Angkor What?

Well Cambodia has now been and gone and we are well into our Vietnam leg. We're currently heading up the Ho Chi Minh Trail and have done, Saigon, Mui Ne and Da Lat (where we are now), and off to Nha Trang tomorrow.

Cambodia definitely had it's good bits and bad bits! The bus ride from the Thai/Cam border to Siem Reap is possibly the most uncomfortable ride ever! We were crammed into a mini bus for the 6 hour dirt road ride. I got lumbered with a broken chair and we were attacked by grasshoppers flying into the minibus from outside. One managed to fly right at me from outside and clock me one right in the eyeball! So I sucessfully smeared him on the van floor with my flip flop - there's one that will be hopping no longer! :o)
Jade and 2 blokes in the back were having a fit as one was hopping around all over them and they couldnt see it because it was dark - I found it pretty hilarious!

We visited the Angkor temples in Siem Reap on the first day, putting in a solid 8 hours, followed by the notorious "killing fields" which was really sad. I don't know if any of you know about this, but basically Cambodia was under rule by the Pol Pot as recently as 30 years ago and all citizens were made to work the rice fields. People who were too intelligent or were lazy were basically killed, and this wiped out somewhere in the region of half the population. This museum coupled with the one in Phnom Penh is a tribute to the killing and they have a monument that contains 5000 skulls which were uncovered in the fields. Not a nice thing to see, but it really makes you realise how terrible some people have had it, and so recently too.

Anyway, the temples were amazing, and if any of you have seen the first Tomb Raider film, this is where they filmed a lot of it. It's really hard to explain what it was like (just think Tomb Raider come Indiana Jones!), but hopefully the photos will help with that when I get around to uploading them. We went to Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and a few others that I can't remember what they were called. We hired a tuk tuk driver who carted us around all day and pretty much for the whole time that we were in Siem Reap - he was like our personal chauffeur! :o)
We also met up with Tommy, Renee and Jan (from the Laos boat) here which made Siem Reap more fun. Our nights were filled with beers, good food, cards and football! What more could you ask for!?!

Next stop was Phnom Penh which was a nice enough city, but more of the same. Cambodia is full of people begging and latching on to tourists which is soooooo annoying! Fair enough there are some that genuinely can't work or whatever, but 99% just walk around and hold there hands out to you to give them money because you are white! Really started to p*ss us off in Cambodia. It wasn't like Laos where they are just as poor, but no one begs. People actually try to make the best of a bad situation and make things to sell etc, but the Cambodians just like to get something for nothing! Oh yeah - would you believe a lady on the street actually tried to sell her baby for $20!!!
We didn't really to do much here as we just wanted to get to Vietnam, so we just visited the Russian market where there is amazingly cheap knock off CD's and DVD's and I nearly came away with the Simpsons series 1-16 boxset for 30 quid. The will power was strong that day, so managed not to buy it, but they had sooo many to choose from. Lost series 2 was as fiver - sooo tempted!
Oh yeah, and because I didn't buy the Simpsons boxset the women in the stall started yelling "You are bad man" over and over, even after we had left her stall and were walking away! Oh the guilt - not!
We also went to Tuol Sleng (S21) which was a former prison for the people arrested during the Pol Pot regime. The prison was left exactly as it was when it was shut down with blood on the walls, all the rooms still with the beds that people were tortured on, all the cells etc. Again very disturbing. Apparantly 14000 people were killed here by the Pol Pot soldiers.

I had a rather annoying incident at our hostel, where the guy that did our laundry managed to dye 2 of my white tops a nice shade of patchy dark pink and then proceeded to blame us for it! One had to go in the bin and one I had to re-wash myself about 4 times to get the dye out. So my rucksack is now one top lighter! :o)

Enough of Cambodia, we are now in Vietnam and loving it! The place is really cool, but very hectic. When we were in Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) there are 4 million mopeds and crossing the street is a literal nightmare! You basically just have to walk out slowly and they drive round you - scary the first few times but you just have to get used to it.
We did a Mekong Delta trip in HCM which was cool and got to go to a coconut candy mill, went on a row boat through coconut orchards, saw some vietnamese traditional singing etc. All in all a good day. We also went to the Cu Chi tunnels which are the tunnels that the Vietcong used in the war with America. Got to crawl through some very small tunnels and then I got to shoot and AK47!!! How cool is that!?!
We went to the War Remnants musuem too which showed all the atrocities that occurred during the war with America including all the deformities caused by the notorious Agent Orange. They even had 2 foetuses in jars showing just how bad the birth deformities were - really gruesome!

Next port of call was Mui Ne which is a really nice beach front town with loads of cool places to eat, drink and chill. This is a famous place for windsurfing competitions. We hired a moped here to check out the sites (sdand dunes, canyons) and basically just relaxed for a couple of days. We then got the bus to Da Lat, where we are now, which is 1500m above sea level and very cold - actually wearing trousers and jumpers! It's like being back in England, and it's raining! I suppose it'll be good to help ease us back into to it before we get home. Pretty cool place, but the rain is stopping us seeing it, so hopefully it'll stop soon.

That's as far as it goes. Off to Nha Trang tomorrow.

Hope everyone is well - that is if anyone actually still reads this anymore! :o)

Take care
K&J
xxx

PS It's stopped raining - woo!
PPS 22 days left..... :o(