The end of the line

Yesterday was a tough one for Damo, who really harmed himself on beer the night before. We had to stay in bed until 11am, at which time we ate breakfast and made it back to the hotel for a nap until 1pm.

At 1pm Luong the crazy drunk cyclo driver took us around Cho Lon in his cyclo. How fantastic it was! The day was intermittent rain and beating sunshine, and Damo didn't look so sick sitting like a little king in his cyclo. We'd been pretty apprehensive about the ride, because the traffic here is so crazy, but strangely it was probably one of the most relaxing things we've done on our holiday. Luong took us to three mad temples in the Cho Lon district of Saigon. All three were very different and really interesting. We took some great photos (which we will use to torture you all with in endless slide show nights).

Later we went to have a goodbye Bia Hoi with Luong at our local. It's a fucking tough life, that of a cyclo, so it was a particularly interesting mini-friendship to have. Luong just loved Damo and gave him the biggest emotional hug when we parted! We wish the mad Luong the best of luck with his family situation and his life on the streets of Saigon. It was interesting to have a tiny glimpse into the life of a Vietnamese native.

It's hard to believe that our holiday is over! We leave at 9pm tonight and we're sorry to say goodbye to Viet Nam.

Here's a list of our highlights (in no particular order):

• Bia Hoi (surprise!)
• Haiko and Silky in Ko Phangan
• Cyclo ride around Cho Lon, Saigon
  
• The GENUINELY nice Vietnamese, including Hoa, Nuong, Luong, Phat and Hee
• Pho Bo at all times of the day and night (clearly one of Beck's highlights)
• Pina Coladas in the lagoon pool at Thavorn with Dan
• Vietnamese coffee
• Green curry at Lee Garden, Ko Phangan
• Carpe Diem at Ko Phi Phi
• Everything at Siem Reap
• Culture shock in Phnom Phen
• Our fabulous hotel room in Phnom Phen
• Beach bar hopping in Ko Samui
  

Here's a list of terrifying things (that we'd do again):

• Taxi ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Phen
• Scooter riding in Ko Phangan
• Mango shakes in Saigon
• 15L of Bia Hoi in 2 hours
• Crossing the street in Saigon
• Lady Boy shows in Patong's gay district
  

And with that, we bid you adieu Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam. It's been real! xxxx

Bia! Bia! Bia! Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!

Allow me to walk you through the wonderful sights of Saigon.

Bia Hoi, seen above, is basically home brew on a grand national scale and served in 2L plastic bottles.

Here is Damo sampling one of the fine local brews about 500 metres later.

After extensive testing, Damo and I have concluded that Bia Hoi is mainly water, and so comes in at the banter-weight alcohol percentage of about 3%. That means that you don't need to have major fight fitness to kick some serious Vietnamese ass in the ring.

For example, above is a local cyclo, Luong, posing as Superman after a few quiet drinks with us this evening.

Here is a nice little brewski that I was particularly fond of. Note that Bier Hoi is the same at every Bier Hoi stall. It's like Macdonalds, but a more enterprising venture that I'm frankly surprised hasn't taken off internationally.

If Australians could vote in the world record holder for drinking a yard glass of beer as Prime Minister in 1983, surely their tenacity for drinking could bring such a miracle to our girt shores.

And so it would only be right to now introduce myself as Australia's new candidate for the highest office. My canditature speech will consist of a powerpoint of the above (delivered with a bloody good dose of the vietnamese dutch courage), and will feature the following press photo:

Note that as soon as I'm voted in I will sack Alexander Downer, Peter Costello, Amanda Vanstone and Wilson Tuckey, also pictured.

I leave you now to marvel at the wonderful spectacle that is Bia Hoi. It is 12:45am and that Luong guy is showing us around the city in the morning on his cyclo...

Tour of duty in Nam almost over...

Greetings from Saigon, or as it is officially known now, Ho Chi Minh City.

Tis I.. Damo writing to you this balmy evening as Beck has retired early after a hard day. Maybe it had more to do with the hard night before we had with the discovery of our new favourite thing, Bier Hoi.

Imagine a little street facing shop, little tiny kid sized plastic chairs and tables low to the ground where you buy 2 litre plastic bottles of home brew called Bier Hoi for 4 to 8000 dong a pop. We are worth around 1 AUD per 14000 dong. Do the simple math and revel in our newfound joy. Thanks for the tipoff El Nickoss. We loveses him the Bier Hoi! :)

We made some wonderful new Vietnamese friends last night at our local Bier Hoi which is just up the road from our hotel, which was also a fabulous find at only 20 USD per night and is clean and quiet but also smack bang in the middle of everything here in Ho Chi Minh.
Anyone travelling this way could do a hell of a lot worse than stay at the Viet Nghi hotel whilst here, and believe me, we checked out many places which ranged from disgusting to downright creepy.

We got ushered in to our Bier Hoi by a guy named Hoa who we suspected at first of trying to pull some sort of "get the foreigners extremely drunk and then stiff them with the bill" kind of scam. We only wanted to quietly drink our two litres of beer then leave but our table kept topping up our drinks and endlessly cheered everyone with a Vietnamese "Yo.." Which is Vietnamese for cheers.

We lost count of the endless litres of beer we consumed, we swapped cultural tales with Hoa and his friends. He insisted we speak with a young girl of 13, accompanied by her father and cousin as he had brought her there with the express purpose of practicing her english with us foreigners. Hoa explained that he had learned english in a similar fashion when he was younger and that it really helps people here get a leg up in the world job wise if they have good english.

I don't know if our drunken babble was much help but she insisted it was, and her father and Hoa were very grateful we took the time to have a conversation with her. Beck made a new best friend of a young Vietnamese lady who didn't speak much english, and she thought Beck was wonderful, so wonderful that we promised we would meet up with her and Hoa tomorrow night to celebrate her 26th birthday at the same Bier Hoi. I think Beck is wonderful too so I understand how she succumbed to her charms so quickly! :)

So many stories, so little time. Crossing the road could be a blog entry unto itself.. so dear friends and family, for now I bid you goodnight. Hope your all happy and well.

FYI, There was no scam pulled on us with the bill which I think we ended up paying 20000 dong for. An obscene amount of beer was drunk for what turned out to be about a buck fifty australian. Crazy! :)

Enjoy!

Damo. :)

Hello from HCMC and a quick back-track through Cambodia

We've made it to our final destination. Beer Hoi! 1L of beer for 4000VHD (about $0.30 - yeah!). I just had my first Pho Baw which was fan-bloody-tastic, and not just because I didn't eat since breakfast today.

We arrived today on the Mekong Express bus from Phnom Phen at around 7:30pm and we're staying in a room that would've been considered very tastefully decorated circa 1975 in Holland. My first impression of Saigon is that it's so very busy and full of happy, drinking Vietnamese [Drew Brock - this is your rice queen heaven]. What it made me realise is that I haven't seen any people laughing in the streets and cafes and pubs since Thailand... I guess Cambodians don't really have a whole lot to laugh about yet.

The trip in the bus over the border was a HELL of a lot less dramatic than our taxi trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Phen, and seeing as our last blog (which I just re-read) was pretty dark, I thought I would fill in the gaps with some of the more light-hearted things we enjoyed in Cambodia.

Firstly, let me say that Phnom Phen is not for the feint hearted. And also let me say that if you want a fantastic, fun and relaxing holiday looking at mind-blowing temples and testing local foods and beers, Siem Reap is the place for you - I would thoroughly recommend it for anyone who wanted to try out the more pre-westernised aspects of Asia without the heavy stuff.

While we were in Thailand we bought a few books on both the ancient and modern history of Cambodia. Just earlier while reflecting on Cambodia over Pho and many beers we talked about how Phnom Phen pre-1975 was considered the jewel of SE Asia, where many foreign correspondents and diplomats sought intermittent refuge from the Vietnam war. As I mentioned in my last blog the Khmer Rouge basically reduced it to a third world city.

The precariousness of the political situation in Cambodia, and especially while in Phnom Phen, meant that we both really enjoyed the city, but neither of us could really relax. The city is haunted by the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who died variously at the hands of Vietnam, the US and Pol Pot. I mean, a week after 17 April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge unexpectedly took Phnom Phen, they drove the entire population of Phnom Phen (about 2M people) out into the provinces. In one day. And given that there is still a strong Khmer Rouge following now, it's hard to relax completely.

But enough of that - the drive from Siem Reap to Phnom Phen is something we must share.

Picture a typical inter-city dual carriageway in Australia. Now halve its width... and halve it again. But don't halve the traffic, and add cows, water buffalo, motorcycles, cyclists, running children and dogs. Lanes? What lanes? If you drive into on-coming traffic it will stop for you. Or will it? Throw into the equation an agressive driver called Chin (who is most definitely a dodgy gambler, given the number of times he stopped to hand money to people and pick up parcels from people coming the opposite way) and you've got a 80MPH ride to potential death every 20 seconds. Damo couldn't watch, but I decided to enter the world of systematic de-sensitisation and watched the whole 4 hour drive. Fuck we were scared. A tip from us to you - DO NOT TRAVEL FROM SIEM REAP TO PHNOM PHEN VIA TAXI. Take the fucking bus.

While we were in Phnom Phen we did do a lot of reading modern history and checking out grim shit. But we also did some interesting stuff, like check out the Grand Palace (which has a floor made of silver tiles that weigh 1kg each) and drink lots of piss at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) which was a hang-out for cool looking older expats and journos. There is also a lot of business that leverages the foreign apetite for ethically produced products (i.e. child-friendly), including restaurants, one of which we ate at. It was called Romdeng and it would rival any upper echelon restaurant in Sydney for style and well cooked food. If you go to Phnom Phen, go there.

To bore you a little further, I would also like to share with you a tale of the usefulness of Sydney tenacity. You are a Sydney-sider who lives in a first world country but has been exposed to enough shit over the past 7 years that you have become jaded with the world, and perhaps even built upon your natural narcisism until it has turned into a sense of entitlment. You enter a travel agent on a Friday and request a ticket from Phonm Phen to HCMC on the following day, a Saturday. You are told that a visa takes two days to obtain, and that the local Government will not process your visa over the weekend. Do you:

a). Thank the helpful attendant and arrange for your visa to be available whenever it is convenient for the Cambodian Government to arrange;
b). Burst into tears because you have to spend another two days in a city you desperately want to leave and so drink yourself into oblivion at the local pub; or
c). Ask if they can do it more quickly about 6 times until they cave and get a dodgy under-handed deal to sort it out for you in a matter of hours?

Well my friends, I just want you to know that we chose C. A corrupt government can do anything you want it to at a price (which was $75USD each - and worth every penny).

And so here we are in Saigon. I intend to go hard on the Beer Hoi. Damo says we need to find a more permanent crash pad before we get stuck in. I say BOOOOO!

p.s. Cats - I've uploaded photos into the older blogs so backtrack and have a gander. I think they fit better with the stories they tell. All the pics in this blog are from Phnom Phen, except this last one, which is from Siem Reap.

Phnom Phen and Genocide

We've been in Phnom Phen for 2 days now. It's basically a third world city with one tiny gentrified district (which we're staying in).

This is a pretty damn interesting place. The city sits on the Tonle Sap river (feeding into the Mekong) and is mainly characterised by dust, street urchins, beggars and the ever oppresive tuk-tuk drivers.

Today we went to S-21 and the Cheung Ek (the Killing Fields).

For the uninitiated, S-21 was a school in a central district of Phnom Phen that Pol Pot turned into a prison camp. His party sent "insurgents" (basically those who fit the profile of the Communist Party's paranoid delusions) there to be tortured before they were sent to the Cheung Ek for extermination.

There are no words to describe S-21, but I think Damo summed it up best when he said he felt like a blanket was covering him while he was in the grounds. It was grim. There are explicit photographs of the victims, both before and after torture. What surprised me most was their expresssions - the prisoners were made to keep silent because S-21 is in the centre of a residential suburb, and Pol Pot didn't want anyone to know what was going on there. I think some people looked like they didn't know what was going to happen to them, some looked terrified, some looked sadly resigned to their fate. People who visited were very respectful. Everyone looked terribly sad - I cried for a while and I think a lot of other people found it very distressing.

Cheong Ek was equally depressing. It is very hard to describe - walking through the grounds you are walking on mounds of clothes of the dead which are slowly reappearing through the mud because it is the rainy season. This was a very sad place.

We wanted to see these places so that we could understand the Cambodians better, to appreciate Cambodia and in particular Phnom Phen for how well it has rebuilt itself, and to pay our respects I guess. It's not something I'll ever forget.

With this filter I feel that I appreciate Phnom Phen more that on face value. It was nearly entirely destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and it's pretty amazing how its bounced back.

We're going to make tracks to Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam tomorrow. I'd like to stay but Vietnam calls and our fly-out date draws near. Our next post from there, and until then Ciao!