Mui Ne to Phnom Penh

Beach bumming, bikes and buses.

Arrival in Mui Ne - last day of Easy Rider Tour -Our hotel seemed to be run by 2 men, possibly father and son. The son was a fat, lazy groce man who alternated between his hammock or bed most of the day and anything that we asked him about he called the older man in to do. The older man was really sweet and looked after us well, including fixing the buckled wheel on one of our bikes and going off on his scooter to get tomatoes when we ordered tomatoes and fruit for our breakfast. Most of the hotels have these huge menus and you wonder how they can possibly keep all that stock of food when they aren't that busy.What they actually do is take your order and then go off and buy the ingredients they need. Takes a while sometimes but you kow it's fresh!

On our last day we thought we'd get up extra early to order breakfast before the bus came as we now knew the bus could turn up any time.Usually they turn up early, but still manage to arrive late! However we weren't counting on it taking quite so long for them to go get the ingredients for our brekkie and ofcourse the bus arrived early so we scoffed down our omelettes and bread. The sweet old man who'd being busy making our juices for us (still with his helmet on!) quickly transferred them into a plastic bag, shoved a straw in the bag and tied it up with an elastic band and off we went with our bagged juices in hand! We boarded the bus, admired the horrendous tacky curtains and marvelled at the unusual amount of leg space and settled back for the next 5 to 6 hours it would take us to get to Saigon.

We arrrived in late in the afternoon, checked into our hostel and organised a tour for the next day and some onward travel plans.It was Friday night in Saigon (Ho Chinh Minh City) and it had been a while since we'd had a night out so we donned our dresses and dancing sandals and headed out for dinner a beverage and wherever the night would take us.We had a lovely meal in a restaurant called Cappuccino (recommend if you're ever there!) It had a riducously large menu which took forever to decide what to have but was very tasty and worth the difficult decision!

From here we took up a prime people watching spot in one of the bars with outdoor deck chairs on the main social corner and watched highly amused and at the same time so embarrassed for them as 3 very drunk English girls danced on a wall in the bar opposite us, alternating between some bizarre moves, trying not to fall off and taking half their clothes off.Classy girls! It was at this point the police made an appearance and thankfully they were soon fully clothed again and still entertaining the whole bar and the bar on the opposite side of the street!!

At the table next to us in the bar we were in there were were some very coiffered local girls who were having their shoes cleaned and polished at the table by some local guy who pulled up on his bike with a few shoe cleaning items. After he'd cleaned all the leather shoes in sight he moved onto giving their boyfriends neck and shoulder massages at the table. If only bars at home provided these services!! After we had milked our one drink at this bar for its whole 2 dollars worth in people watching we decided to go across the road to the bar where the drunken girls had been. Thankfully they had stumbled off somewhere else and it seemed like a good time to get a different angle and perspective for the next hour of people watching! We have come to the conclusion that Vietnam is so far the best country we've ever been in for people watching. There is never a dull moment and always something or someone to entertain you.We had locals doing some weird begging dances in the middle of the street, a backpacker in a dress 5 sizes too small for her pretending to be a fairy/ballerina and dancing from one side street to the other trying to attach herself to random passers by aswell as the regular children out trying to sell whatever they could.

At 'Crazy Buffalo' we orered some exotic juices which caught the attention of an Argentinian football team sitting behind us who proceeded to order a round of exotic juices. We had started a trend of non alcoholic juice ordering, more expensive than a beer the staff were probably loving this! For the next hour or so I slowly but surely immersed myself back into Spanish and by the end off the night it felt weird to be speaking English again! Grammar still all over the place but it was good to know I could be understood and understand for the most part. we ended up going dancing in the bar across the road for the rest of the night and felt like celebrities when a gang of local girls wanted to dance with us. They are so pretty and so so tiny that we felt like giants beside them even in flats. They wiggled around amongst us for the night and probably thought our dance moves were bizarre! We walked our 500 metres home to our hotel just before 4am only to find the shutters and gate down and locked on our hostel. After a moments panic we noticed a bell and unfortunately had to wake up the night porter. He didn't seem to mind though. We grabbed a few hours sleep and then it was up at 7 to go visit the tunnels. Thankfully it was a 2 hour drive so we were able to catch up on some sleep!

The old war tunnels were really fascinating, built by the Cu Chi tribe , about 2 hours outside of Saigon during the Vietnam / American war. The local tribe here were determined not to lose their land to the Americans and fought hard to protect it. Men , women and children joined in on the fighting and they became a very successful and resourceful tribe who in the end ,through pure determination and effort won back their freedom and with it their land. The tribes used old parts of American bombs, grenades and shells to make them into their own weapons and traps. They made some amzingly clever traps which they had made replicas of at the site. We saw many of them in action and I can tell you I would not like to be at the receiving end of any of them!

The tunnels were very narrow and dark. We only went down about 6 metres but some of them go down up to 100 metres. It was kind of claustrophobic and I wouldn't be at all keen to have to spend any more time than the 5 or so minutes we did in them. As the only form of protection the tribe actually built whole villages underground accessed by a series of tunnels. Families lived under the ground for years and many children were born and raised in these tunnels.After the tunnels we were given the opportunity to shoot some of the guns that were used during this war. After not being able to hear for almost a whole day after my last shooting experience on a former trip I decided I didn't really need to do any more shooting and we settled for a cup of herbal tea and some tapioca dipped in crushed peanut and sugar instead. Very random but surprisingly tasty!

Another 2 hours back on the bus to Saigon stopping enroute at a handicraft factory where all the work is done by handicapped people (their choice of words). The factory was so potent with varnish, I have no idea how anyone could work all day in these conditions. The work they were doing,all by hand was really amazing, sticking egg shells onto pottery, hand carving mother of pearl, hand varnishing and polishing furniture, weaving baskets and hand painting intricate designs. Unfortunately the stuff in the shop area was ridicuously over priced and not one person on the tour bought anythiing. It was a shame as the stuff was beautiful and would have made good souvenirs, although just as well really as it would have been another unecessary weight for the already overflowing bags!.All hot and sticky after going through the tunnels we piled back on the bus and 2 hours later and some more sleeping later we were back in Saigon where we had about 10 minutes to get our bags together before the taxi came to bring us to the bus station where we would be catching a bus to another bus station and then from there 4 hours to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta.

After a partcularly uncomfortable bus ride to meet the other bus perched with my 20 kilos on back and 10 on front on a broken bus seat we finally arrived at Can Tho. Can Tho was a fairly uneventful stop. We got a hotel near the market area and grabbed some cake for dinner as apart form dodgy looking street food this was the only food place open that late. Followed by a juice at the river we then had an early night in preparation for our 6 am start to get the 1 hour boat trip to the famous Floating Markets.

By 6.15 after a bit of wheeling and dealing we agreed on a price and boarded a tiny and very rocky wooden boat being skilfully manoeuvered by one of the local women in her pyjamas. We're not sure if they really are pyjamas that all the women wear at any time of the day, but they all go around in matching tops and bottoms that look very like pyjamas!Up the mekong River we chugged passing tonnes of very unstable looking wooden, straw and bamboo houses on stilts. It was only 6.30 and the sun was already giving off a burning heat. Locals were up and about for hours already. we watched them in their stilt houses as we motored past doing their morning exercise or standing knee deep in the really manky brown river doing the laundry. Some who lived on boats were using a bucket to fish water out of the river to boil for tea and cooking and some were simply taking their morning wash using the bucket technique to fish up the water. As we sat on our wooden plank seat in the rocky boat I thought how worlds apart our lifestyles are and felt immensely grateful for everything life had to offer us and humbled by how simply these people live.

Unfortunately Vietnamese people don't seem to have any concept of how wrong it is to throw litter and much of the country is heavily littered, especially market areas and rivers. It amazed me how they chucked the rubbish off their boats and out of their stilt houses into the very water they use to wash themselves and their clothes in and furthermore use for cooking. They must have stomachs of iron!Our driver skillfully maoueuvered us in and around the selling boats and we were soon nibbling on greasy pastries and a whole watermelon. It was a great experience but not quite as colourful as I thought the floating market would be. However, I think that there was a bigger market on a bit further but the deal we bartered for was only to bring us to one market so we couldn't really complain.

That afternoon we squashed into a taxi with our bags and two Finnish girls and this brought us to the bus station where we then boarded aother small mini bus , got given 2 seats up with the driver which was a good view but also a little scary as you see what's happening before anyone else which isn't always a good thing! We were soon travelling at high speed down the road, horn beeping every 20 seconds and some dodgy Vietnamese music on board. There were quite a few incidents of passenger breaking on my behalf and a good few times when I don't know how the person on the motorbike beside us stayed on as we must have grazed their side we were so close to them.

In the last hour of the journey we were coming into a much more rural area and the most popular local form of transport seemed to be a tractor pulling a trailor type of contraption. It had minimal sides and 5 or 6 planks horizontally placed acting as seats on which there were usually an average of 10-15 passengers piled on. Not sure if this is some form of local bus but it didn't look too stable. About 15m up ahead of us there was one with just 3 passengers , including an elderly and very fragile looking woman perched up on one of the precariously positioned planks, bouncing around as the driver failed to slow for of the numerous potholes. Next thing we know we are screeching to a halt, the horn is blowing for longer than usual and the locals in the bus are shouting in a concerned way. I looked up to see the old woman flying off the 'trailor / bus' and doing a Bond like roll onto the tarmac. We screeched to a halt only metres from her as she was being helped up by someone else who appeared from nowhere. We simply took a little detour swerve aroud her and kept going, but I was relieved to see she was up and walking as I looked back upon the scene. That had to have hurt and I'd very surprised if she didn't have at least one broken bone. The incident didn't seem to faze the locals too much so maybe this was a regular occurence!

On arrival at the bus station we woke up the one and only taxi driver who was asleep in his car in the corner of the carpark. It must have been siesta time as the bus driver beside him had strung his hammock up in the bus aisle and was taking a nap too! We shared a taxi with the two Finns to the centre of town. Chau Doc is a small town on the Mekong River which is a popular area to leave from to cross the border into Cambodia arriving at Phnon Penh. That evening we picked our way through the filthy fruit, veg and everything else market avoiding the scurrying rats , ate dinner in a very local restaurant and were tucked up in bed by 8.30 in preparation for being woken up at the usual time of around 4am when things start kicking off in Vietnam.

At 4.30 I woke to the sound of a van reversing outside our bedroom window. I knew he was reversing because the Vietnamese have a tendency to have a Christmas medley as their reversing sensor sound effect - very entertaining , just not very seasonal! So after a few rounds of Santa Claus is coming to town and Jingle Bells I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get much more sleep and we got up earlier than planned and made our way to the boat dock. We decided to take a cyclo , which is a bit like a rickshaw pulled by a local on a bike. We thought we'd get one each to take us the 1k to the dock. We weren't being lazy but our bags really do feel like they weigh a lot more than 20kg now and the Vietnam sun gets very hot very early. The cyclo guy told us no problem he'd fit us both and all our bags on the one cyclo. We looked at him in amazement as he loaded first our bags and then us. We estimated he was pulling around 180kg by pure pedal power. I really don't know why there aren't any famous Vietnamese cyclists, this guy would sail up Alpe D'huez without all the load onboard!!


Once we'd carted all our stuff down onto the Floating hotel where our boat was to leave from we spent the next half hour negotiating an upgrade onto the fast ferry rather than spending 8 hours going down the Mekong River. Technically we had paid the price of the fast ferry but the woman in the hostel where we booked them ripped us off and charged us fast boat but only bought tickets for slow boat. We argued with her over the phone till we were blue in the face, but all in vain. Eventually the ferry company took pity on us and gave us a discount to upgrade. By 7.30 we were on board and chugging up the river. About an hour and a half in we stopped at passport control and then again 20 minutes up the river on the Cambodian side. The whole boat journey took just over 4 hours. Welcome to country 13 of the trip- Cambodia! Pics to follow