strange days in vietnam

So far Vietnam has been quite a weird surreal place. I cancelled my booking through the dodgy travel company, only to discover that its impossible to find one that isn't dodgy....I got a bus to Mui Ne, a beach that smelled like dead fish and cat urine but had cool sand dunes and canyons and then left for Dalat. The bus was 6hours late picking me up and then the "brand new, big air conditioned bus" was really a van crammed with about 15 people plus all their luggage. The hating-vietnam-meter began to rise a little. The good thing was that the van got us to Dalat 3 hours quicker than a bus because the driver obviously had no fear of death and thought nothing of hurtling down the road at a million miles an hour in a game of chicken with various trucks and buses. When we arrived in Dalat the tour office we'd all booked through offered us other services, thinking we were stupid enough to want to book anything else through them, so I told the man he was a liar (evidently one of the worst insults in southeast asia) and he tried pitifully to defend his company, making up all sorts of stories about how the roads were closed and then how the real bus broke down etc etc, and then he tried to calm himself down and nearly cried. Awesome.
So I'm in Dalat, a weird kitschy town with swan boats, penguin rubbish bins, broken down amusements parks with weird figurines and giant mushrooms, and a fake eiffel tower. It's pretty rad, and there's big markets where I can get a vegan feast of fake meat for $1. It resembles Queenstown on drugs, some kind of warped alice in wonderland town, and everyone here wears ski jackets even though its not cold. Ahh, Vietnam.

Cambodia/Vietnam

On my last day in Cambodia I went to the Phnom Penh water park which had afew waterslides, a wave pool full of rubbish and a river run that had water that looked like a polluted river but it was heaps of fun and I ended up joining (another) random party that was being held at the pools. The people were workers from some big hotel and they were so happy to party with afew farang that they wouldn't let us leave and kept feeding us some kind of potent wine/rum stuff and insisting that we stay for just one more song. So the next morning I got what was meant to be a big airconditioned bus (but turned out to be a tiny shuttle bus) to the Vietnam border. I'd been warned about how dodgy the Vietnamese people are when it comes to money and charging you for madeup things, but I was surprised that within seconds of crossing the border the officials stamping my visa were already trying to make me pay a 'quarantine fee'. I knew they were just trying to rip me off so I just refused to pay them and they smiled sheepishly like kids thatd been caught doing something naughty, and let me through without paying. I've been in Ho Chi Minh City for 2 nights now and even though I generally hate cities, its really cool here. The traffic is insane; aswell as the usual vehicles coming from all directions at the same time regardless of what colour the traffic lights are, the way to cross the road is to just stroll into the middle of the chaos and hope that you don't get hit! It's pretty scary being surrounded by hundreds of motorbikes all heading in different directions on all sides of the road, and to make things worse they drive on the footpaths too so you can't even walk on them! I've booked an open tour bus ticket and am supposed to be heading to Mui Ne tomorrow morning but have discovered that its a totally dodgy company that I've booked with....

s-21 and the killing fields

My last day in Phnom Penh was spent looking around S-21 and The Killing Fields. S-21 used to be a school and during the 1970's the khmer rouge turned it into a prison and torture chamber and now its a genocide mueseum. There were stories and torture equipment in the old cells and mugshots of all the prisoners who were kept there (and later murdered) aswell as photos of dead people who had been killed in the prison. Prisoners were then taken to the killing fields, where they were murdered by being hit over the head because bullets were too precious. 3 million people were murdered and put into mass graves - with the killing fields being one of the largest mass grave sites. Theres a temple built there now filled with skulls taken from the graves and as you walk around the area there's still bits of bones and cl0thing poking out of the ground. It was a really really horrible day but I learned alot and understand the Cambodian people alot more now. The next day I left for the south coast where I stayed right on the beach for free. Its low season so there's alot of free accomodation at the beaches (and 50cent handles of beer), and The Frog Shack where I stayed was the safest place to be on the beach because there were guys camped out in hammocks outside the rooms all night keeping watch (even though one night I saw a khmer guy climbing over the wall into the room of the barowner to steal stuff - because the walls werent high enough to reach the ceiling) and during the day a crazy guy called Dune would blow a whistle whenever gangs of theives would come near us on the beach. One night a group of us ventured afew hundered metres down the beach to go to a different bar and it was so scary - twice groups of guys started to circle around us from out of the shadows but as soon as we blew the whistle they ran off, and there were also murders and robberies happening down the beach quite often. So, Cambodia really isn't the safest place and I think landmines are the least of my worries, but the Khmer people are really great and are always looking out for us to make sure we're okay and it's really cool to travel through a country that is still real and not yet destroyed by tourism.

...where the deer and the antelope play

I feel like I've fallen into a Dr. Suess book. On a quest to find some traditional khmer food I have come to the conclusion that traditional khmer food consists of drinks with magic mushrooms in them, pizza with marijuana all through it ( 'happy pizza'/'special happy pizza'/'ecstatic pizza' is the official name for it) and that it's quite a good idea to have live snakes and alligators roaming around restaurants and people dressed in sailor suits. This was my messed up introduction to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Add to that millions of people in your face saying "hello lady buy something", tuktuk drivers that won't leave you alone, and the availability of any kind of drug you may want brought over the counter and it's no wonder that I once again found myself sick. I spent the first few nights in cambodia too sick to even get myself to the hospital, and instead lay in bed watching episode after episode of Ripleys Believe it or Not. Once I was better I went wandering around the temples of Angkor which I really don't know what to write about them. Angkor Wat was mindblowing; millions of intricate carvings, crazy steep steps by which you could climb all over the ruins, and stories of monkey armies. The next day I went to Bayon in Angkor Thom which has over 200 giant faces carved throughout the temple, and I got to see my first ever wild snake eating a frog. Temple sightseeing done, I headed to Phnom Pehn today where things just got stranger and stranger.... there are adverts to go and shoot rocket launchers at cows, the killing fields have become a moneymaking tourist attraction, everyone is yelling at you to buy something from them or go somewhere in their taxi, and all the guesthouse staff are persistently trying to sell you drugs - convinced that you aren't able to relax unless you buy their drugs. Its like WINZ came here and solved the unemployment problem by offering lucrative careers as taxi driving drug dealers.

cambodia (finally)

I should have arrived at the Cambodian border before lunchtime yesterday, but good ol' dodgy Thailandness got in the way and it wasn't until 4pm that I finally got there. I made the mistake of booking a bus ticket through a proper travel agency instead of just taking a public bus like I usually do, thinking that paying abit more money to avoid the hassle of public transport was a good idea in order to just get out of Thailand asap. But... being Thailand, nothing is as it should be. The bus was an hour and a half late in leaving and then after driving for 4 hours it cruised on straight past the border and dropped us at this travel agency/restaurant and then drove off with our bags still in the bus. This horrible travel agent lady then tried to pressure everyone into paying her 1200 baht to 'help' with our cambodian visas and said if we didn't pay her to do it we'd be facing a 3day wait at the border because there's thousands of people trying to get their visas at the border. Everyone except for me, Sean, and Andrew caved in and paid her and handed over their passports. She then tried to pressure us into buying bus tickets from her to get a bus from the border to Siem Reap for alot of money. Andrew eventually gave in too and handed over his money and his passport (after she took him away to a room and gave him a discount and said she wanted me and Sean to do the same). We stood our ground and said we wanted to just do things ourselves. We ended up waiting in this restaurant/travel shop for a further 2hours, unable to leave until the bus returned with our bags. Finally it came back and we drove to the border. Everyone had to wait on the bus because the lady hadn't returned with their passports so Sean and I were let off and were through the border checkin points (no 3 day wait or queues of thousands of people - we were the only people in line hahaha) before the others had even gotten off the bus. Obviously everyone was feeling pretty stupid and ripped off and then had to go and get on their bus that they'd paid for while we got into a taxi for less than what they'd paid for their bus, and would have arrived hours earlier in Siem Reap than them. So it just goes to show that you should never do anything through travel agencys in Thailand.
I was so glad we'd gotten a taxi instead of a bus because Cambodian roads are INSANE. I'd heard stories about them, but they were so much worse than I could have ever imagined. It was like driving for 4 hours through market gardens wearing a blindfold, in a car with no suspension or tyres. The roads are just mud and potholes (made worse because of all the rain) and everyone just drives all over both sides of the road. We spun out quite afew times, doing 360 degree skids in the mud right into oncoming traffic and all the while the driver is just cracking up laughing, having a great time. To make things even more surreal he then cranks up some weird trance music, and constantly answers his cellphone while driving one-handed. It was great fun, although I am a little surprised that we arrived in Siem Reap in one piece.

full moon party

The full moon party was on Haad Rin, a beach on Ko Phangan (an island off Thailand) and around 10,000 people go to each one. I arrived not expecting to really enjoy it, thinking it'd just be a bunch of gross drunken idiots all bopping along to trance music. I was partly right - there were thousands of shirtless guys drinking alcohol from buckets and slutty girls with 'shag me' painted on them, people being dragged out of the ocean passed out drunk, and lots of general grossness. There were so many people that I was sure I'd get lost but when we headed to the northern part of the beach towards Mellow Mountain it became alot more chilled out and there was cool music, space to play poi, and lots of blacklights for painting ourselves in dayglo paint under. I got to watch some amazing poi spinners, met some really awesome people, watched the sunrise, stayed at the party until about 10am the next day, and had one of the best nights ever. Unfortunately I couldn't really work my camera so ended up with only acouple of photos; this one is of Jannie and Marie.