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!