Advertisement
Published: June 27th 2006
Edit Blog Post
This is my last blog for Vietnam…well, because we are not even in Vietnam anymore. Jackie and I are now in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and have been for a few days. So, I think the easiest way to update everyone is to go backwards from here.
We arrived in Phnom Penh having taken a 3day/2 night tour of the Mekong Delta. I keep falling into the trap of taking organized tours, mainly because they don’t require as much work on my part and are usually cheaper too. The problem comes in on the corners the tour company cut to make extra money. For instance, the hotel on the second night of the tour was a complete dump with air vents that opened onto the lobby, which allowed us to hear everything from outside the room and I’m sure everyone outside our room could hear our every word. The bed was also rotten…2 inches of foam rubber over uneven boards. The final problem was the driver on the Cambodian side of the border who thought it would be ok to stop every few minutes along the road to pick up other passengers in his mini-van. Granted, there was plenty of room,
but our tour didn’t say anything about being on a public bus (which we were not). However, we, plus the three Columbians in our group dissuaded the driver from doing this, mainly through locking the back door and keeping his hand from the lock. He wasn’t to thrilled by our actions and did pick up a couple of women who sat up front with him.
OK…I know that he was only trying to make a bit of extra money, but at different points on the drive we saw vans like ours with 15 or more people packed into them and when we fought to keep him from opening the door, loads of people were outside the door which would have smushed us into tiny crevices of the van. So, we fought for ourselves, although I think we may have ruined our karma for a day or two (which may explain why a prostitute showed up at our door at 2:30 am last night, banging on the door to be let in).
Back to the delta. We spent 3 days tooling around in boats mainly around the town of Cantho, where we stayed the first night. We then moved
on to the border town of Chau Duc on the second night and the lousy room. Another complaint that Jackie would like me to add was that the people of Chau Duc seemed particularly unhelpful as we were sequestered out in the boonies in the nasty hotel. There was no food anywhere close as far as we could tell, so we ended up walking all over to find anything at all.
However, I really enjoyed the boat trips around the delta and the sights, even if the tour wasn’t all that good.
Prior to the delta, we spent a few days in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City to everyone not from Saigon) and enjoyed it quite a bit. We spent our time there just walking around, seeing the sights and finding interesting places to eat, including a really good Indian restaurant. We visited a few museums and did a bit of shopping, but otherwise took it easy. It’s a pretty interesting city and Jackie said she wouldn’t mind trying to find work there in the future, so who knows, maybe we’ll be back.
Before Saigon, we spent two nights in Da Lat, in the highlands of central
Vietnam. It’s a very touristy town and it’s difficult to see much without transportation, so we just spent our one full day there walking around the lake and the town. The town was a French Hill Station during their rule of Indo-China…a summer retreat from Saigon to escape the heat, just like Sapa was in the north for Hanoi.
This portion of the trip started in the beach town of Nha Trang. We caught a bus there for Da Lat early in the morning, expecting to arrive at about 1 pm. However, 2 hours into the trip, we broke down in the middle of nowhere and proceeded to spend the next 7 hours stuck there on the side of the road. The bus driver left us to go to a nearby town and get a mechanic. It was a hot and boring 7 hours and now constitutes my longest bus mishap in Asia, easily beating out the 4 hours I spent by the side of the road when the bus in China was hit by a car (during my first trip to China 2 years ago).
So, that gets you pretty up to date. Jackie and I have
another night in Phnom Penh, before heading south to Sihanoukville for a bit of beach time. We plan to spend 3 nights down there before heading back to Phnom Penh for a few days and then on to Siem Reap and Angkor.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.194s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 71; dbt: 0.1609s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb