Vietnam – Dalat, Mui Ne, Saigon, Mekong Delta
Cambodia – Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville
Leaving Nha Trang behind, I traveled southwest and up into the mountains to the small mountain town of Dalat. Sitting at about 4,500 feet above sea level, I found a welcome relief from the heat – it even got cold enough at night to break out my sweatshirt – a first. I wanted to get out in the woods, so I hooked up with a local adventure tour company and did a few day trips. The first trip was canyoning; a rough and tumble adventure, not your normal tourist fare that I am still sporting a few scrapes and bruises from. We repelled down six different cliffs two of them directly over waterfalls in the middle of the falling water. Another the rope did not reach all the way down, so you had to free-fall the last 20 feet into a crystal clear pool of water below. We hiked down through a canyon located just out of town, wading or floating down the river more often then not, sliding down rocks, floating through water chutes – what a rush!! Because it had been raining the last couple of days the water was really flowing, and that kicked everything up just a notch. Very, very, fun! I went hiking to a nearby mountain top the following day with great views of the town and surrounding county side, although not long after we got to the top, the weather shifted and it started raining like there was no tomorrow. This made getting back down the mountain very tricky as the trail became one big mud slide, soaked, muddy and cold we threaded our way back down the mountain with lightning striking close by and thunder bombing in our ears. I found myself attacked by leaches, one on each foot, didn’t even know it until I looked down and one foot was covered with blood and the other one had a slimy slug attached completely bloated with my blood. Nice! I feel like I really earned those adventures and despite the damage to my body, I had the best time – life in it’s fullest… Yes!
From Dalat I headed to the seaside resort town of Mui Ne – just three hours north of Saigon. Mui Ne consists of a small fishing village along with a long stretch of beach were many resorts and bungalow guesthouses have set up shop. Really low key, there is not much to do here other then sit on the beach and stare out across your navel. Never the less I had a great time relaxing and checking out the local sand dunes. The dunes range from about twenty to two hundred feet high, and are spread out over quite a large area. The local kids hang around and rent out hard plastic sheet that you can sit on and sled-ride down the dunes – very, very fun – and a lot like sled riding in the snow when I was a kid. Nights were very laid back, but one of note had me sitting at a bar right on the beach, looking out over the sand, watching the lightning from thunderstorms out over the ocean, and large cockroaches fighting small crabs on the beach at my feet – nature can put on a good show if you pay attention. All and all – a really nice place to relax for a few days…
I don’t think I was mentally ready for the big city reality of Saigon after my quite days in Mui Ne, but I adjusted quickly after arrival taking it all in stride. Horns from motorbikes threading their way through traffic, neon lights of countless bars welcoming you in for a drink, shops decorated with posters of the latest bands selling pirated CD’s for $.60 each, music coming from restaurants with second floor internet cafes, the cyclo drivers pushing opium and pot, “hey mister, you want something?” the come-on from the working girls hanging out on the corner; “you want go boom, boom?” Ahhh the excitement of the city… Definitely a culture shock, and Pham Ngu Lao the local backpacker ghetto, is quickly becoming another Kao San Road in Bangkok. I really liked Saigon as a city, nice easy feel, not too much air pollution, good sites nearby – the War Crimes Museum is a very emotional place that documents human rights violations that occurred during the Vietnam war, sometimes in graphic detail. I also visited the Chu Chi Tunnels, which were used by the Vietcong so successfully to fight American troops during the war. You can’t help but be amazed by the ingenuity of the people here to fight in this manner, the elaborate network of small tunnels, winding around, sometime doubling back on themselves, loaded with booby traps, with multiple levels and exits some underwater into streams. The tunnels are small, which the smaller in stature Vietnamese could run through them somehow, but larger American troops would struggle to negotiate, as I did; they go on for miles and miles, incredibly fascinating and complex.
From Saigon, I headed south to the Mekong Delta for two days touring around the river and local industries in the area, saw a coconut candy factory where they did everything by hand, from boiling the coconut in iron kettles, forming and cutting, to wrapping the individual pieces of candy and packaging. Visited a local weaving village where women weave sarongs and towels by hand on a loom. Most interesting was a floating fish farm village where the government has a contract to supply an American company with catfish. Each floating house is about 30ft X 60ft and they build a fence under the house to the river bottom 30ft below to the river bottom to contain the catfish. They claim there are 10,000 fish under each of these homes, something I find hard to comprehend and the government funds over 10,000 of these homes on the river that individual Vietnamese families manage as part of the contract. Very interesting…
I continued up the Mekong and into Cambodia – interesting doing this via the river, as it was really impossible to discern any difference when moving between Vietnam and Cambodia, other then the passport stamps at the border; this section of the river is very remote, and the farms look the same in either country. The Mekong has been a constant companion through the whole journey winding it’s way through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – interesting to see it’s many personalities – at the border it is nearly a mile wide, before splitting into nine main channels in Vietnam and seeking the Pacific Ocean. On another adventure I would like to visit it’s source in the mountains of Tibet.
I arrived in Phnom Penh via boat, the capitol of Cambodia and found it to be such an interesting place. One can easily imagine a once thriving city that is now working hard at a come back. Situated along a broad stretch of the Mekong River the city has a wonderful river front park with tree lined walkways lit at night by classic styled streetlamps, lined with sidewalk cafes with wicker furniture, serving up a wide range of delicious food and rounding things out with some low key live music. The whole place is very laid back; bars are fun – cool without trying to be. Generally a great place just to settle-in and relax; you can almost feel the city starting to come alive in a rebirth of the culture and economy. But there is a darker side that is not even under the surface, but right there in your face. The former Khmer Rouge government is recent history (late 1970s), but the genocide of two million Cambodians committed by them has not been swept under the rug. A trip to the S21 prison, a former school set in a residential neighborhood – now a museum – is like a raw wound, with many of the cells still containing chains, leg shackles, and various implements used to torture inmates complete with blood stains on the ceiling if you can believe it. There are many graphic photos of victims, some before and after they were tortured and I was struck by the same haunted look in all of their eyes – it’s the stuff nightmares are made from. After torture, most prisoners where taken out of town to the now dubbed “Killing Fields” for execution. Thousands of bodies have been disinterred from mass graves and the monument erected there is a chilling site. A fifteen-foot square tower rises a hundred feet in the air with glass sides and ten or twelve platforms inside which contain thousands of human skulls from the bodies they have recovered so far. Surrounding the monument is twenty or so depressions in the earth – the remnants of the mass graves. Heavy stuff. At first I felt that having the victim’s on display like th
at was disrespectful, but soon realized that it would be even more disrespectful to shield anyone who came here from the brutal reality of what occurred.
After about five days in Phnom Penh, I was ready to move on, so I headed south for the beach town of Sihanoukville where you can find beautiful white sand beaches, warm blue waters, and not much else – including other people. I mostly spent my days hanging out on the beach, catching some rays, and playing tick-tack-toe in the sand with local teenage girls who come around selling fruit. If you loose – you have to buy fruit from them – if you win, you get some free fruit – if you tie which is most often the case, you get some interesting conversation and play again. It’s raining most days now, definitely into the raining season, although it only last about 1-2 hours and does not impact the day too much. I am feeling ready to come home now – it’s hard to put my finger on why, more a feeling then anything else, but I know the time is drawing near, and I am just relaxing and enjoying my last few weeks.
I am back in Phnom Penh now – got some bad food somewhere along the way, the first time the whole trip and have been laid up in my hotel waiting to get better. On the mend now, and will be heading next to the amazing temples of Angkor next. Stay tuned…
Matt