Ho Chi Minh - Mekong Delta - Phnom Penh

Since our last post, we've traveled quite a lot !

We left Hoi An in Vietnam, by an overnight train to Saigon. We shared our compartment with 4 other people, again a guy from the Army ! Train was very slow but in revenge beautiful landscape of rice fields. People were very nice and quiet, common properties less dirty than in China ;-)
After this 19 hours trip, we got to Ho Chi Minh / Saigon, huge city with more than 5 millions inhabitants. We found it less chaotic than Hanoi, the capital, still many motorbikes but with a bit more reasonable driving.
We visited some former Viet Cong tunnels, used during the war against the US to escape and in return to prepare their sneak attacks. It was really amazing to get into this tunnel made only for Vietnamese people... Big US guys could hardly got in and most of the time got trapped inside. They have slightly enlarged them to allow Westeners to crawl inside. The favorite joke of our guide there was to say "welcome to Afghanistan"... American visitors didn't appreciate much the parallel between both wars and the "un-happy end" suggested by the joke.
Unexpectedly in HCM (not in other parts of Vietnam), lots of American guys were traveling in Saigon, among them some guys who may served during the war.
After all these emotions, we went to a very nice upper-class restaurant (still reasonable prices) with several stands around where we could choose our ingredients (typical Vietnamese) and got them cooked in front of our eyes ! By the way, we had the most incredible fruit juices ever tasted ;-)))

Our plan was to cross Mekong Delta from Saigon to Rach Gia (West coast of the Delta), ferry terminal to reach Phu Quoc, supposed to be an heavenly island in the Thai Bay. To travel around the Mekong Delta, we chose the local bus system which is pretty well linked between towns, very cheap and a good opportunity to meet and share a ride with local people !
So we first stopped in Ben Tre to visit some little islands on the river. But our plan failed because of JB's ear... Poor boy was suffering, may be because he played too much in the waves in Hoi An ;-) So, we went to a local doctor, ohohohoho ! JB sat on a chair, doctor arrived, touched ear with her dirty plastic gloves and some weird slimy yellow stuff on them... They must be her 2009's gloves, never changed and used whatever she does... By chance, she didn't need to introduce one of the metallic tools, common for this kind of checking, full of dust that were laying on a woodcut in the office wide open to the busy polluted street... Magic, after 2 days of treatments, it was gone ;-) We never knew what it was... She was not speaking one word of English and when we asked her to write in Vietnamese the disease on the back of the prescription, she wrote something like "go to the drugstore next door to buy your medicines"...

Next stop was Vinh Long, which we chose for the homestay on a Mekong river island and the floating market. We successfully avoid being ripped off by a local agency, that Lonely Planet marked as the best tourist information agency in the Mekong area. They tried to sell us a "crossing the river" for 180 000 dongs per person (=10 $) whereas the local ferry costs only 500 dongs !!!! So we got to our homestay place on the island. It was in the middle of nowhere, surrounding by water, water, water, green jungle and mud everywhere. We slept in a basic wooden bungalow, open spaces on top of the walls, above water, shared bathroom outside (not in a mood to use it during the night) with cold-water... Our nightmare was to be bitten by thousands of mosquitoes but finally we haven't seen that much and to be safe we slept under a mosquito net.
We did a 3 hours boat trip on the Mekong till the Cai Be floating market where people sell and buy fruits and vegetables from their boats !
Our staying there was really special, it's such a different way of life surrounding by this brown muddy water where people organize their daily life according to the river: they live, eat, sleep, piss, work, buy, take a bath... on / in the river !
This life must be pretty hard because of this unpredictable and powerful nature.
The only reason why we would live there would be to escape from our Tax Controller in France... No chance he would catch us there ;-)))

After this roots experience, we continued by a local bus the Mekong River to Rach Gia to take the ferry for our island holiday (Phu Quoc). Big surprise, we arrived in Rach Soi, 10 km away from the expected arrival spot... Usually, we double check the bus station (departure / arrival) because there are several stations in the cities... This time we fucked up a little but we went through: at 6pm there, no local bus to Rach Gia, 200.000 dongs by taxi (=x2 our bus tickets from Vinh Long) or a crazy mototaxi in nightime :-( Neither of them was an option for us... So we tried hitchhiking and got lucky right away. A 4x4 car stopped, inside a Vietnamese couple who lived 25 years in Canada. As usual, people are business oriented and they offered us to stay in their hotel. It was clean, cheap and the guy promised us to drive us for free to the boat terminal the next morning. That sounded good ! The hotel turned out to be a kind of "one hour" hotel for special services ;-))) In the bathroom there were pictures of naked Asian women and the light in the room was red and it was written " I love you" on it !!! But we slept well. We had to get up at 5.30am to catch our ferry... Finally, we changed our plan because too many negative signals: lot of hotels sounds to be full, we read many times everything was over-priced and very touristic, weather was bad and the main reason was that we couldn't find ferry tickets for the morning boat.
We postponed our deserved little beach vacations to the end of the trip in Cambodia.

So let's take the local bus again to Ha Tien ! Youuuupppiiiiii !!! It's a little peaceful seaside resort with black sand, next to the Cambodian border, touristic but mostly Vietnamese staying for the week-end. We only stayed there one night, had some great seafood and tried to relax even if there was a storm in the afternoon.

Next morning, on the road agian by bus to Chau Doc, last stop in Vietnam before crossing border to Cambodia. It's a charming little town but nothing special to visit except some floating houses in the Mekong... There are many ways to get to Phnom Penh but we choose the "slow boat", 10 hours traveling through the Mekong... The boat was very small and indeed slow... but the landscape was fantastic.

What we retained of Vietnam are the very nice people, willing to start a discussion, energic, happy even if their life conditions don't look all the time easy (whole family sleeping in the same room, heat, dust...). Life seems to be organized by "social laws" and goes on even without any "official laws". Nevertheless, it's getting tiring after a while to bargain for each little purchase...
We missed some regions of Vietnam (Mountains in the center and the north) but the landscape along the coast and even more the Mekong Delta are unforgettable. So green and wet but we didn't see many animals, except farming animals (chicken, cows...).

Finally, we arrived in Phnom Penh and directly absorbed by the heat, cars traffic and tuk tuk drivers. We were first surprised that the "official" money was the US dollar even if they have local money (Riel)... Compared to Vietnam they deal mainly with dollars and keep the local money for very small amounts, like street food. Today we visited the Tuol Sleng Museum that used to be the prison and torture zone during the macabre dictature of the Khmer Rouge reign. During the 4 years of terror, 20 000 people were kept there and only 7 survived... Lots of picture portraits of prisoners and some of the staffs (very young boys and girls) were exposed. It was a very emotional visit.

Tomorrow, we're leaving to the east part of Cambodia. We could only book a local bus ticket till 3/4 of the travel... and then, hopefully you'll catch another one to reach our destination !

Adventure continues ;-)

---

Part of trip: Asie 2009

---