SiMonica’s Voyage

Yesterday we returned from a two day tour of Halong Bay, which was primarily a culinary delight and secondarily a visually mesmerizing feast.  I remember when I was a teenager seeing some documentary on television about Vietnam and the only thing that I recall is huge rocks-islands protruding from the water and old-looking junks floating gracefully in the still waters.  Well, as it turned out that was Halong Bay and the rock-islands are karst formations that protrude into the air.  We were picked up from our hotel in Hanoi and four hours later we made it to the docks of Halong City.  There we boarded our junk, which had sails, but they were purely decorative.  We sailed for a few hours, had lunch that included large prawns, crabs, mussels, fish fillets, french fries, squid, rice, and dragon fruit.  After a short respite, we went ashore an island and ascended some 400 steps to get a good look at Halong Bay.  The karst formations spread out in all directions and the disappeared into the horizon like ghosts.  Beautiful.  Then we jumped off the top of our boat a few times into the waters, avoided jelly-fish stings, and went kayaking for an hour.  Also very nice, though it was again disheartening to see some garbage in the water.  When we returned and washed off the salt water it was time for dinner.  Aside from the freshness of the food, the visual presentation was astounding.  They made flowers from carrots and peppers and onions and tomatoes.  The menu included a soup, prawns, stuffed crabs, fried squid, cucumber salad with garlic and pepper topping, lightly fried chicken (for the picky teenagers on the boat) and a large fillet of fish.  Dinner was finished off with delectably sweet pineapple slices.  There were only 10 people on the boat and a staff of 6, so we were doted upon.  Due to a lack of tables, we shared our dinner table with a mother and son team.  The mother is a single mom with three boys, and she decided to travel with her nearly-sixteen-year-old son to show him how people live outside of rural Hunter Valley, Australia.  It was their third day in Vietnam and it seemed that the holiday was going to go horribly wrong, since the mother continuously tried to get the son to eat the food that he didn’t enjoy and was trying to point it out in front of everyone.  The fact that she had a whole bottle of wine to herself that evening probably didn’t help matters.  We just hoped that the kid made it though the month OK and remembered the good parts of the trip rather than his mother’s constant pestering.  The next day we had a generic breakfast and then we visited a cave.  We’ve seen a fair amount of caves this trip, so this one was not so spectacular as the number of visitors that have been here has left a negative mark on the place.  Our last meal was lunch which included a soup, fried sweet potatoes, shrimp in tomato sauce, lightly fried spring rolls, and a nicely cut apple.   We took photos of all the dishes which can be viewed by clicking on this link: Food from Halong Bay Trip

When we returned to Hanoi, we were looking forward to picking up our Chinese visas, going to see a water puppet show (see it if you can) and then meet up with the couple that we met on our way to Vietnam that is essentially doing the same trip as us in the next few months.  However, when I turned up at the travel agent that was processing our visas the agent informed me that the visas were not ready.  The reason she gave was lost in translation but had something to do with the Chinese embassy not being open last week and her having to send it somewhere else (though we were under the impression that the embassy was the only place to get the visa in Vietnam), and that she tried really hard to get it back by Friday but it just was not possible and that we would be able to pick it up the next day.  The reason this was infuriating was that we actually made reservations for the first few days in China and they would have to be cancelled.  Additionally, we were planning on meeting up with Monica’s former co-worker who just happened to be vacationing in Guilin with her family.  With this new information, we had to cancel our plans to meet her (though there still might be a chance if the buses run on time).  So, today we picked up our beautiful Chinese visas (with the Great Wall of China on it) and purchased the bus ticket to Nanning in Guanxi province tomorrow. 

Before the Halong Bay tour, we spent a pleasant time in Hanoi.  The French influence can be felt nearly everywhere with the wide boulevards, a lot of greenery and people relaxing in cafes.  We also lived through a few serious rains, became regulars at a restaurant that served cheap food and even cheaper beer (where we befriended an 84-year-old Vietnamese man who spoke French and in addition to having his own 6 sons, termporarily adopted a few foreigners).  We also visited the Ethnology Museum, which we highly recommend to everyone.  In addition to wonderful exhibits about the ethnic minorities of Vietnam, there was a temporary exhibit about the planned economy from 1975-1986, when people had to buy everything with ration coupons, were allocated 5 square meters of living space, and had to register their radios at the post office in order to be issued batteries on a monthly basis.  The best part were the smiling people in the photographs waiting in line for rice.  Good actors, though.

Well, that’s about it.  Enjoy the photos!

Some of you may remember the episode of involving Monica-eyeglasses-flying-out-of-a-moving-Indian-train-on-the-way-to-Kerala-from-Calcutta-into-the-abyss-of-the-Western-Ghats-at-the-behest-of-Simon.  Fortunately Monica was prepared and brought a back-up pair of glasses and all was well, though they were not as stylish as the previous pair.

A few moons have passed since that unfortunate turn of events, and then we made it to Hanoi where there turned out to be a street that specialized peddling eye- and sun-glasses made by well-known firms of the west but at comparetively cheap prices.  So after trying on a few dozen frames Monica initially settled on this pair:

Upon further review she decided that they were a little too heavy on the nose and a few years ahead of the times.  (She also didn’t want to look like a futuristic Harry Potter.)  So, instead she settled on this pair, which she now proudly wears:

So there you have it folks.  Come to Hanoi for all your eyeglasses needs. 

We also uploaded all the photos since we came to Southeast Asia. 

Enjoy!

To continue where we left off … we woke up from our pleasant nap and headed to the center of town to shop for some tailor-made clothes for which the town is known for.  The main streets are inundated with shops that sell essentially the same designs of clothes, claim to be able to make clothes from any photo you show them, and other wonders.  After visiting a handful of stores we settled on Impressions Boutique, probably due to the slick lady who lured us in with her relatively good English skills.  After sifting though a few books with different swathes of cloth, I settled on a material for the suit that I wanted to be made.  Monica decided that she wanted a dress and chose the fabric, and I chose two more fabrics for button down shirts.  After measuring us up and down, they told us to come back the next day for a second fitting and that the clothes would be finished by the end of the second day.  Happy as clams, we embarked on a little jaunt around the city and another little tailor caught Monica’s eye with their display of a funky coat made of corduroy material.  We walked in and the lady said that she could make this coat either in corduroy or from wool.  After some deliberation, Monica chose to have the coat made from white wool for $22, and also ordered a pant suit for $40.  After leaving that store, doubtful thoughts started clouding Monica’s mind, making her think that the choice of a white fabric for a coat was erroneous, and that she should go and change the order.  Eventually, we didn’t change the order.  However, when we arrived at that tailor shop the next day to see the results, the white coat had some stains already and marks from the blue chalk that was used during the tailoring process.  The woman was very apologetic and said that we should come back later once she cleaned it up.  We ended up coming back 3 more times, because every time there were more blue streaks discovered much to the shopkeeper’s dismay.  Eventually, we got the coat at a slight discount, and the pant suit came out quite well.  Impressions Boutique was also an adventure.  When we stopped by for a second fitting, the suit fitted quite well, though the pants needed to be taken in a little.  I liked the two shirts that they made so much that I ordered two more.  However, Monica’s dress was a different issue.  She found that the stitching was sub-par and it had to be taken in a little.  Additionally, she didn’t really like how the dress looked made out of the chosen fabric, and decided that she’ll buy a different dress made at a different tailor shop.  $18 and one day later, she had another dress made.  (The problem with the second dress was that when Monica decided to wash out some of the remaining chalk, some of the colors ran.)  When we finally came back to Impressions Boutique to pay for our clothes, Monica discovered that her silk dress had a stain and that one of my newly-ordered shirts also had a streak made by some marker.  They feigned blindness and ineptitude and later when we got cross and refused to pay for the dress since it was sent somewhere to get cleaned and we were late for our bus out of town, they pleaded with us saying that oil stains are normal on tailor-made clothes.  Eventually the dress came, we paid for everything (total of $210, our largest purchase to date – suit, four shirts and a dress), and without saying thank you, we left feeling bad.

The moral is not to go to Impressions Boutique in Hoi An and pay up a little to get better service.

Steaming from the inside, we took a bus to Hue, the seat of the last royal dynasty of Vietnam where we took a tour of the countryside, visited some pagodas, explored the Citadel and the Imperial Enclosure, and were bitten by mosquitoes.  Hue was pleasant enough, but one night there was enough.  We left on a hard-sleeper train in the evening.

The Vietnamese trains were made in the Soviet Union (to be confirmed when we take trains in Russia) but the design inside was different.  Our compartment (with a locking door) had three bunks on each side, but the lower bunk was situated lower than on Indian trains.  They even had little reading lamps above each bunk.  Such luxury.  We made it safely to Hanoi, and found a place to stay in the Old Quarter.  The Old Quarter is full of little alleys and streets filled with commerce.  For lunch we had $0.20 beer (pilsener) and some rice with chicken and pork, as well as a cucumber and tomato salad with a sweet vinegar dressing.

Our plan is to get our Chinese visa here, as well as possibly visiting the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, some museums, and walking around town.  Then on Thursday and Friday, we’re taking a trip to Ha Long Bay (a.k.a. Halong Bay) where we’ll sleep on a junk and kayak around the funky karst formations jutting out of the water.  And then on Saturday, we’re planning on entering China.

Dalat turned out to be different from other Vietnamese cities in that the climate was cool, the atmosphere was more relaxed, and the commercialism was toned down.  On our first full day there we rented bikes and decided to visit a hill-tribe village some 12km out of town.  We didn’t really have a good map or directions so instead of the 45 minutes that it was supposed to take us to get there, it took us twice that time, though we did enjoy some nice views of the countryside, listening to communist propaganda blaring from loudspeakers while eating juicy mangoes on the side of the road, and long stretches of downhill bike riding.  After many wrong turns and doubling back, we finally arrived at the village of Lat which really wasn’t much different from all the houses that we passed along the road.  Though they did have an impressively large wooden church right at the main intersection.  After the token amount of time spent in this village, we went to a small restaurant and since we didn’t know what to order and they didn’t seem to have a menu we just said “Com” (meaning rice in Vietnamese).  Lucky for us, com translated into beef soup, fried tofu stuffed with mushrooms, pork and eggs marinated in soy sauce, and fried pieces of pig fat, and two bottles of beer.  The husband of the woman who served us was severely drunk by this time in the day, being around 1 in the afternoon, and kept on coming by our table and babbling excitedly with us. 

While we were eating, the temperature dropped, the winds picked up, and the darkening clouds predicted some nasty weather.  Sure enough, five minutes after we got on our bikes heading home, huge drops of rain started coming down.  We found an awning in front of a store on the side of the road and the proprietor of the store gave us some stools and locked the store from the downpour that was about to happen.  It rained buckets while we sat and waited and waited and waited for it to end.  After 45 minutes of monsoon rains, a woman from the house across the street gestured to us with two plastic bags with ponchos.  Monica rushed over there and offered her some money, but the woman wouldn’t take it.  We thanked her and her kindness.  Although I thought that we should wait until the rain stopped, Monica insisted on leaving while it was still daylight.  The ponchos, though fickle looking, held up well, and we made it to our hotel only partially soaked.  After the rain stopped, we biked out to see a hotel designed by the daughter of the secondpremier of Vietnam, dubbed the “Crazy House.”  It has escaped being demolished as un-socialist architecture due to her family’s status.  You can check our photos later.

The next day we embarked on a physically trying adventure of rock climbing in a nearby valley.  The company provided all the equipment, and we were joined by an American woman who has been living in Japan for the last 5 years and got into rock-climbing about a year ago.  The first rock was a killer for me.  I couldn’t even climb the first 1 meter, and got a few cuts on my fingers, which were promptly taped.  Monica had more luck with that climb.  The second rock was 3 times higher and while parts of it were easier than the first, neither one of us got to the top.  Monica got a little frustrated because her arms refused to flex any longer after the third try.  The result of all of this were a few cuts on my hands and Monica’s bruised knees.  I am not sure I need to do this again. 

The next day we went to Nha Trang, a beach town with a lot of tourists and an equal amount of dive schools.  We found a small hotel, booked tickets onward to Hoi An, delivered our iPod to the iPod doctor, and signed up for snorkeling the next morning.  The snorkeling turned out to be very nice, though at first we decided that we’d brave the waters without wetsuits and both got stung by jellyfish.  Everyone else on our boat was diving, so it was a nice atmosphere.  One funny thing about the boat was that the lonely little life boat on the upper deck was called “Optimist.”  Appropriate.

That day we took an overnight bus to Hoi An, and upon arrival found a room in the old section of town in a 200 year-old house.  After a peaceful nap that was occasionally interrupted by the tune of “Lambada,” we decided to have lunch and order some custom-made clothes. 

To be continued… (We’re getting on a night train to Hanoi).

The rest of our Mekong Delta homestay consisted of a wonderful dinner of elephant fish, spring rolls, a pork and vegetable soup, huge shrimp and some banana wine.  We started chatting with an Australian family who were also staying the night and passed a lovely evening discussing past and future travels over some Tiger beer.  Our guide and the family’s guide got completely trashed, and we were told how happy all of Vietnam was to welcome us to their country.  The next day our hungover guide was a little worse for wear as he stumbled through the workshops showing us how people make rice paper, puffed rice candy, and coconut candy.  Our boat took us to a floating market where people where selling all types of good from their boats: pumpkins, rope, fish, baskets, vegetables, etc.  To announce to people what their boats were selling, the boat vendors attached a piece of what they were selling on their masts. 

We docked in Cai Be and were completely ripped off for our ensuing moto ride and then bus trip to Saigon.  We made it to the city though and the journey lasted long enough for our frustation to dissipate.  We found a quirky place to stay in the backpacker area of the city.  This family had a four story building in this back alley (which reminded us of Venice and Varanasi, but cleaner, as it was rather maze like once you get off the main street) and they rented out the top three floors to tourists.  We spent the afternoon walking around the city, trying not to get run over.  We went on a tour of the Reunification Palace which was an amazing piece of modern architecture.  Simon changed 1/3 of his wardrobe by buying a new shirt and a hat and we had a fantastic dinner of clams in the street market. 

The next day we walked around the city again and started our day with Pho at a small restaurant where Bill Clinton ate when he visited Vietnam in the 90s.  We stopped in the Fine Arts museum, walked down a street of antique shops, and by that time it was so hot we chilled out with some ice cream.  The Vietnamese take their ice cream very seriously and we had one of the specialties which was coconut ice cream with candied and fresh fruit, served inside a coconut!  In the afternoon we went to the War Remnants Museum which was very interesting and depressing.  Aside from the photos of victims of torture, massacre and chemicals such as agent orange, there was also a section which only had photos taken by photojournalists who died during the war.  Another section was about International Support of North Vietnam which had photos and posters of people all over the world protesting the Vietnam war.  I had never thought that the anti-war protestors in the States were really supporting the North Vietnamese.  I could see from some of the materials how the communist parties of various countries were clearly supporting their communist ally, but it was interesting to see how the Vietnamese construed the facts and images after being raised with the American version and perspective of history. 

After this we changed our minds about visiting the Cu Chi tunnels the next day and bought our bus tickets to go to the beach town of Mui Ne.  We spent two nights there and I had windsurfing lesson which was quite tough as the waves were huge and the winds were very strong.  As the Slovenian teacher said at the start of my lesson, “the conditions were not the best.”  But as I was able to stand up on the board and go in one direction by the end of the hour, I was pleased and look forward to taking more lessons in the future.  We rented a motorbike to explore the amazing red and white sand dunes in the area and had an AMAZING dinner of fresh crab in tamarind sauce.

Yesterday we took a long bus ride up to the Central  Highlands and are in a town called Dalat which is about 10 degrees cooler than the coast.  We’re renting bikes today to check out a Lat hilltribe village and some of the local sights and forest.  Tomorrow we’re going on a rock climbing trip and the next day we’re continuing north to the beaches of Nha Trang where we plan to do some snorkeling and hopefully I’ll do another windsurfing lesson.

As we predicted, we’ve managed to see the Sicilian/German couple Mauro and Kerstin (the ones who are also travelling through Vietnam, to China then the trans-siberian railway) again in Saigon and then last night in Dalat while we were taking an after-dinner stroll.  Since you can really only travel north from Saigon or south from Hanoi, we’ve managed to see a number of the people who entered Vietnam by boat with us at our stops on the way north.

We’re going to try to post some photos soon so stay tuned!

The long story short, we made it by boat from Cambodia to Vietnam.

 In case you want to hear about the whole long story, keep reading…

We arrived back in Phnom Penh by bus on Thursday right around noon.  Phanny met us at the bus station and we zoomed (or attempted to) through lunch-time traffic to the boat ticket office.  Turns out that the 1:30 pm boat we had hoped to catch is no longer running, but they had a boat leaving at 7:30 am the next day.  The travel agent in Sihanoukville was partially truthful in that due to the low river levels, we had to take a bus for 2 hours to a place where the river was higher, then take a boat all the way to a border town in Vietnam called Chau Doc.  While at first we were a little peeved that we couldn’t leave for Vietnam that day, we changed our minds later since we had a wonderful time with Phanny’s family.  When we got back to their house for lunch we were pleasantly surprised that instead of having to eat by ourselves upstairs, as we had been doing when my parents were with us, we were invited to eat lunch with them downstairs.  They eat seated on the floor and it was very tasty and relaxed.  That afternoon we ventured out in the neighborhood on our own to pick up some batteries and contact solution and we discovered a whole new Phnom Penh when viewed on foot.  Almost no one walks in this city as the traffic is quite bad and everyone can afford a motorbike, or at least a bicycle.  Stores are set up in the front of almost every building, selling anything you could think of, and the store owners live on the second and third floors. 

We returned home to find the whole family all dressed up for dinner.  We quickly changed out of our grubby clothes and drove to this restaurant on the riverbank.  The restaurants here are massive, similarly to function halls or large Chinese restaurants in the States.  We had an amazing meal of fried fish balls, beef lok lak (meat with beans which you dip in a salty spicy sauce), handwrapped vegetable wrap which consisted of taking a piece of lettuce, placing some cucumbers or basil on top, then taking some of this coconut and rice based pancake which is filled with bean sprouts and pork, then you fold it up, dip it in another sauce and yum.  The highlight were the fresh peppercorns still on the stem which were served with some part of a pig (we think the stomach).  For dessert we had some sticky rice steamed in a banana leaf with coconut inside. 

The next morning So Pai, Phanny’s husband, had picked up breakfast for us before we left for the bus.  We had more sticky rice steamed in a banana leaf, but this time with meat inside.  Having been told that the bus was leaving at 7:30 and we should be there at 7:10, we set off and arrived right around 7:15.  The bus was not there, having left at 7:00 as scheduled, according to the guy working there.  After some intense discussions, where nothing was accomplished except everyone getting pissed off (the customer is never right here it seems), we took a tuk-tuk to where the bus was leaving from, inanother part of the city.  To add injury to insult, Simon managed to get a minor concussion when he was entering the tuk-tuk.  (He’s fine now.) Our tuk-tuk driver managed to find the bus for us, and we settled in for a very bumpy ride.  We arrived at the place where we thought we’d get the boat, and were instead shuffled onto some motorcycles, not knowing where we were going.  No one else from our bus got off, so we were on our own here.  The motorcycle drivers took us into this huge warehouse where, luckily, we could see a boat out the back door.  The drivers’ attempts to overcharge us were thwarted since we had hardly any Riel left.  Fortunately there was a guy in this warehouse who spoke English and explained that we would be getting on the boat at 10 am and we wouldn’t have to pay anyone else.  We had about 15 minutes to spare and we got on the boat and waited.  7 more tourists showed up and we all travelled together to the Vietnamese border.  Before leaving Cambodia we had to get off the boat, have our visas and passports checked by the Cambodian authorities, then get back on the boat and go about 5 minutes down the river to the Vietnamese side, get out to find we suddenly had a guide who helped us through this part of the process, we paid a2,000 dong (10 cents) fee for something (Simon says it was a quarantine check fee), then we entrusted our passports to our new guide who said she’d take care of everything and bring the passports back to us in 40 minutes.  We were shuffled along to a cafe where we had our first Vietnamese bo pho (beef and rice noodle soup).  Our guide eventually came back and we then got into another boat and travelled down a canal and then back to the Mekong for another 2 and a half hours to finally reach Chau Doc.  We spent the night there and the next day travelled by bus to Vinh Long, another riverside town.  To be truthful, the bus didn’t take us to Vinh Long as promised, instead (we think he forgot) he dropped us on the side of the highway and we were left to the mercy of the motorcycle taxi guys.  We had been told the bus would leave us just outside the city and it would be a 10,000 (60 cents) dong ride into the center of town.  The moto drivers wanted to charge us 100,000, so we countered with 20,000, they laughed and we started walking.  We had no idea where we were, but we figured we’d find out how to get to Vinh Long somehow.  Simon remembered seeing a sign for it before we crossed this enormous bridge, but I was hoping he was mistaken.  I attempted to ask some woman how to get to Vinh Long, but she only gave me a blank stare back.  The moto drivers pursued us though, and countered with a 50,000 dong ride, which we conceded and were on our way.  Zooming back across the bridge, the ride to Vinh Long was about 10 minutes, so our bus driver had clearly forgotten about us.  We signed up for a boat tour and homestay for the next day and spent the afternoon checking out this city.  We’re now on the island in the Mekong Delta across the street from our “homestay.”  It’s more like a hotel, but at least we have a guide.  We had a nice tour today of a brick factory where they use the rice husks to fire the massive kilns, then we went to a plant nursery and got to have some jackfruit, longans, guava, pomelo and some kind of brandy made from a big round palm like fruit.  Then we went to our homestay and took a bike ride through some of the islands.  We just came back from a pam-pam boat ride and tomorrow we are checking out a floating market, a rice paper and coconut candy factory, and then we get a bus to Saigon. 

We’ve found the Vietnamese people very friendly and smiley.  Luckily, their lack of English skills leads to very little hassle to buy anything, so we can walk through the markets in peace.  This is likely to change in Saigon and other cities, but we’re enjoying it while we can.

 Also, at the Cambodian passport checkpoint, we started talking to a German woman who is travelling with her Italian boyfriend.  It turns out they’re going to be travelling the same route we are from now until Moscow.  We met up with them last night and commiserated on getting visas and discussed our plans for Vietnam, China, Mongolia and Russia.  We plan to see them again along our trip, but even if we didn’t, it’s funny to think that these people are travelling parallel to us for the next two months.

We had an intersting 5 hour bus ride up to Siem Reap, passing through villages with the houses built on platforms, most with their own dug out pit in front which was used either for dumping their trash, a garden, or we imagined possibly for collecting rainwater for use in farming during the rainy season.  We had a super deluxe ride which reminded us of our Turkish bus experiences – complete with a bus attendant who served water and cakes, and gave commentary in Khmer and rather difficult to understand English. (Overall we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the high level of English in almost everyone we’ve encountered here, this seems to be pissing off the French as no one wants to learn their language anymore).

We were accompanied on the bus by a fellow named So, who our host Phanny had found.  Phanny was a little nervous with us travelling on our own, so she located her friend’s brother-in-law (So) who was travelling back home to Siem Reap after spending several days in Phnom Penh.  We weren’t exactly sure what So’s deal was, but he was sitting directly behind my parents and kept on asking them about what were were planning to do and see over the next few days.  We hadn’t really determined that yet ourselves, so we didn’t really have the answers for him.  He mentioned something about how we should hire a car and driver as it was too hot to ride around the temples by bicycle (what Simon and I had orginally planned on doing).  My parents liked the sound of an air-conditioned car, and since they were paying, Simon and I gave in.  It turns out that So drives a car, so he could be our driver.  It turned out to be a great decision as it was ridiculously hot and there were several times when we all were relieved to be back in the relative cool of the car.  So was also a great guide and his English improved with each day, although til the end it was a bit like a word guessing game as his pronunciation was a little tough to decipher.  The hotel we stayed in, which Phanny booked for us, was super deluxe for our budget standards, with a nice pool and buffet breakfast.  It was only about 2 months old so it was missing some things like hooks in the bathroom, but it was fantastic all in all.  Siem Reap has been growing like crazy in the past 5-10 years with tons of hotels and places to eat.  It’s most popular with Koreans, then Europeans, Australians and Americans.  We took a remorque-moto (the carriage hooked up to a motorcycle) into town and had dinner at a Vietnamese place.  The next day we got a relatively early start and headed out to the temples by 8 am.

We started with the temple of Bayon in Angkor Thom.  This temples has amazing bas-reliefs and these huge heads on the pillars.  It was a lot of fun to climb around  and explore.  We then saw the Leper Terrace and lucked out with a walk to this temple about 200 meters off the main road which was overgrown with vegetation and didn’t have another tourist in sight.  We took the car to Ta Prohm – another temple which was left with a lot trees still growing through the walls, some say as a way for the rehabilitators to show tourists how the temples all used to look before they were restored.  By the time we were through here, we were all so hot that we had ice cream and cold water for lunch.  After a rejuvinating mid-day break back at our hotel, So picked us up and we drove to Banteay Srei, a temple about 30 kilometers from Siem Reap.  It was said to have been carved by women since the carvings are significantly more detailed and finely done than the other temples around.  That night we had a dinner and saw a shadow puppet performance.

The next morning my parents went to visit the mental health clinic of a local hospital where the counselors and doctors were trained by Harvard back in 1994 in attempt to improve the post-traumatic stress of all the Cambodias who lived through the Pol Pot regime (1975-79( and the following civil war.  After their visit we all went to visit this floating village called Chong Kneas.  It’s located in the Tonle Sap lake and we took a boat to get out there.  This village floats in this location for 2 months during the dry season, and once the rainy season begins the whole village uproots and moves closer to the mountains.  It reminded me a bit of a mobile home park as people have their home built on these bamboo poles, with little rafts attached for a garden or pig sty.  All the homes are anchored to these vertical bamboo poles which are somehow stuck in the lake bed.  There also was a floating school, police station and church!  We stopped in a floating restaurant  for a drink, which also had a fish and crocodile farm.  We were mobbed by these pathetic looking children, occasionally accompanied by their mothers, who were trying to sell bananas for $1.  We ended up buying bananas from a couple kids, then giving the bananas back to them.   The noise of the hawking was a bit deafening, almost leading to Simon having a breakdown, but he survived.

That afternoon the doctor and two counselors from the hospital where my parents had visited, met us at our hotel and we all set off to Angkor Wat.  It was interesting to talk to them, although there was a bit of a communication barrier as their English was not so great.  We saw all the bas-reliefs here climbed up the stairs to the inner temples.  We saw a beautiful sunset from the top.  We were to return to Angkor Wat early the next morning for sunrise.  It was wonderful to see, and also fantastic to be able to walk around the huge temple compound before it got too hot.  We saw a whole troop of monkeys playing in a tree!  To top off our Angkor experience we went to Preah Khan, a smallish temple with narrow corridors.

The next day we took the early bus back to Phnom Penh and managed to see the Royal Palace, with the Silver Pagoda, in the afternoon.  For dinner that night, Phanny’s sister had made us a feast of fish amok (cooked with coconut milk and peppers and served inside a coconut), vietnamese soup with mushroom and marinated pork and egg.  We got to meet all of Phanny’s sisters and nieces and nephews as they all came by to see us.  In case I didn’t explain before, Phanny is the sister of Sorat, a man that had worked for my Dad at the mental health clinic he runs in Lowell, MA, teaching Tai Chi.  We had a chat with two of the nieces who are in there 20s, about what life is like for them as educated middle class Cambodians.  Apparently it’s very hard to find jobs, and if you do find a job that is suitable for a college degree, it pays terribly.  Most people have to have two jobs to get by.

The next day, April 1, my parents were leaving to fly back to Bangkok and we took the bus the South Coast of Cambodia.  Before we all departed, we had a wonderful breakfast of nooodle soup and a moon cake. We took the bus to a riverside town called Kampot, which is famous for the pepper grown there.  We stayed in a cute guest house (back to our world tour budget of $4 per night) and strolled along the riverside.  The next day we rented a motorcycle and after an incident where the bike decided to act like a bucking stallion, we were on our way with minor bruises to the seaside town of Kep.  Kep was a popular tourist destination back in the 50s, but over the past few decades has fallen into a deep decline.  You can see all these rundown vacant villas from the road.  We took a boat to a nearby island (Rabbit Island or Koh Tonsay) and enjoyed relaxing on the beach.  Back in Kep for dinner we had an amazing seafood dinner and got to watch the sunset over the ocean from our table.

The next day, yesterday, we took a share taxi to Sihanoukville.  Luckily the Kurt Vonnegut book I was reading distracted for most of the 2 hour journey during which Simon and I shared the front passenger seat.  Sihanoukville is the new and improved Kep, with huge investment during the 60s, and after the demise during the 70s and 80s, it’s booming again with lots of hotel development.  Unfortunately there’s a lot of trash in the water and on the beach here.  Today we went on a boat tour of three nearby islands and got to do some great snorkeling.  It was painful to see that our boat had anchored on the actual reef and you could also see the damage to the reef from the dragging of fishing nets.  Hopefully some type of environmental standards will be enforced, otherwise these reefs won’t last much longer.  We were able to see some interesting coral, enormous sea urchins with foot long spines, and some fish.

We’re heading back to Phnom Penh tomorrow and hope to get the boat to Vietnam in the afternoon.  We heard from a travel agent here that there’s no boat since the water level of the Mekong is too low due to the dry season.  He was also trying to sell us bus tickets all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (f/k/a Saigon) so we’re going to go to Phnom Penh and hopefully get the boat.

3 months left for our trip! It’s official, we will be coming back to the states.  We bought our plane tickets travelling from Odessa, Ukraine to Boston on July 5th!  We’re planning on spending time up in Masschusetts and then about a week in New York in mid-July.  Time flies.