It’s becoming obvious to me that my original plan of posting a summary of my travels every two weeks isn’t going to cut it. I see and experience so many odd and new things here that by the time two weeks roll around, I have way too much to put into a single blog post. So, expect more frequent posts going forward. I’ll touch on my recent visits to Phnom Penh Cambodia, Saigon, Mui Ne (Vietnam), and Dalat (Vietnam).
Phnom Penh;
I love Cambodia. It’s a fun, wild, and high-energy place. The moto traffic here makes Bangkok look tame in comparison. It’s a bit hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot. Imagine motos (gas moped), bikes, busses, large trucks, cars, and pedestrians in droves all mashed into tight streets, all moving like they are a single organism, all with a zero room for error. The motos far outnumber any other vehicle on the road. Some move quickly and some slowly, all seem to be looking out only for themselves, but also seem to share a desire to not crash (but will push the risk of a crash to a degree that would seem insane to a westerner).
Just learning how to cross the street here is a challenge. I went through the same process on this front as I’m sure all others do. I stood on the curb of a seemingly impenetrable blur of rushing humans on every type of transportation device thinking crossing would be impossible. Then a local woman calmly walked past me and into the melee. She was accepted as another piece of the moving organism and walked quite calmly (but carefully) across the street as the moving motorists adjusted an inch to the left or right so as not to hit her and she, in turn, adjusting her pace to accommodate a mutually agreeable path. They don’t waste an inch of space on the streets of Phnom Penh.
A different way to experience this is on the back of a moto, which is a common way to get around the city for cheap. Moto drivers constantly ask passing westerners if they want a ride somewhere. Taking a ride on the back of a moto to anywhere in the city during the daytime costs between 50 cents and a dollar. At night, it’s 1.50 to 2 dollars and the ride is totally worth the price of admission. You really never know what’s going to show up in front of you as you weave through the traffic. At any moment a car could back into traffic, a woman could wander into the street holding her baby, a waitress with a tray full of food for a table on the other side of the street (really), a trash truck could decide to make a u-turn. You’re so close to the vehicles around you that you could write your name on them. But nothing surprises a Phnom Penh motorist and no obstacle is impassable, even if it means riding down the sidewalk for a few yards.
I can’t really talk about Phnom Penh without touching on the next subject. These next three paragraphs are not ones to share with the children. Skip it if you’re squeamish or sensitive to violent subjects;
Cambodia is still recovering from the Pol Pot Genocide from 75 to 79 and the years of conflict and unrest that followed. It wasn’t until 1994 that the final Pol Pot loyalist surrendered themselves. Two common tourist stops for visitors to Phnom Penh are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (located at the s-21 security prison), and The Killing Field of Choeung Ek. Both were the scenes of horrible violence and murder. The S-21 prison and the killing field are both raw and untouched, appearing very much as they did when the atrocities were occurring. Blood spattered walls and blood crusted mattresses at Tuol Sleng sit as they were when the Vietnamese took the facility in 1979. Bone fragments, teeth, and clothing fragments in the mud at Choeung Ek. A monument was erected at Choeung Ek containing the 8,000+ skulls exhumed here. They are organized by age and sex. Men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Even the smallest children were not spared (and their end no less brutal than the adults’). Many of the skulls bare the marks of their violent end, often by pick axe, steel bar, hammer, or machete. Bullets were rarely used to execute victims as they were too expensive.
At S-21, I was fortunate to meet one of the very few who survived incarceration at the prison. He was an artist named Bou Meng. He was allowed to live so that he could paint pictures of Pol Pot. His wife was imprisoned at the same time and was executed at the killing field. He was very friendly (like all of the Cambodians I met) and was very curious about what I thought of Cambodia.
Today, things are starting to look up for Cambodia. There are construction projects all over Phnom Penh as foreigners are starting to invest in their tourism and export industries. Their GDP grew 7.5% last year and the owners of the hostel I stayed at say that they’re seeing a steady increase in business. The increased investment is not seen as a good thing by all as many of the poorest are being forcibly driven from their homes without any relocation assistance to make way for new construction. Apparently, this sort of thing is occurring all over Cambodia and is a regular news topic.
Evenings and leisure in Phnom Penh;
I caught up with my friend Camilla, who had also traveled here from Siam Reap, on my last night. We walked the Mekong River water front which is loaded with bars and cafes on one side of the street and a huge park on the river side of the street. It was a good place to sit and drink some Saigon beer and watch the churning crowd of people. It’s all one big mix here, the wealthy locals, the homeless, the tourist, the vendors. There were street entertainers and a children’s dance-group competition which was hilarious.
When I wasn’t out and about in town, I was hanging out with the folks at my hostel which was a cozy little place that is home to ex-pats and backpackers. I met a German newspaper reporter that was doing a story on human trafficking and an Irish artist who had gone on a 3 week vacation with her sisters to Cambodia over a year ago and never left. She now tutors the Prime Ministers nephew in English. Both lived at the hostel and didn’t have any plans to leave Cambodia anytime soon. I could see why. Western money goes a very long way here if you live simply, the town is full of travelers from all over the world, and the locals are very friendly.
My next stop after Phnom Penh was Saigon (Ho Chi Minh’s City center) – again, this next paragraph is not appropriate for children;
While I wasn’t crazy about Saigon, it sort of had the deck stacked against it after my experience in Cambodia. It’s a constant party, which would have been just fine by me 10 or 15 years ago, but now it’s just all a bit too much. It’s clearly a place westerns come to behave badly. Once the sun goes down, the party starts and you can’t walk a block without having just about everything under the sun offered to you. “Marijuana? Girl? Boy? Coke? Heroin?” The offering is done somewhat subtly and it seems targeted specifically to westerns.
No matter what bar you enter in this neighborhood, the process seems to be pretty similar. You sit and order a drink and about 30 seconds later a young woman is sitting next to you asking you where you’re from and where you’re going in and if you are married, etc. At first, I thought that these were prostitutes, but it turned out that in every bar the hostesses do this. Their goal seems to be two things, 1) to get you to stay and drink more, and 2) to get you to buy them a drink (more money for the bar). The bars that are fronts for prostitution are easy to spot; 5 to 10 girls sanding at the doorway of an otherwise empty bar all yelling for you to come in and have a drink. So, yeah, the town is just sort of seedy like that.
I did visit some interesting places. The most interesting was the Independence Palace (central command of the losers in the US/Vietnam conflict), where much of the inscription machines, radios, phones, maps, and furniture have been left just as they were when the tanks came to invite us to leave. I had planned to visit the War Remnants museum, but it closed early. Much disappointment on that one for me, I had looked forward to seeing how the Vietnamese viewed the conflict today.
The real highlight for me here was the family I stayed with. Many shop owners also live and rent out rooms all in the same building. My particular owner was an artist. Her name, after about 30 tries, we both agreed I could not pronounce. She runs the art shop in which every piece was painted by either her or her brother. She told me about her home town and her parents (also artists). She told me about her recent trip to Bangkok, which was a first for her. When I asked her how much she works she told me nearly every day from morning until night. She has some hours off a few times a month and will take some days off a few times a year. She looked a bit sad when talking about this. Not long after I arrived, she asked me to help her load pictures from her camera onto her computer. She then had me sit with her and her sisters and a niece at a small table. She put out a big pile of this small orange like fruit and we all ate it and talked about their lives and my life and where I was going and if I was enjoying my visit to Vietnam.
It seems the people I meet here never stop working. Tuk tuk drivers (cart pulled by a moto that seats 2-4 people), who spend most of their time looking for a fare, start early in the day and work late into the night spending most of that time asking every passing white person “you want tuk tuk? Where you go? We go now”. It can be a pain to walk down the street and be asked these questions every 10 seconds, but I recognize that they are all competing for a small bit of the tourist money to bring home to their family and that their job is very much like fishing; you need to constantly cast your line if you want to catch something.
Organized crime is also active here (easy to believe). When talking about school with a waiter at a small café, he jutted his chin toward the street and said quietly to me “Saigon mafia”. I looked out in the street and, though it was filled with the usual chaotic mass of people, I immediately saw who he was referring to. Two men, both wearing plain dark cloths, walking in lock step with their hands deep in their pockets, acting as if the people around them were little more than ghosts, both with their eyes on the street ahead of them. They walked straight and didn’t move or adjust their path for anybody. I saw them again later in the day and followed them when they turned down an alley. They stopped at a tattoo shop, one entered, the other stood outside, presumably standing guard.
It’s odd to me how everything is so out in the open here and mixed. The good and the bad. The legitimate restaurant, shop, and hotel workers, and street vendors, and homeless, and prostitutes, and criminals. The ceaselessly hard working locals and the wild everything-at-their-fingertips tourists who are quite at their leisure, all mix with motos and exhaust fumes and music into a single image of Saigon.
Mui Ne, Vietnam;
At 8PM on the 16th, I exited Saigon on a “sleeper bus” (imagine a bus with three rows of beach lounge chairs, stacked two high and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what a sleeper bus is) heading to the Vietnam beach town of Mui Ne six hours away. There is no shortage of learning experiences when you’re traveling a country like Vietnam and my trip to Mui Ne wasn’t an exception. My lesson; never trust that the bus assistant is going to tell you when it’s your stop. In my case, it was a comically bad moment to have to learn this lesson.
When I got on the bus, I clarified to the attendant that I was going to a specific address in Mui Ne, which I wrote down and handed to her. She seemed confident that she knew where it was and said she would let me know when to get off. However, at some point during the night, the female bus attendant vanished and was replaced by a man who woke me up at about 2:30AM saying “your stop, your stop”. “Super”I thought, and hopped off the bus. It took me about 2 minutes to realize I wasn’t at my hotel and about 5 minutes to realize I may not even be in Mui Ne. I was in the parking lot of a large, seemingly abandon resort. I saw no signs of any other hotel up or down the street. It was dark and all I could hear was the wind rushing through the dunes and the waves crashing on the shore. I figured I could do one of two things. Sit here until dawn and see if somebody shows up, or start hitchhiking back toward Mui Ne.
I decided to walk back in the direction the bus had come from, assuming based on the time that we had passed Mui Ne. I would pass a locked and dark resort about every 10 minutes. Every so often a stray dog would emerge from the darkness and regard me from a distance before retreating again. I wasn’t scared or worried and was actually somewhat amused at the fact that I had just been abandon on the Vietnam coast in the middle of the night. About 40 minutes into my walk, headlights appeared on the road behind me and I turned and put my hand out. It was a big dump truck and the driver seemed to understand I was trying to make it to Mui Ne. He drove me for what seemed to be about 5 miles to a resort and pulled in and pointed to the guard sitting in a small hut at the entrance. The guard’s English wasn’t very good, but it was a hell of a lot better than my Vietnamese. He understood I was trying to get to Mui Ne, but he wasn’t familiar with the hotel I was looking for. He got on his phone spoke to somebody for a bit and then told me to sit and pulled out a glass and poured me some tea.
I was there for about 10 minutes when I heard a moto approaching. On it was a young English speaking Vietnamese man who seemed very familiar with all things Mui Ne. He told me that the hotel that I was booked in was on the very far side of Mui Ne, about 25 miles from where we were. I asked if he knew a closer place in Mui Ne, which he did. In the end, I was at a beautiful resort with a beach front room for $15/night. The staff was awesome.
There’s not much else to say about Mui Ne. It was a nice change from Saigon. The beach was beautiful and watching the fishing families work was a new experience. I met a couple other travelers, but spent most of my time zipping around on a rented moto and checking out the local sights. The streets here were a bit calmer than other towns, but they had the added complication of small packs of cows that would emerge just about anywhere and cross the street at their whim. The memory of weaving through a herd of cows on my moto in Mui Ne will stay with me.
Dalat, Vietnam;
Dalat is very different from the rest of Vietnam. It’s high in the mountains near the Cambodian border. It’s a big farming area for Vietnam, producing much of the vegetables and coffee used in the country. I took a day long motorcycle tour here with two new friends, Anke and Marika, both from Holland. We visited a coffee farm (where they make a type of coffee that uses only beans that were digested by a weasel –it’s considered a delicacy here and costs about 5x what a normal cup of coffee costs), a mushroom farm, the elephant water falls, a local ethnic minority tribe known as the “mountain people”, a rice whiskey producer (samples where nice), a silk factory that started with cocoons and ended with the finished products (picked up some gifts for mom), and a large mountain top Buddhist temple. The whole day was a blast. We had lunch at one of the tour guide’s family’s house (also coffee farmers). The food, as usual, was amazing.
That night, Anka, Marika and I found a funny little bar called Saigon Nite run by an older man who liked to crank American rock music. It was a slow night for the bar, so the three of us drank 75 cent beers and the owner joined us to play pool until late and then we weaved our way back to the hotel through the alleys of Dalat.
Right now;
I flew to Hanoi on the 20th, which is where I currently am. I leave for a two day trek in Sapa, Vietnam at 8PM tonight. I’ll return to Hanoi on Christmas Eve to meet up with Anke and Marika and some other travelers for Christmas Eve and Christmas and then I’m off to the famously laid back country of Laos.
As I noted earlier, I’ll be posting more frequently so as to avoid such long posts as this. I hope everybody is doing well and enjoying the holiday season back home. Thanks for reading!
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