Sick in Saigon/ The Asian Tattoo

---

Finally, three months of nonstop travelling have caught up with me and I am sick as a dog in Saigon, luckily I am staying at my friend Sonja's house and have a nice comfortable room with a computer and some Internet access so that I can update my blog.
I last left you right before the sleeper bus experience which I will call just that, an experience. I booked the ticket for myself, an American girl, Erin, and two Argentinians, language barriers I guess told the saleswoman we needed a bed for the four of us and we were booked to sit in the bottom bunk in the last row which is basically one bed the width of the bus with one small aisle size exit and no room for sitting. Not only was that horrifyingly tight, I had my first real bout of explosive diarrhoea. Luckily, there was one empty bed space (some beds are "large" enough to fit two) next to a hunky American guy so I walked up to him and introduced myself as his new bed mate. Unfortunately I didn't even get his name cause I had to keep running to the tiny bathroom on the bus.
So we arrived in Pakse, not as well rested as our Asian counterparts but nonetheless excited to have survived the bus. This is where the Argentinians were separated from Erin and myself. So, Erin and I decided to take a detour to Wat Phou, a 1500 year old temple before heading down to the 4,000 islands near the border with Cambodia. The temple was amazing and it was nice that there weren't many tourists there (we were dropped off at an intersection on the road where we had to hitch a ride to the river, take a ferry across and then take a tuk tuk for 30 mins in order to get there). We walked around and Erin had a great guide book that explained what was what and where. Once we were done checking it out our tuk tuk driver took us back to the place where we were going to once again cross the river, hitch a ride and take a bus south when I realized I had lost my wallet with the only Laotian money I had, my debit card and my driver's license.
I haggled with him to take me back so that I could look for it, for some reason I had a feeling I had not lost it forever. So he mounted me on the back of his motor bike and took me back to the temple. In my rush to find the wallet I made the colossal mistake of dismounting the motorbike on the right side at the exhaust pipe level, needless to say that baby was going to leave a scar aka the Asian Tattoo, in case you were curious, second degree burns hurt like hell. But, there was no time to cry about that at this point (also, the driver thought it was hilarious that my pants were singed to my leg) so, I ran up the temple stairs all the way to the top where I had earlier purchased a water bottle only to find out that my wallet was not there. The sales lady also thought it was quite funny that my leg was on fire and I had lost my wallet but only temporarily because I burst out sobbing and that's when everyone, even the other tourists began looking for my wallet.
I recomposed myself and decided I wasn't finding it at the top of the temple but not all hope was lost and as I was leaving the temple I remembered that the last picture I had taken I hadn't found my lens cap for my camera so I had emptied my bag, found the cap, replaced it and left. I turned my camera on, found the last picture, stood where I had to have been in order to take the picture looked down and there it was, my wallet untouched!
And that's when the pain began.
So I returned to Erin, we took the ferry back to the other side, hitched a ride on the back of a truck to the intersection and had lunch while we waited for the next "bus" down south. I iced the leg and only then did I feel some relief. The "bus" was one of those pickups with the seats in the back and as is custom here, has an extra third row in the middle (a wooden plank) where we proceeded to spend the next three hours only to realize we weren't going where we wanted to, we were headed to another island which at that point sounded fine to me since all I wanted was to cool my leg.
The next day, Erin and I boarded a long tail boat and headed for the island of Don Dhet where there is only electricity from 6 to 10, no running water, just the Mekong and much relaxation. All was good and well there except I was basically unable to swim due to the open wound on my leg so I pretty much slept, ate, played card games and walked around the island. We also managed to get our lazy asses on bikes one day and rode to the widest waterfalls in the Mekong, pretty incredible.
Erin and I split up here, I stayed on a day longer and spent it with Ranaka, a 60 year old harekrishna from Germany, pretty interesting, and he mentioned there is a palm reading library in India which I am now very interested in visiting.
The following day I took a van to the border with Cambodia where I met a couple of Colombian Paisas, (donde sea que vaya uno va a haber un paisa o en este caso dos) with whom I decided to travel on to see the famous Mekong river dolphins near the town of Kratie. We arrived and walked to the center of town which everyone told us was only 200 meters from where we were dropped but was in reality a km or two away. As we looked for a guesthouse, a motorbike approached and promised to take us to his guesthouse at no charge with no commitment. I hopped on and as one guy was driving me in the direction of his guesthouse another moto driver was driving next to us selling me his guesthouse... The dolphins were beautiful although hard to spot in the pouring rain, but more amazing was finding out that the boy's father's family is also Puerto Rican and also from Santurce. And here I must send a shout out to the folks at 3M for inventing a miracle patch that you can put over 2nd degree burns which looks like seran wrap and allows the wound to breathe while shielding it from the elements (thank you Pablo for giving it to me and for listening to Marianela Sierra, a classmate of my sister's with whom he worked at 3M when she said it was essential he bring it with him).
After spending the night there we took an 8 hour bus to Siem Reap, the second largest city in Cambodia and home to the famed temples of Angkor Wat. The lonely planet guide warns of the mobs of tuk tuk drivers waiting at the bus station to scam tourists into staying at their guesthouses, that warning is nothing in comparison to what happens when you do get off the bus. Within 5 seconds there were 40 men surrounding me, pulling me this way and that. This was the first time I was happy to be a woman in a man's world because I told them all I could not make any decisions, only my male friends could decide where we were going and was somewhat left alone.
We arrived at the Garden Village Guesthouse and went to bed early in preparation for our visit to the temples. The following day we rented bikes and set out to see the majestic temples built and housed by a population of over 1 million while London was just a town of 50K. Little did I/we know the bike ride in total to visit the temples would take about 8 hours in total while the site seeing was only really 3 hours. The boys were impressed that I kept up and we decided the next day we would visit the temples on tuk tuk like the rest of the tourists. The boys left me and that same day I received an email from Erin saying she was also in Siem Reap so we met up and hung out there a couple of days before heading south to Phnom Phen, the capital.
The most amazing thing about Cambodia to me has been the resilience of its people. It is incredible to think that only 30 years ago they suffered a genocide. We visited the killing fields and S21 where the Khmer rouge trained child soldiers to exterminate the intellectual elite as well as farmers and workers. If you are interested in reading more about this, the wikipedia entry is pretty informed as well as the books First They Killed My Father as well as The Killing Fields.
From Phnom Phen I moved onto Saigon where I am now. I haven't done anything in the past couple of days thanks to the cold but will post an update as soon as something does happen. Keep in touch!

---