Into Cambodia...

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Hello

Well, for those who sent messages of concern or horror that we were contemplating cycling 80km in one day at the end of our last blog, we have to let you down by confirming that we were stupid enough to do it - but thankfully we survived! Slightly lazily, we decided against doing the apparently gruelling 5km uphill stretch at the start of the ride and went straight into the downhill section. It was great fun flying down the hills (at a sensible speed, of course...) around twisty mountain roads with hardly any other vehicles in sight. The downhill section probably lasted about 30km or so and hardly needed any input from us save for the occasional braking. We then actually had to do some work ourselves off and on for the remaining 40 to 50km but it was not too strenuous and the only real problem was that Matt had a very small and hard racing saddle which got a little uncomfotable after 6 hours... Also, it rained for some of the way and as we had slick tyres they didn't disperse the water on the road at all and simply flung it in our faces. All in all though, it was great fun and we felt that we'd earned our swim once we arrived at our destination - Mui Ne, a beach resort.

Mui Ne was quite nice but not spectacular. It has been the victim of pretty serious coastal erosion meaning that the beach is very short for some stretches and non-existant in others. We did manage to go sandboarding at the dunes nearby which was loads of fun - the local kids rent a piece of plastic to you for an extortionate price (well, about 35p in real money) and start you off as you slide down the dunes at high speed - great fun, but the sand really does get everywhere! We also went to a local fish restaurant one evening where you choose the fish you want from the ones swimming around in the tanks and they then cook it for you however you choose. They had an amazing range of fish (including eels, lobster, crabs and little sharks, but we went for a regular old grouper. Very tasty although we were dive bombed by various insects (some enormous) throughout the meal, seemingly just for their amusement!

After Mui Ne, we headed away from the coast to Saigon (officially now called Ho Chi Minh City). It was quite a change to arrive in such a bustling, energetic and fairly modern city in contrast to the various places we'd been over the past month or so. We spent a few days sightseeing, visiting in particular the reunification palace (an incongruous sixties modernist building in the centre of the city) which the North Vietnamese troops stormed with tanks to bring to an end the war with the Americans and the South Vietnamese and reunite the country (hence the name), and the war remnants museum. The war remnants museum used to go by the much catchier name of 'museum of French and American war crimes' and is an extremely graphic and hard-hitting display of the human casualties of war. We also visited the cu chi tunnels on the outskirts of town, an area where thousands of Viet Cong soldiers lived underground in a 250km network of elaborate tunnels evading caputure by the Americans and launching surprise attacks. The tunnels are very small and a 90m crawl through them, partly in pitch darkness gave a vey brief taster of how appalling it must have been to have spent long periods underground being bombed. That said, our guide seemed to take great pleasure in showing the group the nasty traps the Viet Cong set for Americans who were hunting for them on foot (they mostly involved very sharp bamboo or metal spikes designed to incapacitate - ouch).

As well as the more sombre side of Saigon, we also enjoyed some superb food, in particular the restaurants where you barbeque really tasty pre-marinated meat and fish at your table, and went for cocktails at the top of the Sheraton hotel with great views across the sprawling city.

After Saigon, we headed out to the Mekong Delta, a huge area where one of the world's longest rivers breaks into 9 tributories (and so is called the nine dragons river - the Asians love to name anything 'dragon'...) and reaches the sea. Unsurprisingly, it is an extremely fertile region and produces much of the country's rice and fruit (we sampled fresh mangoes, mangosteen, dragon fruit, pomellos, pineapple, oranges, rambutan, jack fruit to name just a few which spring to mind). We even tried the dreaded durian fruit - it has an incredibly pungent smell and is banned from most indoor areas, it is said to taste like cheese and be very much an acquired taste - we are unlikely to be acquiring it soon! We stayed with a family who were incredibly hospitable and welcoming, which they were very keen to express by feeding us obsence amounts of (very tasty) homecooked food. We also drank a few shots of rice wine with them in the evening after having earlier been off to the local bar for a few drinks. The trip was great fun, one of the highlights definitely being the hugely friendly and fun people, not just those who saw a potential financial benefit in us, but pretty much everyone we came across.

We crossed the border into Cambodia yesterday and are now in Phnom Penh. It is noticably less developed and more poor than Vietnam but the people so far have the same friendliness (except the grumpy and lazy tuk tuk drivers). Today we went to the former prison for political prisoners under the Khmer Rouge regime which was as harrowing as the war remnants museum in Saigon, albeit in a different way.

We have also had a stroll around the beautiful Royal Palace and tonight we're planning to go to the famous Foreign Correspondents' Club for dinner and drinks before heading off to Angkor Wat tomorrow...

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Comments

[jimbo]

bad blogging
Where is the next installment. I am outraged at how inconsiderate you lazy little Lord of the Rings / Snow White rejects are. You reel us in, like a dolphin in a tuna net, and then you leave us hanging, waiting for the next chapter like a dog on heat. Bad blogging. I hope you are chastised by your fellow bloggers in your blogging community, probably via a chatroom in which all the young boys are actually Leslie Grantham. EX oh Ex Oh