2010 Cruise Indochina

Well, we've been travelling for a couple of weeks now and it seems like ages! Our first stop was in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, which was a complete culture shock. We went from steamy humid and regulated Malaysia and Singapore into dry dusty and chaotic Cambodia. The tuktuk (2 seater trailer with canopy towed by a scooter, seats up to 8 with luggage) ride in from the airport aged me 10 years, as the Cambodian
traffic is the worst I have ever seen. The only road rule is that you have right of way, and it is up to you when/how you choose to enforce that. A 4 lane road will have anything up to 16 lanes operating on it, with anything from pedestrians, ox carts, elephants, bikes, motorcycles, tuktuks, cyclos (passenger vehicles like pedal-driven

wheelchairs), cars, SUVs, trucks and buses all going for it at high speed. To make matters (more) interesting, which side of the road you travel on depends on how you feel on any given day, so crossing the road is an absolute nightmare. Bruce used to make me do it before coffee and I'd be standing on the side of the road looking at the utter chaos and crying. After a few days you got to be able to stare down cycles and motorbikes, but grabbing a tuktuk and heading to a restaurant was usually the least fraught option. People had warned us about the traffic in Saigon, but at least that has some reason - Phnom Pehn is just madness. That being said, we absolutely loved that city - it just bursts with life and good humour - I didn't stop smiling (apart from crossing the road or being hounded by begging children) all the time we were there.

Memorial stupa at the Killing Fields. It is full of skulls, bones and clothes

Interior of the stupa showing one layer of skulls

"Please don't walk through the mass grave" A reasonable request, I thought.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Photographs of the victims of Tuol Sleng. There are several rooms of these.

Torture room with photograph of corpse found there when it was liberated

One of my least-wanted-to-do trips was the whole genocide tourism thing, visiting sites from Cambodia's civil war, but somehow you can't avoid it. You can't walk for 30 seconds along the street without a tuktuk driver shouting "Killing Fields? You go Killing Fields?" at you, so we yielded to the pressure and went to both the Killing Fields and to S21, the detention and torture centre set in a secondary school. I can't say it was enjoyable, but I am glad we did it. (Bit of history - skip it if you are familiar with the woes of Cambodia. During the years from 1974-1979 the Khmer Rouge government killed a quarter of the population of the country - over 2 million deaths. The main city of Phnom Penh was emptied out by force and all the city dwellers forced to evacuate to the country to become rural peasants (many starved to death) and all intellectuals, teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, even people who wore glasses (and were thus suspected of being intellectual) were killed along with their families. This has had a major impact on the country today, as a whole generation of people with the skills to run the infrastructure were lost, so they are starting from the beginning again. We talked to some expats who have been there for several years and they say the improvements in the last couple of years have been amazing, but it is still incredibly poor and lacks basic facilities.)

The Killing Fields are around 15k from PP and consist of several excavated pits which were the mass graves of about 9000 people. There is also a large memorial tower, or stupa, with glass sides displaying the clothes and bones of the people who died there, but you can still see bones surfacing from the ground in some areas, and many places have
not yet been excavated. S21 or Tuol Sleng is where prisoners were held and interrogated prior to being tortured and killed. It is a very ordinary-looking school that has been retained as a museum to the genocide of Cambodians. The rooms are arranged as they were found, and the walls have photographs of the bodies found in them when the school
was liberated. There are several rooms with displays of thousands of mug shots of people who were taken there and never got out (only 12 out of 17,000 survived), and the looks on their faces are just gut-wrenching. It was horrific viewing, but the full shock didn't hit me until later in the evening when I realised the true horror was how ordinary the places were - they weren't dark evil paces, but just everyday fields and schools, emphasising how it could happen anywhere. I was uncomfortable initially about how the places were being exploited for tourism, but talking to Cambodians they want people to bear witness to their experiences to get a better understanding of their country. However, I'm not quite so relaxed with the Cambodian Government's decision to sell the rights to market and run the Killing Fields to a Japanese company.

The next day we lightened up by visiting the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda - so named because the floor of the pagoda has 5000 kilos of silver floor tiles! It also has a life size Buddha made from 90kg of gold with almost 10,000 diamonds on it. And outside people live in abject poverty... We also went to Cambodian Cooking Class for a day, which was excellent - we are now guns at spring rolls, banana flower salad, fish amok (sort of a steamed curry) in banana leaf parcels and sticky rice with mango.

From Phnom Penh we got the bus up to Siem Reap to visit the Ankor Wat temples. The trip was not improved by spotting the tour bus that left an hour prior to ours rolled down a bank and into a rice paddy! The roadside cafes also left a bit to be desired - hmmmn, fried locusts or tarantulas? Vats of "spare parts"? Um, I'll have a bunch of bananas, please. (We did start to get into the local thing at a PP bar/restaurant down the road from the hotel: the sort where the staff panic when white folk arrive. We called it the "Dare Cafe" as we kept daring each other to eat stuff on the menu. I dared Bruce to eat the beef with giant red ant (only to be disappointed when the red ant was a whimsical description of a whole chilli) while I had frog, which was BBQed and served with a dip of black pepper and salt dissolved in lime juice - absolutely delicious! By tacit agreement we avoided things like "Spare Parts with Pickled Vegetable", "Appendix with Fried Rice" "Steamed Brain of Pig" and the tantalising "Interesting Beef Paste".)

Siem Reap was a great little party town which enjoyed immensely, and the temples were mind-blowing. We had no idea of the scales of the place and spent 3 full days hoofing it around there and still didn't see it all. The ring round around the temples is 23km!

From there it was back to PP, where we caught a ferry down the Mekong to Chau Doc in Vietnam, where we spent a few days on the Mekong, one day hiring a small sampan and boatman and spending 8 hours cruising the river and canals and visiting the floating markets. From there we headed to Saigon, and spent time wandering in the city, fighting off persistent cyclo drivers and sunglass sellers and visiting the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government of South Vietnam"). Vietnam is a communist country (although you wouldn't know it from the rampant capitalism of the streets) and there are red banners emblazoned with the hammer & sickle everywhere, as well as lots of Uncle Ho propaganda murals. (We dined to the accompaniment of a Communist Party rally, complete with martial music near the town square here in Dalat the other night.)

We then did the 8 hour bus trip (with the woman behind me puking for 7 hours) from Saigon up to Dalat in the Central Highlands where we are
now. Dalat is famous for its cartel of motorcycle guides called the Easy Riders who take you for trips around the countryside on the back of their bikes. being nonconformists, we elected to go with the anticartel cartel called the Free Riders, and hopped on the back of bikes with Tien ("Terry") and Chau ("Joe") and spent the day on the back of motorbikes visiting coffee and flower farms, silk factories, rice wine producers, pagodas, waterfalls and other local sights. They tried to tempt us into a longer trip, but although we had enjoyed the day, I have to confess the scenery of Vietnam is pretty blah. What wasn't killed by US defoliation during the "American War of Aggression", as it's known in these parts, has been comprehensively dealt to by slash and burn farming, so the landscape consists of dusty fields and scrubby trees, with a constant parade of ugly concrete shophouses continuously lining the side of the road. Not somewhere we wanted to linger. Tomorrow it is the night bus to Hoi An, which purports to be historic, but we shall see! At least the food here is excellent and very cheap - huge meals of several dishes for $5 for 2 of us!

Well we finally made it out of Vietnam without me killing a local, although I did come close a few times. There is a saying that to travel in the north you need a sense of humour and that is pretty much spot on. Life wasn't improved by me managing to catch a stomach bug in Hue, which will now always be known to me as "Huuueeeeey!". Despite that, it is a very pretty city and I wish I had seen more of it. One city we spent time in was Hoi An, which is very pretty, and almost unaffected by the war, still possessing may old buildings. It was very relaxed, and I took advantage of the infestation of tailors and cobblers to get some nice clothes and boots custom made.

The train trip to Hue from Danang was another classic - train an hour and a half late, then took 4 hours to go 100km! Floor awash with rubbish & vomit etc etc - we flew to Hanoi after that. Hanoi was fun, but very cold, down in the low teens, which came as bit of a shock.We had a great time wandering around the old quarter dodging traffic and we did the visit to see Ho Chi Minh lying in his mausoleum - very bizarre. We did a 3 day trip cruising on a junk in Halong Bay, which was a welcome but of luxury, even if we froze. (see www.oriental-sails.com). Being Vietnam, it wasn't the cruise we had booked, which didn't have enough passengers to run, so we were arbitrarily transferred to this one and not told until we were on the bus on the highway to Halong. It was fine though, food was excellent and the scenery stunning. We even braved the elements to go kayaking.

From Hanoi we flew in to Luang Prabang in Laos (after a near divorce when Bruce suggested taking the 30 hour bus there) where we are at
present. When we arrived we thought we had gone deaf, as the silence was tremendous after the tumult of Hanoi, where everyone drives with
one hand on the horn and foot flat on the accelerator. No one was driving over our feet on the footpath or screaming "You buy! You buy!"
every time they saw an approaching walking white ATM. You'd have to try hard to be run over here.

Today is temple visiting day, tomorrow we head down the Mekong to visit some caves full of retired Buddha statues, then it is off to spend 2 days learning how to be elephant mahouts (drivers), a skill you never know when you'll need.

Later that same month...

Well, we survived our elephant training experience, which, while being huge fun, was bit of a joke as the elephants knew exactly where they
were supposed to go, as they do the route 4 times a day. This was handy, as my mispronunciation of "go right" in Lao may have had them
wondering "Why is she shouting "bird flu! bird flu!" at me - I always go right here!". We got to ride on their necks and take them into the
river to bathe them, which caused a disturbing loosening of bowels (mainly but not exclusively) on the elephants part, and I can tell you
that you don't want to fall into that lot!

After a few more days in relaxed Luang Prabang we bussed down to Vang Vieng (no-one threw up, a first for a bus trip) backpacker capital of
the universe. Whereas LP is a tasteful World Heritage middle-class wealthy tour place, VV is young backpacker central, based around getting drunk and stoned. Cafes make Amsterdam look repressed: the "Happy Menu"s offer ganja (joint, bag, pizza, garlic bread, cookie or shake), magic mushrooms (shake, omelette, pizza, bag) and opium (joint, tea, coffee or bag). Another feature of the cafes and restaurants is that they all have TVs playing a particular show, so you pledge your allegiance to "Friends", "Family Guy" or "The Simpsons". The most popular pastime is tubing down the river to town (through some spectacular limestone scenery) stopping at bars on the way. Tubing, for the uninitiated, is floating slowly along on a tractor tyre. There are about 40 bars on the first couple of miles of river, sporting a multitude of alcohol & drug offering, buckets of cocktails, free whiskey shots, water slides. trapezes and zip lines out on to the river. We had seen many backpackers sporting crutches and bandages, and wondered why until we went tubing ourselves. Fortunately we were early in the day (11am) and most of the bars weren't open, but Bruce still managed to try the trapeze and zip line at one bar (with me in the background shouting "Just don't expect me to change your nappies for the rest of your life!"). The sights that were hauled back to town in tuktuks later in the evening were not pretty!

After a few days it all got too much, so this morning we shipped out to the capital, Vientiane, where we'll stay in out US$20 per night
luxury room (has been around US$8 recently) which would cost a couple of hundred dollars in NZ, until we fly to Kuala Lumpur and back to the
boat. I'm about ready to be back as well. Vientiane suffers from the extremes of rich and poor we have seen in the other capitals: maimed
beggars (landmines left over from the US bombardment in the 70s) and Lexus SUVs and Bentleys with tinted windows belonging to corrupt
officials, and it is all getting a bit overwhelming.

Daemon is moored in Puteri Harbour Marina near Johor Bahru, Malaysia and we are back in New Zealand earning funds to carry on. Sob - this will be continued in several thousand dollars time!