Haere ra Vietnam.

Well tonight it's 'hen gap lai' (but not 'tam biet') to Vietnam. I'm getting on the 9pm jetplane and heading back to Melbourne town to whence I came.

The last 3 months have passed in a blur - haven't really begun to process this experience yet I think - but initial impressions are that it has been pretty bloody amazing.



As one of the staff members at the university I have been based at said to me 'you'll be back - this place has a way of getting under your skin' - and of course he's right. No doubt about it.

:-)

Cambodia's greatest hits #3.

Siiem Reap airport provided my brother and I with a number of giggles other than entertaining duty free signs (see the last entry).

First up was our disbelief when we landed and taxied past the 'PMT Air' plane. I kid you not - have even copied the logo from their www.pmtair.com website as evidence. Not sure how I would feel about flying with them to be honest.



And then, another engrish charmer from Vietnam Airlines, who we were flying back to Saigon with: a calm reassuring stewardess intercom voice came on halfway through the flight to let us know that "Ladies and Gentlemen, we are currently smashing through a patch of turbulence, please fasten your seatbelts" .... so we did.

Cambodia's greatest hits #2.

Bottle of water bought while in Siem Reap.....maaaaaaaaate.

Cambodia's greatest hits #1

Well, it's T minus just under 2 weeks until I am back in Melbourne trying to remember how to do my own washing cooking and cleaning and I've got a fair bit of knuckling down to do between now and then so no time to do my usual roving correspondent piccy taking.

So, with no further ado, here are some highlights of both Cambodia and Vietnam, starting with this sign from Siem Reap airport's duty free shop.



P.S. If Labour doesn't win tomorrow's election I am gonna be seriously pissed...but I reckon she'll be right.

Oh all right then...

Maybe just one Ha Long Bay piccy - apologies for the overcast sky not cooperating - will have to learn how to photoshop properly and get the better of nature ;-)

Vietnam (brief) debrief: Hanoi and Ha Long Bay and back to work.

After Cambodia and a Saigon stop-off we headed up to Hanoi and out to Ha Long Bay for a few days each.

In Hanoi we stayed with some lovely friends and their two evil cats in their gorgeous apartment on one of Hanoi's many lakes - I blogged up Hanoi last time I went there so I won't bore you with a repeat.

And Ha Long Bay was bloody marvellous, mostly because we paid a little more than most people do to get a great 2 day tour. For $55 US per person we got 2 days/1 night on Ha Long Bay, sleeping, reading and lazing around on the gorgeous boat, being fed (mostly) good food, getting a tan (as much as a whitey like me can tan) and swimming in the world's most scenic outdoor swimming pool.

None of the photos I took do the place justice so just add it to the list of places to go to before you die if you haven't already been there, done that (or 'BTDT' as my supervisor says).

My brother left from Hanoi for Paris on Sunday and I flew back to Saigon (a true Vietnam Airlines special - a 3.5 hour delay on a 2 hour flight!). Now, I'm back and knuckling down to do some work before leaving Vietnam at the end of the month. Will have to relearn how to cook, clean, transport myself and all those other boring proletariat chores when I get back to Melbourne - will be a shock to the system!

Cambodia debrief #3: Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)

Warning: another ridiculously self-indulgent amount of photos follow. I won't hold it against you if you don't finish!

Flew from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap in the morning and was in the taxi heading to our hotel by lunchtime. When I realised that our taxi was following a 4WD with a mokey on a lead sitting on the roof (South East Asia's not a great place to be an animal lover in, unless by 'love', you mean 'eat'), I knew we were in for a fun/crazy time. (Apologies for crap quality photo - taken through window of taxi in a hurry - better to have some blurry loch-ness monster-type evidence than none at all).



Like the masochistic tourists that we are, my brother and I checked into our hotel and hit the Angkor temple circuit within an hour of touching down in Siem Reap. [For those who are a little blurry on place names (like I was), Siem Reap is a town in Cambodia - it is also the gateway town to the Angkor temple complex which was done around the 9th-13th centuries. Angkor Wat is just one of the temples within the Angkor complex which covers a pretty vast area].

One of my Saigon mates is a photographer who is a bit of a pro at avoiding the tourists at Angkor - which, providing you have the right advice, was remarkably easy to do. It just involved us getting up at ridiculous times of the day - those who know me know that '5am start' is not in my vocabulary - but that's what we did on 3 consecutive days.

Between my brother and I we took god knows how many photos of the temples (more than a CD's worth!) so I won't torture you with them all - much better versions are available on postcards and coffee table books.

...but that said I can't resist doing a few of em' and a few 'Mad Hatter TM' piccys from the back of a motorbike (I'm honestly not sure how I ended up with this transport fetish - not healthy at all).

So! Let's start with the classic 'tree in temple' shot from Ta Prohm - a super atmospheric temple complex that is infested with tourists at all times other than the sneaky time we went. For a better shot just look at the cover of the Lonely Planet for Cambodia ;-)



Followed by another 'tree in temple' shot from Ta Som temple (at least I think it was Ta Som - after 3 days they all tend to blur into one a bit!).



...and a few 'between temple' scenery shots.





And a few shots of Angkor Wat itself:



...and some of the very funky Apsara carvings within Angkor Wat.







This place, called Preah Khanh (excuse spellink) was one of my favourites - hardly any tourists and literally falling over in places but absolutely spectacular - I just love how nature every now and then says 'right - you've had your fun, i'll take that back now thank you' :-)







We were at Preah Khanh near dusk and these two, ridiculously cute kids (Cambodia specialises in em') came tootling past us on their way to visit one of the guards with their cute, furry god-only-knows-what-creatures on their shoulders.



But this kid with a football up his shirt at Ta Som temple also gave them a run for their money in the cute stakes.



All templed out yet? Well by Day 3 we were in danger of getting temple fatigue so we hired a tuk tuk guy who said he was 21 but looked about 10 to take us to two places 30km and 50km out of Angkor respectively.

The first stop, Banteay Srei, is about 1 hour's drive away and ridiculously over-touristed from about 7.30am onwards so, mad sods that we are, we headed there for before 7am - would have been earlier except for the flat tuk tuk tire on the way.

At that time of day my vision is a little blurry and I think my camera was feeling empathetic - but I like the colours in these anyway (and no blog is complete without a rice fields and water buffalo shot in it somewhere).





Banteay Srei is tiny compared to most of the other temple complexes but is beautifully carved and looked great at the time of day we got there.



After which, it was time to hit the unpaved road section of our trp - and to wish that we had taken motorbikes instead of a tuk tuk (which we nearly jack-knifed on a bridge) as we spent an hour travelling on a diabolical dirt road that turned our back's into a chiropracter's wet dream.

But what awaited us at the end, after a seriously sweaty 1/2 hour uphill hike through what looked like New Zealand bush, was well worth it. Some devoted loon carved an entire river bed - it goes on for at least 500 metres and is quite amazing - and the waterfall cool-off afterwards was very welcome!





OK - enough torture - I guess this is the digital equivalent of the much dreaded holiday snap slideshow - but at least this one is optional - if you made it to the end I am impressed!

Next stop was HCMC for an evening of clothes washing and sleep and then we headed up to Hanoi to do a little Ha Long Bay-ing which will be posted up asap...and yes, I promise to do shorter posts with less pictures from now on!

Cambodia debrief #2: Vietnam to Phnom Penh

So where to begin? Between my brother and I we took some ridiculous number of photos between us so this will definitely be another gratuitous photo-fest. But hopefully they are at least of passing interest to my loyal readers (all 2 of you) ;-)

We left Saigon on Friday 2 September - which warrants a photo in itself cos' all the people in the city had disappeared and been replaced by Vietnamese flags. The quietest I have ever seen it - apparently Tet Festival is the same.


Unlike Noo Zulland, which is at the arse end of the universe, the countries in South-East Asia are all conveniently close by - so, 45 minutes later, we were in Phnom Penh. We met up with a Cambodian mate who works at the French embassy - and, within 4 hours of arriving in town, found ourselves having an extremely messy (but entertaining) night, gatecrashing the farewell party of one of his colleagues. Was yet another twilight zone moment, dancing to old French pop songs with pissed Frogs in the middle of Phnom Penh!

Amongst other things, we did the obligatory tour of Toul Sleng (aka the S-21 prison where the Khmer Rouge got up to some pretty atrocious shit) which was pretty hard going but well worth seeing in person. Nothing like several rooms full of people's photographs staring at you to personalise genocide.

Our touristing in Phnom Peng got a little more light-hearted when we were travelling on motorbike with our mate (the ones in Cambodia are extended to take 3 people and are brilliant fun) and the famous Cambodian rain started up. We had raincoats on but they were a little irrelevent when our bike died in about 80cms of water outside the royal palace and we ended up wading through the COMPLETELY flooded street.




Apparently one legacy of French occupation in Cambodia is a seriously shit drainage system - Phnom Penh regularly floods but by everyone's reaction you would think it was the first time. So, we abandoned ship off the bike and waded to slightly higer ground and stood with a bunch of wet monks (whose email addresses we got when they requested copies of the photos) and watched small Cambodian children swimming down the road and people pushing stuck vehicles through the floodwaters.




All quite entertaining really.




At this point anyone remotely sensible would have retired to a cafe or something but no, we carried on touristing in the rain.




So, one royal palace and an abortive mission to the national museum later we had just about done Phnom Penh...except for dinner. Our mate took us out to the suburbs to a fantastic place called Hen Lay. I don't really know how best to describe it - maybe an aircraft hangar with food and live bands would be a good start. This place, on the river, was absolutely massive.



And, not content with one band or piped music, there was the house band and a full-on cabaret of about 6 singers who did songs with backup dancers and costume changes and everything. This place was so big that there were concert-type video screens at either end for those people who couldn't see the stage!




My brother, who was still a tad jet-lagged and disoriented after flying from Paris the previous day, got even more disoriented when mobbed by the 'beer girls' when we sat down - their job is to thrust a card with the name of their beer brand in front of your face and say the name of the beer as loudly and insistently as they can. Not too bad when there's only one of em' but when there's about 10 the effect is quite entertaining!

We spent a little while hanging out on the waterfront in Phnom Penh as well - watching this dude who was doing his best South-East Asia Ray Charles impersonation...


...and enjoying the fried bug sellers - fried tarantulas are seriously cool!


And then it was time to head on to Siem Reap and get some temples and culcha in us.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

Cambodia debrief #1: Let the silly pictures commence!

Well my brother and I have 'done' the tourist trail in Cambodia - 2 days in Phnom Penh and 3 in Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat and associated temples live). We did 3 consecutive 5am starts and lived to tell the tale.

To say that Cambodia (especially Angkor) is the schiznit would be a pretty vast understatement - that place kicks ass!

Many many silly piccies and gratuitous temple shots will follow as soon as I have a decent internet connection. But to get the ball rolling - this is a shot of the back of a tuktuk in Siem Reap - beautifully combining my two nerdy passions of engrish and public transport.

Squint, read carefully and enjoy :-)

Voting Noo Zulland style.

Well my brother arrived from Paris yesterday morning and we embarked on a high-speed intro to HCMC before leaving for Cambodia today. As part of the touristing we went to the New Zealand consulate to lodge overseas votes for our upcoming election.

My mate has the expression 'Vinamoment' to describe those uniquely surreal Vietnamese moments that seem to happen pretty regularly here (almost every vietnamese company is 'Vina-something or another' e.g. Vinamilk, Fonterra's equivalent). Well this was one of those - but it was actually a New Zealand moment in a Vietnamese setting - seriously bizarre and quite entertaining.

We found the consulate and went in, finding a big kiwi bloke who wandered up and said 'oh, you want to vote?'. Overseas voting only began 2 days ago so I think we may have been some of the first, which is never a good thing.

Pretty quickly transpired that he didn't really know how it worked - there was a Vietnamese chick who sort of did but she also seemed intent on covering up our unique voting numbers on our papers with a black sticker - not really sure what that was about.

Anyway, we sat down in the 'official voting room' and muddled through the paperwork for my brother - who went behind the designated official 'voting bookshelf', did his thing, put it in the overseas ballot envelope and posted it into the box (we even got a photo of him doing it in case the press called).

My one should also have followed suit but at that point the consul, who had wandered in earlier and said hello, called the Vietnamese chick away on some 'urgent business'. Leaving me mid-voting process, sitting opposite the big kiwi guy and wondering what to do - as he clearly didn't know.

So, in time honoured Kiwi style, we engaged in chit chat. Turns out he has been in Vietnam for 12 years - and, when my brother said he had lived in Paris for 14 years the guy responded with 'wow, and you still vote? I gave up on that years ago!'....

...and yes, the person saying this was also the person wearing the 'returning officer' badge who was helping us to vote.

So, after about 10 more minutes he disappears off and comes back grumpily cos' it seems the consul has stolen the Vietnamese chick in order to help him pay for some plane tickets for his upcoming holiday this long weekend...which, of course, is seriously urgent business.

So, the returning officer, after a few more minutes thumb twiddling, eventually says, 'well, you've ticked the boxes, why don't you just leave it with me to put in an envelope and post into the box for you......?'

Hmmmmmm....... thinks I, while pissing myself laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

'Um, OK, seeing as the sole chick who can do it is otherwise occupied with planning the consul's holiday, sure what the hell...she'll be right mate, right as rain!', says I.

So, I'm pretty sure I voted...but if Aunty Helen doesn't get back in I am singularly blaming the Vietnamese consulate in HCMC!

Right - time for some Cambodia - we've got a plane to catch.