked a bit dodgy to me and were probably money laundering for all types of unsavoury characters across SE Asia.

The roadside restaurant we stopped at made my heart sink. If the rest of Cambodia was like this, I was going to want to go back to Vietnam! Our fellow Vietnamese and Cambodian travellers jumped at the chance to have lunch while the rest of passengers (hungry) milled around wondering whether to risk the food that was piled up at the kitchen and that was piled up with flies. A rudimentary fly catcher in the kitchen helped me make up my mind to stay hungry for a while - it was a wooden board painted with some sticky substance and it was covered in hundreds of little fly corpses. I made do with a can of Coke and got back on the bus and wanted to get away as soon as possible.

Not exactly a great first impression of Cambodia but thankfully this was to prove to be superseded by many very positive impressions and experiences in the next 2 weeks!

Miss Saigon?

All through the two week trip in Vietnam the anticipation of something has mostly proved to be better than the actual experience. Highlights included the Cuc Phuong National Park in the north, the oldest tomb of the Emperor in Hue and the Memento Country Resort. The downsides have included the 'get as much money out of tourists as you can' approach encountered in many parts of the country. Most of the people are generally pleasant but there are more than a few that are out to tout.

Saigon proved to be much like the rest of the country. I was anticipating somewhere that was cosmopolitan and full of energy. It certainly was more cosmopolitan than Hanoi and there was a bit more energy but it felt more subdued than I was expecting. Perhaps the fact it was Re-unification Day holiday when I was there that led to the subdued atmosphere (the receptionist at the hotel was a little bemused when I asked if there were any parades for the holiday or the May Day holiday the next day). Perhaps the fact it rained quite a bit in the 2 days I was there put a dampener on things. Perhaps it was the fact I got my first tummy bug there that made me have a subdued feeling towards Saigon. Everything about the place was just OK - not great, not bad - just OK.

In hindsight, a week in Vietnam would have been long enough. I appreciate the country has a very turbulent recent history and it is probably little wonder that the people might have seemed a bit remote at times. I wish them well but it will probably be some long time before I go and visit again.

What's that Smell??

Train travel was second nature to us now and we were pretty sure of what to expect on this third and short 9 hour journey from Nha Trang to Saigon. We had not accounted for the fact that there was a 2 day public holiday (backed up to weekend) starting the next day and the train was quite busy. We thought we could not get any worse travelling conditions than the previous 2 trains...Wrong! This was the oldest carriage we had travelled in and it was in a really sorry state after the 20 hours from Hanoi. My request for clean sheets on the bunks was met with a blank look and a shrug by the cabin attendant. Our travelling companion on this leg of the trip was a young man with a number of small bags, including a rather large tied up yellow plastic bag that he put under his berth... we thought we could smell a funny smell then but didn't think too much about it. The young man was not prepared for his trip though as he seemed to have no food with him. Being the seasoned train travellers we had become, we came well stocked with food and he accepted everything we offered him with a smile and a nod of his head. He became curious when he saw me working on a crossword in a puzzle magazine I had brought along. Curious probably because the longest words we saw anywhere in Vietnam seemed to be only five letters long! The crossword puzzle makers would be hard pushed to make a challenging cross word puzzle shape in Vietnamese. I wonder if anyone ever gets a 7 letter word in the local version of Scrabble? Vietnamese, for those curious readers out there, is a tonal language and although the length of words is relatively short, there appears to be a multitude of dots, curly lines, little hats etc...over the vowels that make the About 5 hours into the 9 hour journey, the slight smell we noticed at the beginning of the journey was getting more pervasive and it was obviously coming from the young man's yellow carrier bag under his berth. We then realised he must be taking some of Nha Trang's local speciality', fermented fish(!!), to someone in Saigon - rather them than me I say! Needless to say some deep breaths were inhaled when we got off the train and we waved a thankful goodbye to the young man with the smelly yellow bag

Hey Jimmy!

The owner of the Memento Resort was not present on site during our stay but he obviously had heard about the dinner 'incident' 2 evenings before from one of the staff. We had not complained and assured him we were more than happy with everything. He was pretty adamant that he wanted to make it up to us and he insisted that we take a complimentary ride on the Memento horse and cart through some of the local villages. Thinking this would be too touristy we tried to politely decline but he would have none of it. So the horse was brought in from the neighbouring field and given a good scrub down while we ate breakfast. It was then hooked up to the cart and we climbed aboard and trooted off. Our driver spoke little English but did tell us the horse was called Jimmy! Jimmy proved to be less than willing to get above any speed than a sedate trot. The driver was having none of it a Jimmy was soon 'encouraged' to give it all he could! The cart bounced around and I nearly fell out of the back while Jimmy galloped off down the road. Thankfully Jimmy had other ideas and soon slowed down to a more sedate (and more comfortable) trot. We waved at the locals and their smiles back seemed genuine and the trip seemed less touristy than we thought. Jimmy stopped a couple of times to undertake his morning consitutionals although there was a distinct lack of roses for the fresh steaming piles of Jimmy poo to go on any where. A local free wandering bull provided the next exciting installment of the journey and Jimmy needed little encouragement to gallop off away from him. The journey through the countryside was really fun in the end and the resort owner was more than right to insist that we take the ride. Our stay at Memento was at an end and we reluctantly left in the taxi to take our third and final train ride down to Ho Chi Minh City (better known as Saigon)

A Nice Quiet Day

After the excitement of the mud bath the previous day and the fact that Nha Trang quite frankly was not as an appealing beach town as some would have you think (it is supposedly the most popular beach town in Vietnam), we decided to explore our immediate surroundings. It was hot, very hot, and the longish walk into the village area was undertaken slowly. We were slightly off the usual tourist track so the sight of a tall sweaty Englishman walking through the village certainly raised the curiosity of many, especially the school children riding past on their over sized bicycles. The local eating establishments did not look like they were open for lunch so we bought a couple of baguettes and few triangles of "Laughing Cow' processed cheese to have back at our room. It was the least adventurous meal we had had since starting the trip. After bread and cheese, we finished off our grand meal with the fallen mango we had retrieved from the resort's garden the day before - it was a bit stringy and probably would have been best left for the local fauna to enjoy. During lunch the sky turned black and the heavens opened and it rained for most of the rest of the daylight hours.We had 'warned' the staff that we would be eating dinner that night and we set a time of 7pm. At 6:55pm there was a knock at the door to say our table was ready. We sat down a little after 7pm and ordered within 5 minutes... then waited...and waited...waited a bit longer. Nearly 50 minutes later the food all arrived at once. It was worth waiting for and was easily the best meal we had eaten on the trip yet. A very nice and most relaxing day.