Into Cambodia by Steve

The end of Vietnam

Our last days in Vietnam were spent in Ho Chi Minh City. As Jo mentioned in the last blog we nearly didn't get there as the bus drove off while we having lunch and had to be flagged down. It was the height of my stress in Vietnam, I felt a breakdown coming. It's a good job I was ill at the time of the last blog posting otherwise Vietnam buses would really have got it!

We did absolutely no favours to our fragile state of mind by staying in the most depressing hotel room you can imagine. I'm not sure why I did not turn and run when I saw it. A musty smell, checkerboard floor, lurid sheets and mosquitoes. I was ill and this room didn't help. It was like staying in a doss house.

The next day we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels. I had really been looking forward to this, and for those who don't know, and I wouldn't expect you to, the Vietnamese Communists lived and fought in these tunnels during the war with America. They were vital to frustrating the Americans for 4 or 5 years, and it was from the tunnels that the Communists launched the Tet Offensive which signalled the beginning of the end of American involvement in Vietnam. And they buried a tank down there!!!

Our tour guide for the tunnels was Mr Binh. He had fought alongside the Americans, so was on the other side to the Vietnamese Communists. He loved the bus microphone. He told us lots of funny stories but there were times when you wished he'd sit down. He said everything we'd ever heard or read about the Vietnam war was wrong, that his was the sole truth, and then proceeded to tell it just like the guidebook. It was confusing hearing the story from a Vietnamese who had fought with the Americans.

As we went around the ground above the tunnels, in the distance you could hear the machine guns of the firing range, which made it all a bit surreal, almost as if you could imagine what it might have been like at the time. Unfortunately we were to get pretty close to that firing range, it was an optional extra, so we had to sit next to it for 25 minutes while someone let loose an AK-47. I couldn't believe how loud it was. Apparently it is people from countries with gun laws that do the firing range. Americans aren't interested.

At last, after seeing various other tunnel displays, we got to go in one. They went down quite a way, 8 or 9 feet. They were well lit and you could hear people in front and behind, but I can imagine it would have been terrifying on your own with just a flashlight. The maximum you could go was 100 metres, any further, said Mr Binh, and you would come to the booby trap. I'm not sure if this was still working or not. Best not to go beyond 100 metres.

Back on the bus, Mr Binh stands up and starts talking again. He looks drunk. He wants to tell us about his life. We then get a pretty sad story about him having to flee Vietnam when the Communists took Ho Chi Minh City, but he loves his country, so he came back, they called him a war criminal and put him in prison for 4 years, then when he got out no-one would give him a job so he had to work in the market and ride a bicycle taxi with a mask on so no-one would recognize him, then he got this job but didn't make much money, and he doesn't get a pension, but his son would look after him, he was a good boy, a doctor, and did he tell us he loved his country and he hoped we would never have war in our country...and then we dived off the bus. A pretty uncomfortable situation, and we wondered if it was genuine, it did look it, and we found out later that the victorious Communists treated the Southern Vietnamese pretty bad. We went to the War Remnants Museum which was filled with American war stuff and some pretty harrowing stuff which I won't go into. Then I collapsed into bed at 5pm but didn't get any peace as it sounded like the kids were going up and down the stair in flippers.

Up the Mekong River into Cambodia
I was still ill but managed somehow to get up at 6am. It was the 17th July and we had booked the boat to Cambodia, so I figured, well, a couple of hours on the bus to the nearest boat and then get off the next day in Cambodia. I could manage that. I was to be proved very wrong.

It didn't start particularly well. At the hotel we manhandled our bags onto a bus which drove us 200 metres to a coach. We got on this and then crawled for hours through HCMC finally arriving at My Tho and the boat. We were told we would see this bus again and to leave any stuff we wanted, I must have missed something because we never saw that bus or the bag of snacks I left on it again. So we got on a boat and it went throught the floating market. We stopped and watched them making pop rice and coconut candy and the guide invited us to drink a revolting looking snake wine. We got back on the boat. They don't seem to do proper passenger piers in SE Asia and make getting on any kind of boat as difficult as possible, like some kind of test to humiliate the foreigners. This boat took us to the lunch spot, where a good row unfolded between the guide and two people he'd left behind in HCMC. After lunch we got on some rowing boats and were rowed down the river. We got off in a town, were reunited with our luggage minus anything you had left on the bus, then walked through the town, lugged our bags onto a bus and then drove for 5 minutes to an old house in the middle of a market where we were told we had one hour before the boat left. It then emerged that we would be in one big dorm on this boat, like a floating youth hostel. Jo got a bit worried about this as she had discarded her pyjamas some days ago. The boat arrived. They parked up and threw a plank across the water, this was how we were to get on it seemed. It was a relief to finally be on the main boat up the Mekong, no-one could make me change to another boat or walk any ridiculous plank until at least the morning. I got up in the night and went to the toilet. The Mekong was dark and silent and I shuddered to think if anyone would have heard if I accidentally slipped off the boat into the dark waters.

They woke us at 6am. They were then up to their old tricks of moving us around boats, at times it resembled the Grand Canal out there as little boats ferried us around. We sailed out to a fish farm. There, a man got very excited about feeding his fish who would thrash around in the not very deep wooden hole he was keeping them in. A completely underwhelming sight. Then we sailed on to a floating village where all the children subjected us to a full scale sales assault for little waffle biscuits. I was feeling better but a girl we had go to know, looked awful. I sympathised, there was nothing worse than having to clamber on and around these boats when everything aches and you're head feels like it weighs 100 tonnes. One wrong step and you're in the drink! We sailed on and got on another boat similar to the sleeper boat. There we did our Cambodian border paperwork. Cambodia felt a long, long way away. At about 11am we got off the boat with all our luggage and had lunch on the Vietnamese side of the border. A dog tried to chew the straps off a guy's rucksack. We then walked through a security check, presumably we were leaving Vietnam. But they weren't going to let us go that easy. The boat was parked up by a steep bank and they had thrown a plank across for us. So, with our bags, we had to slip down the steep bank, then wobble across the plank. Great fun. This boat was pretty scary. Wooden benches down the side, all the bags piled up the middle, and just endless streams of people getting on. Surely they wouldn't make us sit on this for 3 hours? But after getting our visas stamped by Cambodian immigration, they did, and it was more than 3 hours.

So we sailed up the Mekong to Phnom Phen, capital of Cambodia. People washed cows in the river. Children waved from the banks. Golden temples rose up. Things were looking better already. The feeling didn't last long, as they shoe-horned us and our bags into tiny minibuses for the 2 hour drive to PP. It started raining heavily, then it got dark. Lots of Cambodians seemed to have a death wish, weaving through the traffic on their motorbikes without any lights.

We had arrived in Phnom Phen. I had expected to get on a boat in Vietnam and get off in Cambodia. In reality it took 1 minibus, 2 buses, 1 coach, 9 boats and a rowing boat. We had seen coconut candy and pop rice being made, been invited to drink snake wine, seen a man feeding his fish, seen a row, been touted by small children, slept on a floating youth hostel, had walked numerous planks. And, of course, seen lots of Mekong River.