PP day 2 (& some Cambodian soup)...and Bangkok

I had a nice leisurely breakfast yesterday, chatting at the Okay with Joshua (from Nigeria via Singapore) and with Sangky (a 7 year old member of the Okay household). Sangky is a bright lad who has already devised a plan for a satellite system to defend Earth from alien invaders. I'm sure we will be safe in his hands. Joshua was heading for a Sunday church service. Maybe I should have joined him for something out of he ordinary!
Instead I went to along to the Russian market as planned - and gave in to a few tempting bargains, including the new belt I badly needed. No single photo could do the place justice. It is a marketplace for virtually everything, including jewellery, watches, fake designer clothing, apparently looted or fake Bhuddist relics, motor bikes, as well as local foods of all sorts. The Barras pales by comparison!
I had an afternoon stroll in the city after another tuk-tuk ride. My picture shows the Independence Monument at the end of a long wide boulevard (shortly before the darkening sky turned to a torrential downpour). If I had turned the other way though, the scene was one more of post-war devastation - completely flattened buildings for street after street. The Pol Pot regime seem to have wanted to destroy everything of cultural or educational value and return the country to the stone-age with just peasant farmers and no monetary system.
I'm giving you another soup picture today. This time it's the "rice and chicken" at the Okay GH, but it is so delicious and full of garlic that it deserves a mention. This was my second!
I met up with Claudia from Holland again in the afternoon on her return from her Killing Fields and museum visits. In the evening we headed out together for a meal at a nice Khmer restaurant nearby. Like a lot of hot cities PP seems to come even more alive in the evenings - with night markets and people just out for a stroll. I felt rather sorry to be leaving so soon.
I'm now in Bangkok and checked in to the Rambuttri Village Inn - in the Banglanphu area near the river. This is backpacker central, but I'm very pleased with my choice of hotel so far. It is like an oasis in this gigantic and now mostly very modern city. And there's a rooftop swimming pool very close o my top floor room. all for about US$19 per night.
It's 6 pm and it feels like I've had a long day already. I was up at 5:15 for the fight from Phnom Penh - in the very pleasant company of Diane from Rugby - flying back to the UK today at the end of an 18 month world tour. Di, you are an inspiration, with your positive attitude to getting the most out of life despite your difficulties!
It wasn't quite as easy as I hoped to get fixed up with an onward flight to Delhi, but I finally got something sorted out for Wednesday.

For my two days here I don't think I'll be going very far from the Rambuttri Village. Everything is on the doorstep, and I suspect that 'll be tempted to lounge by the pool for a while reading my latest Michael Connelly book.
My last picture today is of the river close to the Bangkok hotel.
PS. Again the sky darkened very quickly in late afternoon and we had long downpours for much of the evening

Phnom Penh day 1

Well I've done much of what I wanted to do today in PP, after deciding to hire my own tuk-tuk service (for $15) with driver called Napp. We first went 15km or so out of town to the Khmer Rouge "killing fields" at Choeung Ek, and then to the museum of the genocidal attrocities (housed in a former secondary school at Tuol Sleng which they turned into a terrible prison and torture camp).

I was actually glad to be on my own in these places. Speech is more or less forbidden anyway, and the best way to see them must be just to walk in thought and silence. No graphic pictures here of course, but I'll give you an oblique shot of the pagoda at Cheoung Ek.

As it happens I bumped into a Swedish couple who had been companions on the journey from HCMC - and a rare fellow-Scot. None of us felt like speaking much.

I'm not giving history lessons here, but I certainly hadn't realised quite how bad things were in this country until really very recently. After all that the Cambodian National Museum was a good way to get a bigger perspective on what Cambodia has been about over the centuries.
Photos aren't allowed inside, but you can have one of the fine internal garden and pond area. The other pictures are of of the back of Napp's head and some of the street scene from tuk-tuk level (the local version is really a motorbike with a trailer) , and a group of novice monks walking past the royal palace. There is a lot of (re)construction going on around the city and it has a pretty positive feel about the place.

I've decided to fly to Bankok on Monday with Air Asia (a Thai low-cost airline) and then look for the best onward connection to Delhi. That leaves me with another day in PP, and the right thing to do seems to be to hit a market area called Psar Tuol Tom Pong (also known as the Russian Market for some reason). I'm told it is one of the cheapest places in Asia for all sorts of goods, some of which may even be genuine. So now is the time to give me your shopping lists.

I'm beginning to take more to the Okay GH here. I had very pleasant chat tonight with Claudia from Holland, who had just arrived on today's version of my own trip yesterday. I had a lot of sympathy for how she felt - and we had a lot in common to talk about over Nepal.

Another day, another country

Just checking in to let you know I've arrived safely in Phnom Penh. It has been a long tiring day, leaving Chau Doc in small rowing boats at 7 am, firstly to a fish farm and then to see the production of various local products. Then we split into those heading for Phnom Penh and the others heading back to HCMC. That left about 12 of us on a very long and hot (and noisy) boat trip up the Mekong towards PP - from approx. 9:30 am till 5 pm with a 1 hour border and food stop, and then an hour-long bus ride into Phnom Penh.

The Okay Guest House here was included in the deal, and I can't object. It is a fine place and rates highly in Lonely Planet, but I have to confess that it is too much of a backpacker haven for my liking right now. I consider myself a different kind of traveller - but don't ask me to define it. Maybe I'm just getting old (although I'm not the oldest here), or maybe it's just that it is getting near time to come home now.

Anyway, I'm happy to be in Cambodia. It seems nice and laid-back and relaxed compared with Vietnam. I think our bus driver used his horn once on our 1 hour journey. In Vietnam (or Nepal or India for that matter) it would have been once every 10 or 15 seconds. No kidding!

My initial impression is that it seems a lot like Laos - outwardly very Bhuddist and peaceful. Of course Cambodia has had a very troubled recent history, and I confess that I'll be visiting some of the evidence of the Khmer Rouge attrocities as well as some of the national treasures. But I'll save Siem reap and Angkor Wat for another time. I can tell you that the Angkor Beer is pretty good though.

I was thinking of flying from here to Bangkok and then to Delhi, but Ive discoverd that there is a cheap daily bus service to Bangkok and maybe I'll use that - more so that I can see the land than to save on cash. It's all up for further investigation tomorrow!

Mekong Delta & Chau Doc

It is 9 pm here, and I've just got back to our overnight hotel in Chau Doc after eating with Biff from Texas and Ling from Hanoi.
Today's trip has been long and very interesting and I'm not going to do it justice here. It has been a tiring day and we need to start again at 6:30.
Suffice to say that the Mekong Delta area is a really fascinating place, with the land very fertile and the huge and complicated delta network a kind of water-borne version of a normal working and market city, with all sorts of goods being transported and traded from boat-to-boat, and most of the buildings standing on stilts in the water.
I've now added a couple of pictures just to give an impression of the scale of the Mekong here, and some of the narrower passages we can take as shortcuts.
By the way the HK nurses reappeared and joined us for the first part of today's trip; so it was good to see some familiar faces.
Tomorrow a dwindling band of us will continue our Mekong tour, finishing with a border crossing to Cambodia and a 1 hour trip to Phnom Penh arriving about 6 pm.

and now: Vietnamese Garlic Soup!

Maybe it will seem a bit on the morose side but I spent yesterday morning at the preserved parts of the Cu Chi Viet Cong tunnel network northwest of HCMC - which at one time extended all the way to Cambodia. What the VC got up to was hugely impresive - with guile and determination against the might of (mainly) US forces. Much of the afternoon was spent at the "War Remnants Museum" - a Vietnamese version of the war story, with lots of captured or abandoned US equipment. I know I've been hearing one propaganda version; so I'll refrain from political judgements in this little story.
I also saw around the now renamed "reunification palace" - built as the intended seat of government of an independent South Vietnam, and the local Notre Dame Cathedral, but I think the prize for the most impressive building goes to the post office of all places. That's the interior, with Uncle Ho looking down over us.
Again there were very few Europeans on the trip; they were mostly from Hong Kong or Singapore or Korea this time, with a couple from LA. While I was doing my best to tag along with 5 HK nurses, I was rather disappointed to be lumbered more with the attention of an 8 year old Korean boy called Shiang, or something like that. For some reason he seemed to think I had a kinda big nose, and found this a great source of humour. It didn't help that the rest of his family seemed to agree with him and share his sense of humour!
Things improved though. I now have a favourite restaurant here, and last night they eventually agreed to prepare some garlic soup for me. I think they thought I was nuts, because various tasty soups are completely central to Vietnnamese cooking - and I wanted something different.
Anyway I'm pleased to report that it all turned out excellent - maybe even better than the Nepali stuff. I've no idea what the recipe was, but it contained lots of tofu and vegetables (carrot, mushroom, parsley, celery, coriander) as well as plenty garlic. Tha's today's main picture, along with the post office interior and a typical HCMC traffic junction. OK, you can have a pic of the HK girls too - outside Notre Dame. I'll spare you the old US planes, helicopters and other armaments.
Today I'm going to have something of a rest in HCMC and look around now I feel a bit more comfortable here.
Tomorrow, though, I'm off again - on a trip through the Mekong delta and then on into Cambodia.
Somehow or other I need to get back to Delhi in the first day or two of July!

HCMC

I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (still equally know as Saigon it seems) a couple of hours ago. Despite the touts who are always hovering on arrival, I found the hotel I wanted to get to pretty easily - selected from Lonely Planet as usual.
Already I have eaten and arranged a trip for tomorrow - mainly to see some of the war-time tunnel network used by the Viet Cong, as well as some other local sights.
I'm in the usual tourist neck of the woods, but this is a huge city which seems a little intimidating at first. It all feels quite comfortable in this neighbourhood, but I don't think I'll be doing too much exploring on my own!
By the way I'm glad I took the daytime journey option. The route mostly followed the coast fron Nha Trang - and it is very largely unspoiled beach-front. There are a few embryonic developments, but very little really.

Day at sea

Today I went on one of those organised trips again - this time to four of the small islands off Nha Trang. One of best day trips ever I think it is fair to say, and all for US$7 (OK, plus a few little extras on the way). The trip included lunch and a mountain of exotic fruits, and a crew in party mood. That's them doing the post-lunch entertainment - including the one in the middle who seemed just slightly embarrassed to have 2 half coconuts strapped round his chest!
Most of the customers were Vietnamese - including quite a few "ex-pats" who escaped from VN in the 70s and made new lives in the west. No boat people amongst them I think, but I heard some amazing stories. That's Lam-Phol in the picture and his daughter Hang - now both Danish citizens, and Paul (probably Phol originally too), now from Houston Texas and trying hard to look like just like "Uncle Ho" (Chi Minh) - I think as a kind of sarcastic gesture, but it seems to go down well with the locals. Sorry about the overexposure. Lam-Phol escaped on one of the very last American flights out of Vietnam, together with wife and 8 month old son.
We had a "floating bar" after lunch, where the rules were that you had to jump into the sea and use a lifebelt to swim up to the bar. That's me taking off (as elegantly as possible) and in the lifebelt. It wasn't the only time I was in the water or shirtless, and the result tonight is that I feel a bit barbecued in places. Did I mention the snorkelling too?
I'll attach one more picture, this time of a cable car arrangement from the mainland to Hon Tre (the largest local island). Maybe not an alternative to a new Forth Bridge, but pretty impressive anyway.
I could happily stay here for days, but am off on my continuing journey early in the morning - this time to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as many folks still call it).

Two post scripts here: I can't edit photos on this computer (I've just discovered), and even worse news is that I have now learned that the Miss Universe Finals are due to be held here in Nha Trang on the 14th July, with the contestants arriving a week or so earlier.
PPS. Some pics now added.