Bungalow

Our bungalow! Jungle behind and ocean in front... no electricity except between 6 and 10pm, no windows, one decent mosquito net.

Old Money

I tried to change $50 into Cambodian riel before we left Saigon. It took a lot of time, counting and conversation behind the desk... eventually the money changer informed us that they only had $13.60 worth of riel. Well, that would have to do. We weren't sure whether we would be able to use dollars right at the border so we wanted to at least have some local money in our pockets. Turns out $13.60 worth of riel is a stack about 2 inches high stuffed into my handbag. Not only that, but they must have had it so long that they gave me some bills that are long out of currency here. At first that was annoying, then we decided that these might well be collector's items and, at a minimum, would make good souvenirs. Apparently, the Khmer Rouge, in its attempt to eradicate all ties with the cultural past as well as corrupting influences like money, eliminated currency entirely. These bills aren't dated like the contemporary ones but may well be pre-Khmer Rouge bills. In any case, the locals won't take them, so even though they're only worth less than a US penny each we're going to hang onto them as souvenirs.

SEALS training, 2

... after the jumping jacks, two stragglers swam up. The slow pair. They got to do their jumping jacks separately, while everyone else razzed them for being last. After that, everyone kneeled over and got a pat on the butt by the oarsman, for which they had to thank him profusely. All the fast guys got more or less a symbolic pat, but he put a little more force into it for the slow pair.

Navy SEALS

Our bungalow at the Koh Ta Kiev "resort" - really just five bungalows and a tree house grouped around one small outdoor restaurant - was just down the shore from the Cambodian equivalent of a Navy SEALS training camp. After swimming several laps out to a bouey and back, these guys had to pull their drill sergeant's boat ashore in front of us to provide some breakfast entertainment. First, jumping jacks...

Sunset at Koh Ta Kiev

Sunset from in front of our bungalow, just a few yards from a warm, placid bay in the Gulf of Thailand.

Fooling around on the boat.

I guess I spoke too soon about this being a decent internet connection... image uploads are very, very slow and unfortunately I can't upload any of Patrick's high resolution pictures at all. So, oh well, for the moment mine will have to do!

Transport to Koh Ta Kiev

We really wanted to go to one of the islands off the Southern coast and stay in a rustic bungalow. Koh Ta Kiev was one we only found out about after we arrived and it took a bit of organizing to get there... a car to a small dock area at the tip of Ream National Forest, one of the protected jungle and wildlife areas in this region, followed by a boat pick up arranged by the resort on the island. This was the boat that arrived to pick us up.

Monks

I finally have a little time with a decent internet connection to post some pictures. This one is of two monks doing their lunch rounds in Kampot, Cambodia. Communities support their local monks by feeding them breakfast, lunch and dinner on a daily basis... rain or shine, the monks walk around town with their begging bowls to collect food and community members give them something to eat.

Patrick helping cook at the Mekong homestay

Crossing the Line

Vietnamese telephone repair call

Nguyen showing us some of the Mekong farm products

We were determined to make the border crossing into Cambodia at the new Xa Xia station we had read about in our Lonely Planet. This is the far Southern route, connecting coastal towns of Vietnam with coastal towns of Cambodia. The closest town to the Xa Xia station is Ha Tien, a big enough town to have it's own listing in the Lonely Planet, though admitted off route for most foreign travelers. It made more sense to go that way, but... but everyone we talked to, every hotel desk, every tour operator, even Huong and Vong, said that we should instead go through Chau Doc. They aren't that far apart judging from the map, but the Chau Doc route takes you through the common tourist trail for Mekong Delta tours then spits you out into Cambodia en route to Phnom Penh. From Phnom Penh you transfer and get on a bus to Sihanoukville. 12 hours total. Except that we wanted to go along the coast... it seemed to make more sense.

Eventually, if you ask long enough, you find someone who offers you what you want. And so, the day before we were due to leave Saigon, we wandered into the Kim Travel office, told them what we wanted and, for the first time, got a response that didn't involved furrowed eyebrows. “Sure,” he said, “we can arrange a private car with driver to take you to Ha Tien.” Great! Just what we wanted. We made the arrangements and went off to enjoy our last evening in Saigon.

I had originally wanted to spend several days on this part of our journey, meandering around the Mekong Delta area in a private car, getting off the main road and exploring some of the smaller villages farther South. In the end, we decided to make a beeline to the border instead and so we mostly drove along the busy main road, a 2-lane highway lined with dirt paths and dusty shops and homes, and providing the main travel artery for bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians and children playing as well as a handful of larger transport vehicles and some buses and minivans. It was a miracle we didn't hit anything along the way, as we were passing people with barely an inch of clearance – typical Vietnamese driving conditions – for hours on end.

If you look at a map of Vietnam, you can see that, as the crow flies, the distance between Saigon and Ha Tien is probably about like driving from Palo Alto to Sacramento, maybe less. But because of the rutted and crowded road conditions in this region, we broke it up into two days. The travel company had made arrangements for us to do a “homestay” on Vinh Long Island, which is in the middle of the Delta region. We did some touring with our trusty guide Nguyen (pronounced “Win”), visiting parts of the island by boat, having lunch along the riverbanks, taking a bicycle ride along its dirt pathways, then finally settled in to one of several family guest houses set up to house tourists.

Next day, some more touring on the boat ride back to town, then Mr. Chu picked us up and we continued along our way to Ha Tien. I think it's safe to say we were both glad to get off the bumpy Mekong road.

The land crossing itself was interesting. If we'd arrived in Phnom Penh at the main airport, we would have gotten our visas and gone through customs pretty much like anywhere else. But making the crossing by land is a whole other experience. It's one of those borders where you exit the first country in one place and enter the next in another. In between is a no man's land between the two countries which you traverse by foot. First things first, the Vietnamese authorities stamped our passports goodbye. Ten feet later we passed an inoperative looking baggage scanning machine, walking slowly past in case someone wanted us to use it. Another 10 feet and we're at the Defense Ministry exit station, with guys looking information up in large books before waiving us along. This was a fairly routine stop, thank goodness, since you've already technically exited the country, so in the event that you are determined to be some kind of exiting defense threat, I'm not sure under whose jurisdiction you would be detained, or which government would be in charge of making sure you get to call your embassy.

“Good luck!” the defense officer called out to us as we walked away and began our 2 kilometer trek through no man's land. “Good luck?” we said to each other... “that sounds ominous. What does he know?”

The weather was balmy with a cool breeze blowing and it was a pleasant walk across. On the far side, we first stopped at the visa office, a tiny, cinder block hut where two officials met us and handed us some forms. One of them engaged us in an apparently innocuous conversation about some relative that lived in California, during which we noticed, as he at one point leaned forward, that in fact the “conversation” was being recorded. More like an entry interview. Maybe they wanted to make sure we really are from California. Meanwhile, the other guy had hauled out a book of visa stickers and told us the price, $50 each, or so we understood. I felt Patrick cringe at my side. We knew that the real price should be between $20 and $30 each. But what can you do? The price isn't posted so you pay what they ask... and once they've told you how much you're going to pay, well, they couldn't very well negotiate – that would be an admission that they were keeping some for themselves. So, reluctantly, Patrick pulled out fifty bucks and gave it to the sticker guy. A moment later, I did as well.

After everything we'd heard about official corruption in Cambodia, we were totally unprepared for what happened next. Sticker guy smiled and handed me back my $50! “It's $50 for two together,” he said. “I wouldn't want to take too much.” With a smile.

“Oh. I see. Thank you.”

So much for Cambodian corruption. OK, next stop: the Health Inspector. Another tiny cinder block hut, this one with a lone medical officer inside. And more forms. No, we are not sick. No, we have never, ever, in our entire lives had any of the conditions listed below. We are healthy and whole and absolutely do not need to be detained for any length of time in the little room marked “Cambodian Medical Quarantine” behind the doctor. No way would I want to spend even an hour in that room. Fortunately, this too was a piece of cake. He waved a temperature sensing device near our ears – several inches away from what I could tell, didn't even seem close enough to get any kind of valid reading at all. Then he charged us a dollar each for our medical inspections and waved us on our way.

Next stop, last stop, finally, was immigration where... more forms, more surreptitious conversations, at the end of which we were unceremoniously sent along our way with another chorus of “Good luck!” to the small collection of drivers waiting to take us to town. We were in Cambodia!

The road to Kampot was one of the most beautiful drives I've ever been on – bright green rice paddies being worked by families, limestone mountains jutting out of the flat earth, water buffalo and an occasional pig. Friendly children waving hello from the sides of the road. Bouncing along in a tuk tuk down this road on a cool December morning seemed like the perfect way to arrive in Cambodia, and we were glad that we'd been stubborn about making our way through Xa Xia.

Between then and now we spent a night in the riverside town of Kampot, followed by four nights on a tropical island that not only had no cars but no motorbikes as well. More on that later. Tomorrow early we leave for Chi Phat, a village with an ecotourism project that sounds fascinating. With any luck we'll be spending Christmas deep in the jungle of the Cardamom Mountains and unlikely to find a good wireless connection.

Continental Courtyard

I haven't blogged much on this trip, mostly because we've been places that don't have internet. Tonight is my window of opportunity since we'll be heading off again tomorrow morning to spend Christmas in the jungle – literally, from all we can tell.

So... to backtrack a little bit, we started off in Saigon, which was noisy and chaotic as always, although I find the Continental Hotel charming with its colonial era architecture and because it was the place where all the journalists hung out during the war. The central courtyard houses some very old trees, which themselves house a variety of tropical orchids. It's a great place to get away from the hecticness that is Saigon and cool off in the afternoon with a nice gin and tonic. We toasted our arrival in Southeast Asia there on our first day before heading upstairs for a massage. Patrick, of course, was accosted by his masseuse in pretty much the same way Robert was when he was here in 2006. My massage was fine.

Where, o where...???

Where are we? Where indeed... we've covered a lot of territory since leaving SFO on the midnight plane to Saigon. Two nights in the frenzied chaos of District 1, the tourist Mecca of Vietnam. Most Western tourists don't venture more than a couple of blocks outside this small area before moving on to other destinations but we were lucky to have lunch with my "Uncle" Vong and his wife, Huong at a local restaurant in another part of town. We passed on the eel, but the sauteed ostrich was tender and a local river fish was excellent.

We wanted to cross the border into Cambodia at a new border crossing site called Xa Xia, near the port town of Ha Tien, at the very south-western edge of Vietnam. We were quite stubborn about this. Every source of travel information we consulted wanted to channel us instead through the border crossing near Chau Doc. From there, they wanted us to get to Southern Cambodia via the capital, Phnom Penh. We were, as I said, quite stubborn about it and eventually found a travel operator that arranged a private driver for us. Thank god for that - and for the fact that foreigners can't rent cars and drive them themselves in Vietnam - because the road conditions in the Mekong Delta area are abysmal. In the end, we had a long but interesting drive with a lovely stop at a home stay on an island near Vinh Long. We "helped" cook dinner with the host family on an open fire and took a nice bike ride along the red dirt roads lining the many, many waterways that criss cross this area.

From Vinh Long, it was a good 5 hour drive to the town of Ha Tien, after which we unbderstood why everyone wrinkled their faces at us when we said we wanted to go this way. On the other hand, the limestone mountains in this seaside area are stunning, and the Cambodian countryside on the other side of the border is lush and green, full of rice paddies, small mountains rising abruptly out of flat fields, charming family farms and kind people all along the way.

Anyway, pictures and a better update later. This morning we're traveling from the town of Kampot to the island of Kho Ta Kiev, near the national forest of Ream. Hopefully, the driver we've arranged to take us to Ream Fishing Village shows up. And hopefully, the guy at the bumgalow, who seemed to take our reservation, and seemed to agree to pick us up in his boat and take us over there, hopefully that guy shows up. And hopefully the island of Ko Ta Kiev is as lovely as it looks in the photographs. As the border control officers said to us as we walked along the no man's land between Vietnam and cambodia, good luck to us!

Cambodia Bound

Time to get the blog going for the last trip of 2010. This time the destination is Cambodia. I've been to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand - all the bordering countries - but I was saving Cambodia... its dense jungles, remote islands, the ancient Khmer temples of Angkor Wat, the still-undiscovered species of the Southern Mekong and Cardamom ecosystems... I was saving Cambodia for something. I wasn't sure what. As it turns out, I was saving it until I had a partner who found all those things as interesting as I do and - and it's a big "and" - actually wanted to take a month long vacation in order to explore them all.

So we're off tomorrow, flying into Saigon for two days to visit with my Uncle Vong, then heading to Cambodia - by bus, by airplane, by boat or by motorbike, we don't quite know yet. Stay tuned...