Bangkok to Hong Kong by bike - Stage 2

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CAMBODIA & VIETNAM

Stage 2 of the Tour de Monsoon countries went through Cambodia and Vietnam - a route that has been popular over the years with opium traders, B-52 bombers and Gary Glitter. Too risque?

I entered Cambodia from Thailand at the town of Poi Pet - a chaotic border crossing full of the hustle and bustle of international traders wheeling cartfulls of merchandise from one country to the other. It can reportedly take hours to process a tourist visa here, but I managed to beat the bus tours and was back on my bike on the Cambodian roads within 30 minutes. The Cambodian roads are not paved like those in Thailand - the main Route 6 is a pot-holed dirt track. Good fun for riding on. Route 6 took me to the town of Sisophon and then on to Siem Reap, the base for visiting Angkor Wat.

My sister met me here in Siem Reap to tag along for the next 2 weeks of travel. For 8 months I had been travelling alone, so was unsure how I was going to adapt to being with someone for such a period of time. All that responsibility, inflexibility and dependency I thought. But it proved to be none of these and was a nice change to see some sights with a person I know, instead of a stranger cum new-best-friend. I compare travelling alone and meeting people to a series of one-night stands - you meet someone, spend a short time bonding with them (occasionally faking it), share a breath-taking experience, say goodbye, take their email address and pretend you'll meet up again in the future. The relationship serves it purposes for that moment in time though.

We hired a Tuk Tuk and a guide and spent a day visiting Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat narrowly missed out on the final list of the New 7 Wonders of the World, somehow losing out to a big, grey, plaster Jesus (I won't repeat my rant). So it was either going to be amazing or another massively disappointing famous landmark. During the past 2 weeks I had seen dozens of wats (temples) and I thought I may be suffering from Chronic Wat Fatigue Syndrome. I needn't have worried. Angkor Wat is the king of wats and what a wat it is. We arrived at 5am, settled ourselves next to the moat in front of Angkor Wat and watched the sun rise behind the 5 giant towers. Exploring inside the wat was no less impressive. We scrambled up steep stone staircases to the upper level of the temple. From here there were stunning views across the entire Angkor complex.

I was already pretty chuffed with the day, when I struck gold - or more accurately a secret staircase - or even more accurately a small entrance to some scaffolding erected for restoring one of the towers. With no-one around to stop me or tell me to act my age, I clambered up like a exciteable chimp climbing a tree. My sister had been sent out with strict instructions to stop me "doing anything stupid", but she was pre-occupied chasing a totally different monkey around trying to get a good photo. From the top of the tower I didn't see much that I couldn't have seen from below other than a slightly extended horizon. I was pleased with myself nonetheless and so treated myself to a banana.

Angkor was actually built as a Hindu religous site though was later converted to a Buddhist temple, as it remains today. Angkor Wat is the most impressive of the temples, though many many other ancient buildings scatter the site, including Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm - which you'd recognise from Tomb Raider if you ever looked at the background behind Lara Croft. We saw a fair few temples that day, but there's only so much wattage a man can take, so after a long day watting, we headed back to Siem Reap. We had dinner in "Mick Jagger's favourite restaurant" for some culinary satisfaction.

We left Siem Reap and headed for Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The major attractions (if that's the right word?) of Phnom Penh are the shocking reminders of the Khmer Rouge regime. We visited the Killing Fields with a stupa stacked full of 9,000 human skulls acting as a horrific account of the brutality. Then we visited S-21, the prison used to torture and "re-educate" Cambodians before they were inevitably sent to be executed in their thousands. To think this all happened within my lifetime is chilling. The inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge rule is well documented so I won't use my blog to go on about it. Go read "When Broken Glass Floats" or "Stay Alive, My Son" if you want to learn about some gut-wreching true stories. There are still an estimated 10 million undetonated landmines littering Cambodia's countryside and each year hundreds more victims are either killied or lose limbs in their wake. This is no more evident than the numerous amputess visible around Cambodia. Like I say, I won't go on about it.

Time permitting, I would like to have spent much longer in Cambodia, but as it wasn't permitting, we crossed into Vietnam. The security man at customs called me Mr Tim, and I would be addressed as such throughout Vietnam.

Vietnam has a checkered history mostly characterised by their struggle for autonomy. I'll try to summarise this in a walnut kernal: The Chinese came in and dominated early Vietnam. After a brief period of self-control the French colonised Vietnam in the 19th century until WWII. The Japanese invaded. The Viet Ming resisted and then demanded independence from France (in 1954). Obviously the French ended up being defeated. The UN agreed to split the country into a Communist north and an anti-Communist south. The God Bless Americans sponsored the anti-Communist movement in the south. Tensions erupted. War followed. The US (eventually) withdrew. The south fell to the north, unifying Vietnam. Now it is still officially a socialist state but acts and trades like any other freely commercial country, having the third fastest growing economy in Asia after China and India. The US are now their allies. They still eat French bread.

Our first city in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh city (formerly Saigon), where the Mekong delta empties into the South China Sea. The Mekong river had been my guide and loyal companion for the past fortnight, but it was here we decided to go our separate ways. Not before we took a day trip up the river to the Cu Chi tunnels, built by the Viet Cong to elude the US Army. This 240km network of tunnels was designed to allow a Vietnamese soldier to crawl through, but too small for a big western white guy to squeeze into. Therefore the tunnels are tiny and claustrophobic, as well and being dark and sweltering hot, but an amazing insight into the reality of war.

The highlight of the journey back was meeting Yin and his prize-winning cockerel. They were returning to Saigon having pecked lesser cocks to a bloody death. The girls on the boat were fascinated by them and everybody wanted a stroke or to take a picture of Yin and his champion cockerel. Schoolboy puns were rushing through my head faster than I could get the chuckles out. I'll let you make up your own.

In between Ho Chi Minh city in the far south of Vietnam and Hanoi in the far north, we stopped off in the midway town of Hoi An. Hoi An is ridiculously quaint. If anything even a little too charming to be taken seriously. The port is an old 15th century trading post for Chinese and Japanese merchants and very little has seemingly changed since. There are loads of shops selling silk, cashmere and other clothing materials and the competition keeps the prices low. So with its tourism and cheap clothing, it has cottoned on to becoming the centre for tailoring. Hoi An is possibly the cheapest place in the world to buy a top quality tailored suit (or dress). I bought 2 suits for 60 quid and I scrub up like the real deal, if I do say so myself. The only problem being they were made to measure to the exact centimetre, so I need to stay the same size and weight for as long as I want to wear them. Therefore I'll have to keep to my strict Vietnamese diet of snake and dog when back in the UK.

The Vietnamese will eat just about any sub-human meat species, especially in the north which has a strong Chinese influence. Their specialities range from Lau (hotpot) to green rice and somewhere in between there is space for deep-fried spiders, BBQ snake-on-a-stick and roasted dog.

From Hoi An, we moved on anagramatically to Hanoi. In Hanoi there is a 1 km long Dog Alley dedicated to dog restaurants. Not your well-groomed, pure-bred types, like Lassie or the Littliest Hobo or Bouncer that we so love and adore back home, but scruffy vermin types that scavenge on the streets and would otherwise meet their mut-maker under the tyres of a Hanoian moped.

Hanoi's streets are teeming with mopeds. Somehow they all zigzag around without too much cause for concern. Upon first cycling in Hanoi it was quite daunting, as the inter-mingling traffic looks like uncontrolled chaos to the untrained eye. But after a while you recognise the etiquette of the road. If you see a gap in the traffic and you are there first, no-one will fight you for that space. The constant tooting simply means, "Be aware I am here", and not "Get the freak out of my very important way" or "Let's sort this out with a cock-fight". It is unaggressive, slightly controlled chaos.

From Hanoi we took a 2 day sailing tour around Halong Bay, one of the World's natural wonders. Magnificant karsts (jagged rocks) spout up from the bay in a stalagmite-esque formations. Under low mist, they are a romantic sight - I imagine.

After Hanoi, my sister flew on to Laos and I got back on my bike and worked my way up into the mountains around Sapa. Don't let me fool you into thinking I cycled up too many mountainous climbs though. I would usually freewheel until my momentum ran out and then grab onto the back of a passing pick-up or other truck for a free tow. This tactic worked until I almost became the meat/metal combo in a two truck sandwich. I quickly let go of the back of the truck and got catapulted towards the mountain edge. So although I can claim to be covering a good number of cycle miles, the majority of them are downhill.

The scenery in northern Vietnam is stunning and I can appreciate it moreso by bike. I regularly stop at the roadside to take in the views and some water. The landscape is an expanse of paddyfields sprawling down entire mountain sides over hundreds of levelled steps. These paddyfield terraces have more plots than a series of 24 and more layers than an emotionally complex onion. It truly is rice at its most beautiful.

Mr Tim

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Comments

[Philipodpoulso]

Myyyyyy! that yin's got a massif cock!