Phnom Penh
After a quoted five hour bus ride that ended up being 8.5 hours, we finally arrived in Phnom Penh! It's 9:45pm here so no real first impressions but our hotel is nice, on the waterfront (river). The waterfront is very bustling and reminds me of a third world south beach. Very cool.
picture from the bus ride
We met a girl through our friend Ethan (the currently-in-Beijing one) who lives in Phnom Penh and we are meeting her for breakfast tomorrow morning. We are psyched to have a local show us around a bit and give us some tips.
Sooo muggy! It's hot and sticky - reminds me of home (FL).
Here is a picture looking out the hotel balcony.
…
Today was great -- we met up with our contact through Ethan, Maria, and she had her driver take us around (in a range rover!! how fancy!). First we had brunch then she took us to some markets and then just generally drove us around to check stuff out.
It's soooo incredibly hot and humid, like 80s, so we haven't been lasting long outside. We went to the Royal Palace, which is the big tourist sight here but it's all outside so we tired of it pretty quickly.
Chris got his haircut for $2! Not bad..
Now we are resting in an air conditioned coffee shop before meeting our OTHER contact for dinner. This second contact goes like this -- a board member from Mission Markets, Duncan, introduced us to this woman, Kathy, in Rhode Island who used to live here in Phnom Penh (he had initially introduced us when we first moved to Asia). We contacted Kathy before we left just for some tips on Cambodia and she put us in touch with her former roommate from England who still lives here, Alison. We are meeting her tonight. It's incredible how this overseas coordination works with friends of friends of friends :)
Tomorrow I think we are going to check out the killing fields.. I know it will be heavy but it's sort of a must from a history perspective.
...
Things are wrapping up nicely here in Cambodia. We are having breakfast now, waiting for our bus to Saigon.
The other night we had dinner with a friend of a friend -- that went very well! The food we had was great and she was very interesting to talk to. She has been living here about three years and had some interesting insight into the culture and the NGO world. She hooked us up with her tuk tuk driver, who took us the next morning to the killing fields and Tuol Sleng prison. That was a HEAVY morning, to say the least. The killing fields were really really heavy. It was basically like going to a concentration camp. The killing fields are an area outside of Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge would use as an area to mass execute Cambodians during the 1970s genocide. The most intense thing was the killing tree -- where they would hold babies by the legs and hit their heads against the tree to kill them. It was unreal. They had many body parts and skulls on display. I get shivers thinking about it again... Heavy indeed, but necessary to understand what this country has been through in such recent history. There was even a survivor at the prison selling a book.
Killing Fields
Tuol Sleng Prison (formerly a school)
Honestly, I had no idea of the history of Cambodia or the Khmer Rouge genocide before going there. I think it's shocking (but somewhat culturally understandable) that growing up we were never taught about the Cambodian genocide. Maybe it's because the conditions that led up to the Khmer Rouge getting into power involved the US bombing the crap out of Cambodia, trying to f-up the Viet Cong supply lines. Sooo much bombs on innocent civilians. Truly heartbreaking.
After our heavy afternoon we treated ourselves to some "happy pizza" (apparently infused with some happy herbs) and happy hour at the Raffles bar, Elephant Bar, highly recommended by our local contacts AND the guidebook. ;) (and no, the pizza did not make us feel any different)
Saigon
Wow, the motorcycles here are UNREAL!!!!! We plan to take a ride on one, for the full experience (separate ones, of course), but we just got in tonight. We are staying in the backpacker district, Pham Ngu Lao, in an adorable guesthouse in a back alley. We even have a balcony overlooking the alleyway!! It's amazing. Plus the couple who owns the guesthouse is sooo nice. In Siem Reap we also stayed at a quaint guesthouse, but in Phnom Penh we stayed at a bigger hotel and the people running it were like, Yeah, Whatever. I definitely like the small guesthouse feel.
view out our balcony into the alleyway
This is the official dish of Vietnam, rice noodles in soup with beef.. Mmmmmm! At $2, it's a steal.
The currency here is dong and $1 equals 21,000 dong. That means we are millionaires! We just bought our train tickets for going up the coast next weekend and it was a million each, sounds so funny! We rearranged our trip a little bit based on advice we have been getting about which towns along the coast are worth it or not to visit. The new plan is, take 15 hour train (overnight) stopping in Hoi An (near Da Nang), which is supposed to be an awesome little town, 'a highlight of a visit in Vietnam' and 'untouched by the war'. We are going to stay the night in town, just winging it and finding a hotel when we get there. Then, we leave the next day for another 15 hour train to Hanoi, which gets in at an ungodly 5am (!). We had to make that compromise since we have been reading that the train ride right outside of Hoi An for 2 hours is supposed to be the most scenic. If we take the later train, it will be dark for that part. Anyway, it's good to have a solid plan now.
Tomorrow we will walk around Saigon and do some sightseeing, hit the war museum, the markets nearby, etc. We are interested in checking out Chinatown (Cholon) since our guide book plays it up as having a ton of pagodas.We also have to run some errands -- we had gotten some cheap sunblock in China and it gave Chris a terrible face rash (it looks like terrible acne but it's definitely an allergic reaction). Plus it gave me a much milder rash on my arm so we are now on the hunt for some gentle, natural, crunchy sunblock that doesn't have sketchy harsh chemicals. There are so many hippie expats here with dreadlocks.. I think we will be able to find some :)
We are going on a Mekong River delta tour on Saturday to see the rice paddies and floating markets since many people said they wished they would've spent more time in the delta. Then we have all day Sunday to do more sightseeing then Monday flying to Phu island to stay in a bungalow on the beach (!). No tunnels for me -- I think I'm done with heavy stuff after Phnom Penh. The war museum is all I can handle after the killing fields. Monday morning the plan is to wake up early and try to find a bar to watch the super bowl for a little bit. I think we are in the right place on our trip -- if we were going to catch it anywhere it would be here, I think.
I feel one could spend months exploring Vietnam... So far, we LOVE Saigon -- the architecture is amazing, so much art deco! Plus all the narrow streets and motorbikes...
...
Today we broke the ice and took two separate moto taxi rides (with helmets on, don't worry), Chris on one bike taxi and me on a different one. It is the preferred way to travel, plus, since everything is so close together and all the roads are so narrow, the bikes go very slowly, like not more than 15 mph. Each of our rides were only $1 today, thanks to my haggling (pictured) -- not too bad to make it in time before the museum closed.
Today we were able to visit the war remnants museum (Vietnam War, aka "American War of Aggression", touche, Vietnam, touche), to see Notre Dame and the opera house, plus walk around a bit.
I did a bit of haggling to buy a dress at a market
Mmm iced coffee… Gotta love French colonialism!
but wait, is that… dunkin don-- no wait, it's not, false alarm!
...
I woke up this morning with food poisoning! Probably the worst sharp stomach pains of my life. We had to cancel/postpone our Mekong River delta tour until tomorrow, when I'll hopefully be feeling better. I feel so bad for taking a whole day of our vacation to recover but Chris is being really supportive and is taking good care of me. I've had food poisoning before and ended up in the hospital, so I know how important it is to stay hydrated. I drank over 1.5 liters of water in the past 6 hours and the owner of the guesthouse made me some ginger tea. I just hope the terrible stomach cramps subside soon!
the suspected culprit… street chicken restaurant
I can't believe I didn't get sick in Cambodia but got sick here. Chris and I have been eating all the same things so I have no idea what could have caused it. They are really big on iced coffee here and we had like 3 of them yesterday so I'm wondering if one of them had ice made from tap water or something?
Anyway, this is not fun. I am feeling better than early this morning so hopefully by this evening I will be over it. I am reading horror stories on the internet of people who had food poisoning and then thought it was over so ate 'normal' meals and then felt it all over again so I'm going to take it reeeeal slow.
We leave Saigon on Monday, the day after tomorrow. I'm just glad this didn't happen on a travel day :/
...
I'm slowly feeling better, still feeling intermittent sharp stomach pains, but fewer and far between compared to earlier this morning. I'm still drinking tons of water. I'm bummed this is taking a whole day out of being in Saigon :( but I guess it could be a lot worse. We missed seeing the rest of the museums: history museum, ho chi minh museum, plus the pagodas in Chinatown… Fail. Chris went alone to Chinatown briefly while I rested. Oh well. I honestly love love it here so who knows, maybe we will come back at some point in life.
It's a small world after all… Last night we randomly ran into one of our fellow teachers from Beijing here! Such a small world :)
...
Today I took a chance and pushed myself to go on this Mekong River delta tour. I was definitely feeling touch and go -- part of the day I was fine but parts I felt pretty icky. The extensive boat rides didn't help. But the scenery was awesome. And our tour guide was hilarious, except his humor was lost on the mostly European crowd.
We visited a place where they make honey. Here is one of the beehives..
The Mekong delta is very famous for its coconut candy so we visited a place where they make it -- yum!
Here is a picture of the trail our tour group rode bicycles along. There was such a big group of us and we were going so slowly, I definitely fell off my bike right into a nice, soft, cushiony bush. It didn't hurt at all since the bush fully softened my landing but it could have been a lot worse had it been at a different point along our ride. I think it was funny for the people behind me to see me just kind of fall over =)
We took canoe rides through the smaller canals in the delta. Women were rowing all of these boats; it was impressive!
Our flight is late tomorrow morning for Phu island!
No comments:
Post a Comment