The catch up blog

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Oh dear...its been so long since i last blogged...this is going to be huge! Oh and those of you dissin' my spelling (MUM!) I'll have you know that its all typo's and i can spell when i want to! There's just not enough time to proof read anything!!

The next stop on our itinerary was Hue (pronounced Hwey for those of you that care!) which was a 14hour overnight train journey on the mankiest train Í've been on yet. The chinese trains were immaculate where as the vietnam trains, although 4 berth insted of 6, were not clean at all; you were picking the previous passenger's hair off your pillow and trying to avoid the mystery stains on the sheets or touching the sticky surfaces...niiice. It was pritty noisy aswel; the speakers in the corridor were straining to blare out the vietnemese music made up of 70% static and 30% wailing. We quickly learned which switch turned off the speakers in our carriges which also prevented us being woken up at 5am by the same cheerful music. However, we sadly never discovered the off switch for Mary (the 72year old Nzlander) who held the seriously wrong opinion that it's acceptable to open curtains/talk in an extra loud voice/ask people to wake up and watch your stuff at 5am! Luckily, my superpower is being able to sleep anywhere and at almost anytime so after the first baffling minutes of "what the hell is going on? have we missed the stop? what time is it? Its What time??? Screw that I'm going back to sleep..." However my unfortunate friends could do nothing but sit scratching their bed hair and watching with bleary eyes Mary pottering round the small carrige, telling everyone about how she'd been awake for hours and how it was so good that everyone was early risers like her who got the best out of the day....

On arrival in Hue at 8.30am we went for some brekie in a nearby restaurant and then went to visit the Citadel and learned about the lives of the concubines of the Emperor. In Vietnam they were quite conservative with their concubines, only having a few hudred whereas the chinese had thousands! Being a concubine of the was a good job way back in the day. Your father who would be a scholar in the Emperor's court would offer you up at the age of around 13 and you would have to work your way up the levels of concubines to get to the top and into his bed. Once you were a royal concubine you could never leave the palace and when the Emporor died you would have to spend your days worshipping him until you died aswel. This set the scene for our royal banquet later where we got to dress up as concubines- Mary and her husband Jim were the king and queen- and we got served 10 courses and ate them in a banqueting hall and had the royal musicians play to us. We left totally stuffed!

The next day we went sightseeing round the countrside on motorbikes!! Totally got over the initial scepticism of motos once you'd spent more than a few minutes one one! We were speeding through the little country lanes, past rice paddies and through villages on the back of motos driven by experienced drivers (toally safe Mum, we had helmets and everything!!) We saw Thein Mu Pagoda which was one of the Emporor's tombs, and we saw the conical hats being madeby a lady famous in Hue because she made these hats with only one arm. One stop was by a japanese built bridge which provided a good break from the sunshine. All the village oldies were sat there snoozing in the shade and apparently it was a good place for young people to date. The reason we were there took the form of a wisened old lady in pink silk pajamas and a conical hat who would read our palms for a few thousand dong. I had my palm read she started off by asking me how old i was and then spooked me by saying that i had done alright in school so far but had chosen not to do medicine, she that i was good with paper (receptionist stuff) and good on the phones (can't believe Goyt Valley came up in my fortune!) and that it would be a good job to me because i was going to be poor until i was about 25! But my parents would help me out with the money side (sorry Dad..!!) She said that i was going to do very well in school and would have 2 boyfriends, the second i would marry and have a long life with. Then she did something wierd with my hand and told me i was going to have 3 children, 2 boys in my early 30's and then one girl later on and that money wouldn't be a problem after 25 and my husband would be rich!! She told me she was 98 and said a few more things which were a bit incomprehensible, perhaps i missed the bit where she told me i'm going to be a famous historian and sell lots of books about international history...! She did all of the girls and pulled a few more spooky things out the bag for them but she did tell my friend Helen that she was going to have 7 children but she could stop at three if she wanted!!

That night was spent celebrating Alison's 19th Birthday but she was too hung over from the previous night so it was quite a tame one!!

The next day we got the bus to Hoi An, one of my fave stops along the trip. A lovely quiet old town with so much character and set on the river Thu Bon, the architucture hasn't been updated really since its 17th century chinese, japenese and european influences- lots of historynstuff. Its one of the best places for food aswel; our main hangout was the cargo club which had the most inpressive pastries and all things sticky. It was such a good base that we bought the mixed cd that was played there in the background! One cargo club lunch time Helen and I were eating our Cau Lau when what looked like brit school trip rolled up- a school trip to Vietnam?! Helen's an english teacher so she wanted to know which school had the sweet deal of trips to Hoi An, so we investigated and found that they were from an international school in Singapore on a school trip for history and geography... sounds like a good career choice to me!

Hoi An was also the cheap tailoring centre of Vietnam...and the place to go was a tailors called Yali. I find shopping in Asia stressful as it is, sweatyness is unavoidable and you have to plan everything you buy -will i still like it back home, am i going to send it home or carry it round, will i wear it again and then add pestering shop assistants and trying to bargin down from a ridiculas price while they tell you how poor they are and its this price because its not fake....my head practically spun off my shoulders at all the decisions to make in Yali!! You could design and have Anything made, a lot of people went crazy and got loads made but i was so unprepared and i could barley choose the style colour and fabric of a fairly standard dress i wanted made! The route to and from the hotel to Yali was a well worn path. Every traveller it seemed went there so it was a good place to meet people whilst sitting waiting while they took a bit in here and added stuff elsewhere. I did get made two skirts in a smaller tailors and left Yali with a light blue chiffon longish dress which will do me well at Uni. Not an unsuccessful tailoring experience in all...!

We did a cooking class in Hoi An aswel which was much more successful than the chinese one, much nicer food cooked and no throwing up after! I'll have to show off my spring roll expertise when i get back!!

On second day in Hoi An we went on a biking tour through the countryside, going to visit a two elderly sisters and see how they live...a real eye opener for us again. They literally had one bowl of rice a day and lived off the land their remaining family leased out. Hai our tour guide said that they would get so much more if they sold their land, but like so many other old school farmers, they would not sell the land that had been handed down to them over generations and had kept them alive through even harder times.

The next day we had the option of getting up at 4.30am (bad enough but especially bad when you've been getting into bed at around 4.30!) to go and see the My Son ancient Cham temples, an insane idea which we all went for! Although with hindsight, it was hard to take in the necessary culture input from our tour guide at 5am and althouh it was a beautiful place, we left 2 hours later feeling not really clued up on the Cham people except that they were a mixture of hindu's and buddhists who liked their Ying and Yang imagery...(yes more phallises) oh and they worshipped elephants. Not to worry, we thought, we'll pay more attention at Angkor Wat.

The rest of the day was spent catching up on sleep, chilling on the beach and messing around in the pool before we headed out for dinner and an early night!

Our next stop along the way was Nha Trang. Hai normally introduced new places with "this is a safe place but we have problem with taxis so make sure you ride with the ones in uniform" or something similar but with Nha Trang he introduced it with "this is a dangerous place, we have problems with bag snatchers and expertise pickpockets and girls don't walk home alone, and watch our for the beach area's at night, and down leave anything valuable in yout hotel room either" so we felt a bit more on our guard in Nha Trang compared with our previous small historic towns!
Our first activity in Nha Trang was a boat trip with swimming and snorkelling and lunch on a boat which was lovely! This trip was very holiday-like, I felt a bit of a cheater in terms of backpacking!!
That night after our meal, Hai took us to the Sailing Club which was throwing a charity night for a children's charity in Vietnam and although we arrived while the stage act was a Vietnemese Abba tribute band (there just aren't words to describe this atrocity) we were glad we stuck it out because come 9 o'clock it turned into a massive beach rave! The Sailing club was the place to be in Nha Trang so i met loads of travellers i had met in Hanoi Backpackers and in Yali in Hoi An along with some new people. Its very strange how you are always bumping into people that you've met before, especially when the backpacker's trail in Vietnam is so well trodden and stuck to!
At about 2.30am we had got seriously sweaty so a dip in the sea was a good idea! Hannah the idiot surfaced as I took off valuables like my watch and money belt (containing credit card and debit card) which i left under my clothes while we went for a quick swim... Unsurprisingly the petty criminals don't go to bed at midnight and obviously watched the loaded and stupid sweaty weaterners wander down the beach. So when we came back to our piles of stuff, unsurprisingly, anything of value had gone.
All was not lost though, I hadn't been a complete fool and had travellers cheques left and enough dong to get me through the last couple of days in the hotel so all i had to do was cancel the cards and get good ole Dad to send the replacements to my contact in Cambodia. Lesson learned! The trip to the police station the next afternoon after our morning moto tour was an experince, but a lucky one- the police just signed and stamped my statement for insurance there and then which was a miracal according to Hai who said that in the past, the police claim that they have to investigate it and get evidence which concludes with them doing nothing and not acknowledging the crime at all. Hai said its because they don't want to report anything and get a bad reputation for their area, and possibly bescause the gangs that rule that area bribe the police. They didn't seem very busy when i arrived. The station looked like an empty garage and the police on duty were all in the back room watching loud TV. Another experience to remember!

That night we rode the awful night trains again and arrived in Saigon the next day at 5am. This time there was no allowance to catch up on sleep as it was straight to the park for morning aerobics with the locals and then at 7.30 on the bus to the Cu CHi tunnels. A brill experince, it took the Viet Cong 20 years to make the extensive network that fooled the americans for so long. We saw the traps they made to trap the GI's and got to have a go crawling though the specially widened-for-westerners tunnels which freaked out even those normally unphased by small spaces. You can imagine how terrifying it would be to be in them with bombs raining down! There were 16000 people living down in them and babies were born down there...

Later we went on a cyclo tour around Ho Chi Minh City, Sally nearly got her bag snatched off her while on the cyclo! I was behind her and a moto came swerving in front of her cyclo and then speeded off, it looked like they had nearly crashed with the cyclo and were just righting themselves but no, they were bag snatchers!

We got to witness HCMC in the rain aswel- there's no warning with the wet season rain. The heavens suddenly just open in the afternoons and its like its never rained before- hard rain that wets you from the bottom and the top! Everyone stops and for a few moments the streets are quiet until everyone finds their plastic ponchos and then the streets are taken over by human sized colourful condoms riding motorbikes and peddling clyclo's! The cyclo drivers cover you up so it feels like your a baby in a pram again!!

We ended our cyclo tour after visiting the War Remnants Museum which was harrowing. The images of deformaties from Orange, dioxin, phosphorous and napalm bombs was bad until you moved into the war crimes section where the images changed to the GI's massacaring women and children in what they called successful search and destroy missions was too much for a lot of us. By the sounds of the Killing fields, I'm going to have to toughen up.
It isn't even propaganda because its photo's taken by american and vietnemese photographers. It becomes even more undeniable when you find out that the US was bombing civilians in Laos secretly and have only recently (like 2001) have started to acknowlegde any kind of second front in Loas - one of the most bombed nations in the world. It's even more difficult to understand when the only reason given to explain why all these people died is a fear of communism.
Its at these times when I'm most certain that picking History to do at Uni was the right choice for me.

The next day wasn't so heavy as we took a day trip up the Mekong river and went to a coconut candy factory on one of the islands, and then stopped at a local family of bee keepers who make honey from logan flowers...nicest honey ever!! The family also kept a pet Python which we all got a chance to hold- brill, i can do snakes, its the tarantula eating in cambodia im not sure about!!

After a final supper and goodbyes, the 27th May marked the end of our intrepid trip in Vietnam.

The next day I wasted no time hanging round HCMC and got on the 8am bus to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I had origionally planned to arrive in Cambodia two days later so it was a bit of a surprise for Caro's brother, who i'm staying with, and consequentially he had planned to go to a Khmer wedding that night and took me along! It was a brilliant experice, we got fed 8 courses of Cambodian food (minus the tarantulas!) and i learnt to dance khmer stye, its all in the wrists you know! I met his work collegues aswel, Matt works for Flora and Fauna, the oldest conservationists around, advising the local farmers what to grow to stop the elephants trampling their crops. Aparently elephants don't like chilli so they teach the farmers to line their crops with Chilli plants. This helps preserve the wild elephants aswel becauase less angry farmers kill them. They also teach them sustainable farming like growing different crops other than rice. I've learned some scary statics...70% of the origional rainforest has been destroyed by farmers who gain land by cutting down the trees and claiming the remaining land for themselves.
Speaking to Matt and his collegues the corruption in the Cambodian government is so rife and ingrained its so difficult to make any progress. Matt was saying that in a festival of independance involving kite flying in Phnom Penh, the government shut the protest down on the grounds that some one could attach a grenade to their kite and drop it over the palace walls and that the kites themselves were a threat to aircraft! The local newspapers have to be careful on reporting such things as any criticism could see them shut down.

Although I've only been here day, I'm really loving Phnom Penh!

That was such an effort, I'll have to keep on top of the blogging!

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