Angkor

OK, so a brief catch-up on the last two weeks...

Phnom Penh was very nice (I thought - Tobe was not so taken). Our hostel was sitting right on the lakeside, and we regularly had little kids paddling up to us in small wooden boats while we sat by the lake eating, offering us tours... The area down by the riverside in town was also really picturesque - and the whole town was just very green, with lots of trees even on the busiest roads.

This was the view from our table while we ate.

I had a few days of solo flying when I went down to Bangkok for my test on Monday - and then had a nightmare getting back. I was able to get from Phnom Penh to Bangkok on a direct bus, but because that was already gone for the day by the time my test was over, I had to get a bus to the border and stay over night, then get a bus to Phnom Penh and stay another night before I could get a bus to Sihanoukville to catch up with Tony. The whole return trip took me four days, with more hours than I care to count spent on buses (certainly the majority of my waking hours).

Another cute puppy - this one was at the guesthouse I stayed at in Arranya Prathet, at the Thai border.

When I finally did catch up with Tony, he had gotten a bad dose of food poisoning, and was pretty much unable to go outside or move around - so after knocking several days off my beach trip to go to Bangkok, I ended up spending most of the rest of it sitting in our room in the shade watching DVDs with him. The best laid plans, and all that...

Our cabin on stilts from Sihanoukville.

Anyway, once Tony was fit to move around again, we headed up to Siem Reap, the town outside Angkor, the home of the famous thousand-year-old ruined temples (our second-to-last day-long bus trip, which is very comforting to know - our last is tomorrow). The town itself is actually quite nice, but unsurprisingly I won't be putting up a lot of pictures of that while there are temples to show off...

This is Ta Keo, which was probably my personal favourite of the temples.

And this is the famous Angkor Wat, viewed from a hot air balloon (!)

And one more, since it's kind of cool - you can see the whole grounds of the temple and the moat around it here.

Cleanshaven and poor. Coincidence? I think not...

So, after them growing unchecked for about four months, I finally shaved off my sideburns the other day (it's getting sunny, and I figured if they stayed any longer I'd have tan lines when Connie inevitably made me shave them off in Thailand). That said, they weren't looking all that exciting anyway - I don't grow the best facial hair.

Nonetheless, in a Samson-like collapse of fortunes, this coincided almost exactly with the first time in almost three weeks that I was not a millionaire - clearly the gods were punishing me. It may also have had to do with leaving Vietnam, home to possibly the worlds finest currency (both because it's called the Dong, and because 50 Euro is enough to make a body a Dong millionaire).

Anyway, we're in Cambodia now, in Phnom Penh, which is actually quite a nice city. It's much more like Luang Prabang (with it's lots of trees, and general prettiness) than Hanoi or Saigon (with their lots of traffic and ugliness - although there's a lot of bikes here too). Pictures are quite slow to upload here, so I've just got the one, of the border crossing...


Also, this place is just swarming with drugs. This internet cafe is literally 50 metres from our hostel, and we've been here for three days, and I think I've been offered more drugs (of all kinds) walking up and down that stretch than in my entire life before coming to Cambodia. That said, the drug pedallers, as well as most other people, aren't as pushy here as they have been in a lot of other places, and tend to be reasonably willing to take no for an answer (although you have to give that answer to each of their offerings, which can take some time).

My job applications have started to enter a more active phase at the moment as well - I have a telephone interview tomorrow and another on Tuesday, and a written test to sit on Monday. This is going to mean a brief separation for myself and Tony, since I have to head down to Bangkok to sit the test - so I'm going to be all alone in the world for a couple of days starting on Saturday. Tony is silently (and sometimes less silently) thanking the god he doesn't believe in for this reprieve...

Mortality

I have recently been struck by a strong sense of my travelling mortality. We'll be back in Saigon by tonight, and then on a bus to Cambodia by this time tomorrow. After passing through 12 countries since I left Ireland almost four months ago, I now have only three more left (Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia). In large part, I'm looking forward to getting home - getting back to Connie, back to Cork, back to staying in one place for more than five or six days, and just back to some sense of normality. Still though, there's a lot that I'm going to miss about travelling (by which, clearly, I mean the weather).

Anyway, to lighten the tone somewhat, this is an extract from the rules in our hostel - it starts off with all the normal things about checkout times, and then rapidly progresses to much more exciting prohibitions (and then falls off again at number five...):


Needless to say, rule number four has totally been cramping Tony's style...

And finally, a random note about more heroic battle against addiction... It's been more than six weeks since the last time that I had a fizzy drink (and two weeks to the last time before that) - which anyone who was familiar with my levels of consumption during term time last year will realise is nothing less than a small miracle. Foreign climes do strange things to a man...

Exfoliating

At least, I think that's the word for it - scraping off layers of skin. Apparently therapeutic. I can vouch, after several enjoyable days on the beach, that the best way to do it is by being thrown 12 feet over broken shells by a ten-foot high wave. I can practically feel my wrinkles disappearing (or whatever else it is that's supposed to happen).

So once again, it's been a while since I've posted. Although in my defence, I refer you back to the fact that I'm on holiday, and don't need any defence. Also, internet has been a little patchy here, and (believe it or not), I've been doing quite a bit of work for the last few days. Some of the work I did for CEOL over the last few years is going to be a contributed chapter in a new book by the group's director, and I'm furiously editing everything at the moment. Soon will be v. famous published author (not really, but I read the other Bridget Jones book today - v. funny).

Our accommodation is quite nice (no Presidential palace, but hey...), and located right on the beach. Or room is about ten feet from the swimming pool, and about twenty feet from the sea, so there's been lots of swimming. The weather hasn't been quite what we had hoped for (mostly overcast since we got here), but it's still been very warm, so we can't complain too much.

Tobe struggles with the challenges of our new environs...

The only thing we've really done that hasn't been a variant on sitting around or eating since we got to Mui Ne (i.e. the beach) was to head up to the Fairy Spring at the edge of town. There's a river there flowing down from the sand dunes, and the base of it almost all the way up is made of soft sand and clay, so you can walk about two kilometres up the river in the water, to a very pretty waterfall. I didn't bring my camera when we went, but I'll see about stealing some pictures from Tobe and putting them up.

We'll be heading back to Saigon on Sunday, and then leaving Vietnam on Monday to head into Cambodia. Apparently the genocide trials of the Khmer Rouge are just starting in Phnom Penh, which is our first stop, so this might be an interesting time to be there...

Further bulletins as events warrant.

The most amazing hotel ever!

(For anyone who's wondering, we successfully braved crocodile infested water to swim our way to Ho Chi Minh/Saigon. Honest.)

But more importantly, we're now staying in the most amazing hotel ever in Saigon. Have a look at what we're getting, for $5 per night each, and wish that you were in South East Asia:

This is my bedroom. It's massive, and has its own en suite with a shower and bath. The bed is also really comfortable.

This is the lounge for our floor - and since there's only a few of the other rooms occupied at the moment, we practically have it to ourselves. It also sports a bar and free pool table.

And possibly the best of all, this is the view from my window. Pretty sweet.

And just in case I never get around to putting up any other pictures of Ha Long Bay (which would be a shame), here's one to keep you going:

Alas, like all the other pictures I took, it fails dismally to capture how amazing that place looked - and I think the haze affected the pictures a lot more than it affected my view. But still - imagine dozens of islands like these rising right out of the clear blue sea, and you might get some idea.

I really hope that at least a few people have actually read this far and believed the stuff about the hotel... some people will believe any madness about far away places. And in my experience, most Irish people will believe anything at all if it fuels their jealousy of someone in a hotter country than them - which, in spite of being in a rather humbler hotel, I still am.

Those pictures, in case anyone is wondering, are from our bit of touristing today, the Presidential palace in Saigon.

The crocodile train

And of course, I was right about the laziness. Pictures later, maybe. Right now, just a note to say that it turns out that the train is (probably) running notwithstanding the floodwaters and the 5,000 escaped crocodiles.

So if I don't post again for a while, you should definitely assume that something exciting happened. And not just that I'm a lazy git.

Ping...

I'm feeling lazy at the moment, so just a short update (I plan to put up pictures tomorrow, but considering how some of my blogging plans have gone lately, I figure I should play it safe).

My first, second and third impressions of Hanoi were all of the traffic. If I remember correctly, there are 5 million people in Hanoi, and 3 million motorbikes, and the roads are just madly jammed. Crossing a road like at home by waiting for a gap in the traffic (or waiting for traffic lights to help you) is a hopeless strategy - probably the best advice I've been given is to just close your eyes and walk slowly. A sea of motorbikes flows around you like a liquid, but you don't seem to get hit (probably because they'd do more damage to their own vehicle than a car would, and also risk a domino-like topple of all the following traffic).

I haven't been too crazy about Hanoi city itself, but we've spent the last three days on a tour to Ha Long Bay, which is very possibly the most beautiful place I have ever seen. More about that, and various pictures that hopeless fail to capture it, will follow...

The interesting news at the moment is that, thanks to a spot of bad weather further South in Vietnam, the rail network is apparently temporarily closed - and seeing as we're meant to be getting a train to Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon) tomorrow night, that might end up throwing off our travel plans just a tad... Further bulletins as events warrant.