OK. About time for me to do a nice little write-up of this trip. This is a somewhat daunting task, to be honest.
My trip was to cross three countries, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. I had a fear of things not going as planned, so I didn't plan anything. No hotels or transportation was prebooked, and I only brought one bag with a little over a week's worth of clothes, figuring I'd buy new clothes as I went. The one planned event was the full moon party in koh phangan, an island to the south of thailand very close to Koh Samui. The whole trip I would be able to look at the sky, and by the size of the moon know how far away the trip's finish line, a legendary and foreboding beach party.
The flight to was relatively pleasant, if long. I like travelling like most people, but unlike most I actually like the actual moving, the getting-from-paint-A-to-point-B. It's very cool to start this process in a very familiar place and when it's all done, you're someplace very different. The 16-hour flight ended in singapore, where I had a brief layover. While at the airport, I had a bowl of pig intestine soup. It was offal. I wondered why it was easier to navigate an airport in Singapore than Logan Airport in Boston. Then a quick 2 hour hop to Ho Chi Minh City. It was the second day of the year of the tiger.
I was in Hanoi a few years ago and loved it, which was why I wanted to start this trip back in Vietnam. HCMC, or Saigon, seemed to me to be a slightly busier city. I was staying by the Ben Thanh market, which is a big area for backpackers. Within this small area there were a lot of white people, during the day you would venture out and then not see any at all. The hotel I picked out was pretty cool, run by two sisters who spoke good english and were very friendly. I dropped my stuff off there and then left almost immediately to explore. The very first thing I did was park myself where I could snag some pho. I love pho. It's probably my favorite food and when I am executed someday it will be my last meal. For those not familiar, it's a beef soup filled with vermicelli and comes with sprouts, mint leaves, chili peppers, thin slices of beef, and tripe. Always served so that you can augment the taste, adding chili sauce, limes, peppers, whatever. You eat it and it fills your stomach because it's mostly water, and you sweat because I like to add spice, and it's a very very satisfying meal.
A note on the beer. You guys probably know me enough to know I'm kind of an alcohol nerd, and I couldn't tell the difference between all the beer brands, they were all the same. The beer in the above is "333" or "Ba Ba Ba". It is incredibly light, sometime referred to as steam beer, and doesn't fill you up at all, and it's really what you need when walking around the city at 85 degrees and humid. This whole trip, when I drank it was mostly beer, until the full moon party.
Two other drinks that I enjoyed immensely. The first is the coffee, which is dark and thick, very strong and probably lethal. Enjoyed with sweet milk, and I always had it iced. The other drink is "sinh to" which I think translates to "water ice", basically fruit smoothies, but they always somehow taste more like the fruit than the fruit does itself. Watermelon is my personal favorite.
So I ended up getting pretty drunk on that first night, hopping from backpackers bar to backpackers bar. It did not take long to make friends at each bar, you just find a white person and ask where they're from, conversations follow. The first night I hung out with two different pairs of americans. I was carrying around a small notebook and one of the americans seized it at one point and the next morning it was full of bizarre notes. These people claimed to have been to london and in fact claimed to know my neighborhood, south ken, but then proceeded to name landmarks in the area that simply don't exist. In my first brush with Asian Holiday Vice (AHV), while sitting at a bar a girl immediately sits next to me and puts one hand on mine and the other on my leg. It was too early in the trip for a pro, so I tried to turn her away, but not before she tells me "I suck you" and giggled like it was the world's funniest joke. Heck maybe she wasn't a pro, and asian girls just love me.
Vietnam is cheap. Very cheap. A beer costs 10,000 dong, which is like 50 cents. A bowl of pho is about the same. A silk shirt costs about $2. You also have to haggle for everything, it's very standard, to try to get close to the price asian people would pay. Sometimes you feel quite silly when you realize your succesful haggling just saved you a quarter.
My first day I did the proper tourism thing. War remnants museum and the reunification palace. That palace was basically the white house of the old south vietnam government. There were a lot of pictures of the NVC tanks rolling over the gates, which was pretty much the official end to the Vietnam War... this was of course after the US had evacuated. Here's the palace:
The war museum, not much surprising. The strongest impression I got was from the wing about Agent Orange. Apparently children are still born deformed because we used this stuff 40 years ago. You see that display and you are not filled with patriotic pride.
One moment of nervousness, at one point this day I've walked all over the city and been to two museums, and it's only 3 PM. At this point I kind of internally panic, because I'm wondering what the hell I'll do for 3 whole weeks. Good news is after a week this type of thought didn't even occur to me.
My pattern in Saigon while walking around the city was basically: sit at a street stall and eat pho, drink some beer... then wander around for a while, explore the city. I walked across the whole city several times. Basically walk around till you're hungry again. Another great meal I had was claypot braised fish. It was cooked so well you didn't even chew it, it just melted.
I stayed in Saigon I think for three nights. After that I arranged transport to Phnom Penh. I signed on for a Mekhong Delta tour, taking the long way around. Very glad I did it, it was cool to see the village areas, people living in such poverty but it doesn't really matter because they have fish. We also stopped by a village and rode bikes to a restaurant where I had a fried elephant-ear fish, including its eyes which are a delicacy. Stayed that night in a floating hotel, then crossed the next day into Cambodia and landed at Phnom Penh. This trip included a van, a bike, and like 6 different boats... I also managed to get sunburned on my face and some sunglasses raccoon eyes.
So that was Vietnam, next I will post about Phnom Penh and Siem Reap but I'm going to take a break for the moment.