Road to Camboida via Ho Chi Minh City

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Martin: We sat in a deadly silence, awaiting our doom. Sweat slowly began to ooze from our pores and trickle down our faces as the clock neared the arrival time of the bus. 18:00… No bus. This was tormenting, the clock slowly ticking. Ten past… still nothing… quarter past… nothing. Every minute that passed was tense with the evil 24-hour bus’s imminent arrival. For a while there was a small part of me that wished this bus would never turn up, but my dream was shot out the sky when finally at 18:30 the bus arrived and we had the unfortunate necessity of putting both us and our belongings on board for the next 24 hours.

We found seats near the back of the bus. Behind us was a big guy from Finland who we took an instant dislike to. He was loud, obnoxious and uneducated. The bus filled quickly and it was inevitable that the super luxury of two seats to yourself just wasn’t going to happen. There was a guy sat on the back seat of the bus by himself and one of the drivers came down and told him he had to move as it was reserved so they could sleep. You can guess who had the nearest available seat. The Finish guy kicked up a fuss, telling the guy to move down the bus as he wanted both his seats to himself. The driver was shouting at the poor guy who was told to move, telling him to sit down, yet the Finish guy wouldn’t let him take the nearest seat. Eventually the guy had to walk right down to the end of the bus and find a seat. I was red with rage. I stood up and gave the Finish guy a mouthful explaining that nobody was going to be comfortable on a bus for 24 hours and I asked him why did he have to be such a dick about it? He came back with absolutely nothing, much to the delight of the other passengers who were kindly acknowledging my rant with thumbs up a plenty. I sat back down in my uncomfortable seat satisfied that I had shown this idiot what for and set myself up for the next 24 hours.

The Finish guy didn’t stop going on about how much he would drink when he was at home, and how he had such an amazing tolerance to alcohol and would drink all day and all night. He was a real party animal. For a moment I thought I was sat in front of Oliver Reed. This was obviously not the case as Oliver Reed got off the bus a long time ago. The guy had about four beers on the bus, was totally wrecked, and passed out. I think my thirteen year-old brother could easily drink him under the table. We found this highly amusing, chucking to ourselves safe in the knowledge that no one can beat the Brits when it comes to alcohol consumption, except maybe the Irish.

The journey passed. MP3 Players were taken down, as were local snacks, small talk, bus narcosis, and a spot of reading. Eventually after a bus change and more of the same same we were entering Ho Chi Minh City or for this next part Saigon. Pete and I had been very excited about taking down our Apocalypse Now moment, and as the bus rolled into Saigon we both retrieved our MP3 players and selected the only song of choice. Music…Artists…The Doors…The End. Having reached the end of the song we both uttered the words “Saigon…..Shit”. If Martin Sheen had been there, I’m absolutely sure he would have been damn proud of the two of us. Having lived that moment we could have left Ho Chi Minh there and then, as our main task for visiting the city was complete.

Now this may sound ridiculous but 24 hours on the bus was not that bad. We arrived in Ho Chi Minh dazed and slightly confused in search of a cheap room with a skyfan so we could relive our Apocalypse Now moment in style. After a successful recon we found a cheap room in a family run guesthouse. The owner showed us to the room. No windows, no skyfan. Gutted! The dream was not happen but the room was cheap so we took it and ventured out to find some economical food, and inexpensive beer.

We were told that Bia Hoi was local to Hanoi and was not available in the rest of Vietnam. We knew that this was a fallacy as we had sampled its delights in both Cat Ba Island and Hoi An. Having only walked 10 metres down a street in Ho Chi Minh we saw a bright light. As we edge closer to the light we discovered we had found a beer Hoi establishment which to our astonishment was even cheaper than Hanoi. It worked out at around 45 cents for two litres! We met some Brits who were doing the same trip as us but in reverse so they told us about Oz and we talked to them about Laos and northern Thailand exchanging useful tips and information. This is the best way to get information while you are travelling. We only really use the Lonely Planet for travel advice and maps i.e. how to get from a to b. This is because as soon as something is in the Lonely Planet they bump their prices up, plus you can guarantee every other man and his dog that lacks a sense of direction and adventure will either be eating or staying there. I can understand why in Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach’ they use the line “Once it’s in the Lonely Planet its countdown to doomsday”. We decided to all grab some food together and the waitress asked us if we fancied coming to a bar down the road. When we got to this bar it didn’t take long to realise what was going on. The place was full with old men, each one having a young Vietnamese girl attached to their arm, and their wallet. The words “me so horny…me love you long time” spring to mind. Thank you Stanley Kubrick. We had a couple of games of pool and a few beers and left to go home as we were travelling the next day. Much to the disappointment of the available girls who were looking for a free drinks ticket.

Pete: It’s important to note at this point that Ho Chi Minh City was not what we’d expected. We had met several other travellers on our journey south that were living the Vietnam dream in reverse. We told them about Hanoi’s insane motorbike population and the asphyxiating fumes that came as part of the package. We were told, on numerous occasions, that Ho Chi Minh was far worse. This was not so. In fact I would hazard a guess that none of these people had ever been to Hanoi and were just assuming that since Ho Chi Minh was a larger City, that there was more of a problem. They were in for a shock! I was also pleased to see that my walking boots, which live on the outside of my rucksack, had made it all the way through Nam and hadn’t, at any point, been liberated by a Vietnamese guy looking for a pair of sturdy new shoes. This might be because South East Asian chaps have comparatively small feet. In fact it’s quite a problem when looking for new footwear, not many places offer anything in a size 10 or above.

Due to a tight time scale and the fact that we were now behind schedule, we needed to leave Ho Chi Minh that day, bound for Cambodia. We were desperate to do the border crossing by boat, straight up the Mekong Delta to Phnom Penh. A small Vietnamese town called Chau Doc was where we needed to be in order to realise this dream. By way of conversation with some friendly locals (again, they do exist), we were able to ascertain that it was about 6 hours west of Ho Chi Minh and that local buses do run there. This was great for us, we’d had enough of the inefficient and comparatively expensive tourist transport. Procuring a ticket for the local bus though, was proving harder than we thought. Most of the travel agency’s we spoke to told us that local buses don’t run to Chau Doc and that the only way to get there was to book a two day tour, including lodging and a ferry to Phnom Penh, for the grand total of $24. Ninety eight percent of what these agency’s will tell you is bollocks. It’s always best to find out for yourself. Local transport is generally a lot more efficient and far more cost effective. Not to mention that the experience is invaluable, it’s one of the best ways to meet the local people. This in mind, we threatened to go to the bus station to and sort it out ourselves. It worked. Now they were interested. We hooked ourselves up with two tickets for the bus leaving at 16:30 and transport to the station. We now had a couple of hours to kill and decided to spend it wisely. The war museum sounded interesting so we hopped on the back of two motorbike taxi’s and headed there. We arrived to find that it was closed for lunch. Shit! We had an hour before it opened again. We headed to the local market to waste the time. We tried some obscure fruit called Rambutan. It’s a bit like a Lychee, only a whole lot nicer. During the consumption I started thinking about guitars, I hadn’t played in over a month and desperately needed a fix. So I bought one. Technically it’s crap, but it plays and sounds remarkably good. I handed over twenty dollars and I was a happy man. We returned to the war museum bob on opening time. It was an interesting place and although it was a bit one sided, it really brought home quite haw bad the war was. There was a picture of an American soldier holding up a dismembered torso whilst laughing to him self. Checking out the tanks and helicopters was awesome though! This done it was then time to catch our bus. It was an amazing experience. The driver, like all others, was a mentalist. I wonder if that bus actually had a brake pedal. And despite the fact that nobody spoke a word of English, one guy sorted us out using an array of hand gestures and nodding and shaking of the head. Bonus!

We arrived in Chau Doc at about 23:00hrs and as always the bus station was situated miles away from the town. Motorbike taxis were needed. Nobody spoke English. Bugger! Eventually we resigned ourselves to the assumption that they probably knew where we wanted to go, so we hopped on the back, carrying all of our luggage, and off we went. They delivered. We landed in town and set about trying to find some accommodation. This was not so easy. Everywhere was shut. Wondering where we would spend the night, we paced the streets of Chau Doc. Eventually we were approached by a cyclo driver who said he knew a place we could stay. We were a little dubious but too tired to argue. He turned out to be a really nice guy. We neither mounted his vessel or paid him any money and he delivered us a cheap room for the night. It was on the forth floor and full of fly’s but it was a room none the less. They even sorted us out with a ticket for the ferry the next day and the whole lot cost us $4 less than if we had gone on the tour!

Martin: We arose early the next morning to embark on the ferry to Phnom Penh. After a quick fix of omelettes for breakfast, our cyclo driver who was supposed to take us to the ferry arrived outside the hotel. He then pointed in the general direction of the ferry and rode off leaving us to carry all our luggage and navigate our own way there in the blistering morning heat. The other passengers on his cyclo found this amusing. We did not.

The ferry was an old boat and was extremely slow but had a huge rooftop deck on which you could relax, catch rays and admire the amazing scenery. Chau Doc itself is a bustling border town and the river is the hub of all activity. It was wonderful to watch the town come to life in the morning, as the local fishermen set about their day and the local water markets sprang into life, all this while catching some well needed rays. Pete, bless him, tried to take this time to catch up on his journal writing. This sounds like a normal thing to do but he was in fact living in a dream world. On Pete’s last entry into his journal he was still in my Mum’s car on the way to Manchester Airport. He only had three countries and five weeks travel to catch up on which is a little optimistic to say the least. I, however, haven given up entirely on my journal spent the time basking in the sun, reading, and watching the scenery of the Mekong Delta go past at a slow and steady pace.

Pete: While on the boat I met an Australian lady whose maiden name was Quinnell, I found this fascinating as I thought that the ones I knew and loved were the only ones in the world. We talked for a while but when we discussed how, somewhere down the line, we were probably related, the conversation got a little weird and we went our separate ways.

Martin: Eventually we arrived at the border, myself a little browner, and Pete, having now acknowledged how much he had to write, looking a little worried at the prospect of catching up on his journal. As we had come to learn, border crossings take time. I don’t know why but they just do. We sat around for what seemed like a few hours while everyone had their passports stamped as the left Vietnam and then re-stamped as they entered Cambodia with the obligatory “what is the purpose of your stay in Cambodia”? “we are on a world wide tour in search of the Swedish National Volleyball Team and I have been told they are currently residing in Angkor Wat and are recruiting men to help with sport injury massage and pre match preparations”……. “Tourism” I replied. We also stopped for some food at the border and changed a small amount of our US dollars into Cambodian Riel. This turned out to be totally pointless exercise as we discovered that even though Cambodia has it’s own currency, everybody operates on US dollars. We were hurried back onto another boat for the final stretch up the Mekong to our final destination Phnom Penh. There was short bus ride and complimentary back massage (really bad roads) to Phnom Phen from the dock and we arrived in the city looking for a place to stay. We had an idea of where we were going and managed to find, as always, a cheap place to stay. We dumped our bags and congratulated ourselves on reaching country number four.

That night we went out for some excellent hawker food and met up with some other people on the bus for a drink. The night was uneventful but we did meet a woman who had the most boring voice in the world. She took monotone to a whole new level. She would even put Michael Owen to shame! We also found it strange how she had two young kids at home and had left them in the UK whilst she went travelling around Cambodia for a couple of months. Well, when you have no responsibilities, it’s easy to drop everything and do that. We had made the decision to travel straight to Siem Reap the next morning, explore Angkor Wat and then come back to Phnom Phen to do the Killing Fields with the prospect of getting a cheap flight straight to Bangkok so we could avoid the road out of Cambodia which we had heard was one of the worst in the country. This in mind we headed back to catch some sleep in preparation for an early bus the next morning.

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Photos

Tank
tanks are awesome

Helicopter
I would have liked to ride in this Huey chopper

Chau Doc
Waving goodbye to Vietnam

Petrol Station
I am sure health and safety would have something to say about this

Fishing Boat
Doing it the local way

Houses on stilts
imagine living in one of these

Pete
desperately trying to keep the journal writing dream alive

Martin
The new Jimi Hendrix...