Viet Nam / Cambodia

Wow. Back again. I feel like my blog entries are going to get shorter and shorter, but they don’t…they stay long. It took me a total time of probably 7+ hours to handwrite my personal journal, and another good chunk of hours to hand write my politics journal (which I’m doing for a grade), so by the time I get to this blog…I’m so exhausted from writing about everything, and I feel like I’m about a billion hours behind on school work. So anyway I’m just going to apologize now for the watered down version, which believe it or not, this is, and justify it with…at least I will remember all the real stories for when I’m home.

So Vietnam was fantastic! I spent the first and last of our five days in port in Ho Chi Minh City (which many people still refer to as Saigon), and I spent the middle three days in Cambodia.

I got up early the morning we arrived in Vietnam to watch our boat float down the Mekong River…much, much different from the vast ocean. It is always so exciting to see land! Vietnam looked pretty much how I had imagined it to look, very green and jungle-y with murky brown water. I did the City Orientation tour, which actually turned out to be really cool. We went to a temple built by the Chinese at some point during their 1000 year occupation of Vietnam, and then we went to this lacquer shop, which was incredible! We got to watch the artisans crush up egg shell and make these fabulous designs. They would drop the egg shell over a certain area of their project, and then use a brush and brush it away, but some of the egg shells would stick (where they were supposed to be in the art piece). I hope that makes sense. Then they would use this little chisel to clean up the edges and define the lines. It was so cool! They also use a lot of mother of pearl, and embed that into their intricate designs. It was very fun to watch and the finished products were just beautiful! We went to the presidential palace and got a tour of that which included seeing the room where south Vietnam surrendered to North Vietnam at the end of the war. We had a 4 course set meal lunch in which I tried a new shrimp dish (yayyyy Hilary!!!!). They brought out the shrimp wrapped around a piece of sugar cane, so you scrape it off and put it on this incredibly thin race paper circle and then put veggies and sauces in it, wrap it up and eat it. Very good. We didn’t get to go to the War Museum but we did get to go to some History Museum. The main thing we did there though was watch a cultural Vietnamese water puppet show…which was really fun! The puppets are dressed so eloquently and the puppeteers stand behind a screen waist deep in water for the entire 20-30 minute show. This would all be much easier to describe with pictures. Which I have TONS of. Have you guys heard of Weasel Coffee? I guess it’s famous and super expensive. There are no Starbucks in Vietnam because the Vietnamese like their coffee. I don’t even like coffee and I tried this Weasel Coffee and it was amazing! So we did that. I had told my tour guide that a bunch of us wanted to go get tailored dresses made, so after our normal tour, he volunteered to take us to a nice but not too expensive shop, take everybody else back to the ship, and then come back and pick us up! It was so nice of him!! So I got 2 dresses made, which I am very excited about!! I like one better than the other, but I will wear both for sure and…I got dresses custom made in Vietnam, so whatever. We went back to the ship, dropped off stuff, regrouped, and then a bunch of us headed back out. Not getting ripped off by cab drivers is an art! You have to be So careful with them. I was fine but I heard of people getting stuck with a $40 fare for like a 5 minute ride because they weren’t careful enough. I spent the night wandering with SAS-ers, hanging out around town and it was a lot of fun. Usually I don’t like to be in the big big SAS groups, but I met new people and everybody was really fun so it was OK for one night. My last day in Vietnam, I woke up 12 minutes before I had to be at the bus for my trip. We drove for like 3 hours and finally had lunch. After lunch we went to the Cao Dai temple, which is a really colorful, cool, religious place. Yellow = Buddhism, Red = Confucianism, Blue = Daoism, and White = all the new people who haven’t picked a focus I guess yet. So the monks all wear different colored robes and we watched them do their prayer service/ritual for like half an hour and it was really pretty and cool to see! Then we went to a cemetery/war memorial before heading off to Cu Chi to go crawl through tunnels!! It was a lot more than just tunnels though. The grounds are still run by the army so our tour guide recommended to us that we NOT try to bargain for things…we saw all types of different traps used, the original size of the holes the Viet Cong would use, original entrances, everything. It was so awesome. I did all the crawling I could do, I was wearing my grimy clothes and I had my flashlight. You could do either 30, 60, or 100 yards and I did all 100, but those tunnels were built for tourists to get an idea of what they were like, so I’m pretty sure they were similar, but fake. Then you could do a bonus 50 yard crawl through I think real tunnels, or at least more realistic. There were no turnouts for the whole 50 yards and it was smaller, narrower, and darker, and I did that one too!!! It was so much fun. It was really eery being there though because the military has a shooting range there too that they let tourists use ($1/bullet)…so while we were walking around this place we were hearing machine guns, M16’s, and AK47’s going off…creepy. Much as I hate guns, I would have shot one for the experience of it, but the joys of group travel moved our group along before I had time to. We watched a really anti-American war documentary before heading back to the ship. Then it was like panic time – everybody was trying to do all these last minute things before on ship time. (If you’re not back to the ship on time, you get dock time, which means once we’re in the next port…you can’t go out for a certain amount of time). I went out with this girl Jordan, I didn’t really have anything I needed to do except for find somebody to give me a postcard and bargain for last minute things, but Jordan needed stamps, postcards, and a magazine, so we were like rushing through Saigon. We decided, against all SAS rules and general safety precautions, to pay $1 and ride on the back of a motor bike. There are lots of those people trying to get you to hop on their bike and they’ll take you anywhere in town for $1. I hadn’t done it yet because I’d heard we shouldn’t do it and I knew they were dangerous…but I really wanted to, so I did it anyway. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t want to hold on to the anonymous driver in front of me so I held on with both hands to this bar behind me for Dear Life as he zoomed and honked and swerved. It was terrifying and completely exhilarating. Finally he plopped me down next to Jordan and we went about our errands. When we were all done we hopped on two different motor bikes and this time the driver was much slower and stayed with Jordan’s driver which was really nice, and it made it easier to look around and enjoy the city. My only worry with that was that I really thought this car was going to hit me when we were merging one time, but it didn’t : ) yay! haha Oh Daddy I’m sure you’re freaking out right now. But it’s ok, I’m still alive! I’m not one of the 25+ people that actually had to go to the clinic for bruises, burns and pussing scrapes they got for getting off of the wrong side of the bike or for getting completely thrown off while hitting another motor bike (this one girl’s face is messsssed up!!!) so I guess that’s why we’re not allowed to ride them. Alright so that was basically Viet Nam…I wish we would have had more time there, I really wanted to go on a trip on the Mekong River and I wanted to go to the War Museum also. I will have to come back sometime I guess…

Cambodia was amazing!! I had no idea what to expect, but it was just really beautiful there. There were a couple sweet thunder storms while we were there (it’s monsoon season), but the rain didn’t stop us at all. The first night all we really did was go on a river cruise (which was lame cuz it was cloudy so we couldn’t see the sunset and … we’re on a boat alllll the time so it wasn’t that magical) and then out to a buffet dinner. So many buffet dinners!! It’s annoying, because they make sense – everybody can find something, big room, blah blah blah…but I feel like it’s fake food from the countries we’re from, not their normal cuisine. After the dinner though when we got to the hotel, a group of 4 other girls and myself headed out to get some sweet $6/HOUR massages!!!! That was my first professional massage and it was an interesting experience…I’m glad I went with people. We were all really really excited about it. The next day after breakfast we went to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum…which used to be a torture prison…which used to be a high school…it was eery, creepy, gross, sad, and I didn’t take that many pictures there. Also eating beforehand was not the best idea. It was so hard to look at pictures of victims’ faces and learn about it, but it was so interesting and I really believe that it’s incredibly important for people to keep learning about atrocities the world has already seen in an effort to prevent them from reoccurring. But yeah, it was a dark, sober morning. From there we went to the Killing Fields which was somehow not what I expected but nauseating and powerful just the same. The Pol Pol regime didn’t want to use bullets on people because bullets were expensive and they didn’t want people to have a quick, relatively painless death. So they would use a lot of torture and especially for babies and kids they would just bash their heads on a tree (in front of their mothers, of course), before tossing them aside into a mass grave. So lots of the graves were next to trees used for that purpose, other graves were just grassy pits in the ground. The dirt we walked on literally had bones and teeth showing through from the rain that has brought them up to the surface. Also, Pol Pol was not his actual name, it was a nick name that stands for Political Potential…which haunted me all day. And, I didn’t realize before that the Khmer Rouge “boys” was not a mis-translation of our tour guide…the boys they used to do the killing were literally between 12 and 20 years old. It gets better: the current Cambodian Prime Minister was a Khmer Rouge boy….gross gross gross. So it was a sad and heavy morning. To lighten things up after that we went to the Russian Market, which I don’t think has anything to do with Russia, and did some bargaining. I got some COOL things there!!!!! I’m so excited about them! Then we went to lunch before visiting the Royal Palace where the King still lives and the Silver Pagoda (a room with like silver tiles as the floor). Then we headed to a history museum before going to the airport to fly to Siem Reap. Once in Siem Reap we went to dinner that also included these amazing cultural dance show!!! The outfits were gorgeous and the little mini stories were so cute! After dinner a different group of girls and I went out and got a $5 massage!!! We arrived down town via a Touk Touk (which is a carriage type thing attached to a motor bike). Our driver’s brother was named Sambo and he was really nice. He came to pick us up after our massage and got us safely back to the hotel. I want a Touk Touk. I got up the next morning for the Angkor Wat sunrise tour…but it was cloudy, as usual…but still it was fun to go see Angkor Wat in the dawn light as the day came on. It’s very magestic, but more about that later. We went back to the hotel for breakfast and to check out and then went to Ta Prohm (where Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was filmed). That place was gorgeous!!! The rocks were just so beautiful…it was all in ruins but some things were still standing and the bas-reliefs were so intricate and detailed! I really loved that place. Then we went back to Angkor Wat in the daylight. We got to walk around, take lots of pictures, and I got to climb to the top of it, to the third level. It was Really scary!!! The steps are so steep, and they go so high, and they are so falling apart…but it was an adventure, and I’m still alive!! And the top level of Angkor Wat was gorgeous!!! The windows without panes looked like a painted picture with the scenery you could see through them. It was just so grandiose and beautiful. We spent some time up there before making our way carefully back down, holding on to this skinny metal rod hand rail on our way down for dear life. I just found out yesterday that Unesco, the company that is preserving Angkor Wat, literally JUST declared that climbing the steps to the top of Angkor Wat was too dangerous for the thousands of tourists that go every year, and the day after we left Cambodia, I heard from the other SAS Cambodia trip, they had guards there already not letting people climb up. So I’m one of the last people ever to stand on top of that thing!!!! Hah! Then we went to Angkor Thom which was a temple with 200+ faces carved into the stones…there were just faces everywhere…there was also the Elephant Pagoda, with Tons of elephants carved into a wall, and then the Leper King Terrace with just one statue of the Leper King. After all those adventures we went back to the airport and finally arrived back at home sweet home…aka the ship. That was our last night to go out in Vietnam, so after I showered Melissa and Michelle and I went out to the night market and then out to this restaurant called Pho 2000 which is really famous in Saigon because Bill Clinton ate there in 2000 and it’s named after him I guess. There are a ton of pictures of him on the wall. So I got Pho Bo there (traditional Vietnamese beef noodle soup, and it was delicious, and dinner and a beer cost me a whopping $2.5, so yeah…pretty good.

So I think that is pretty much it. I am still meeting new people, getting to know acquaintances better, and everybody is just so excited all the time either about the last port or the next that people are always in a good mood and it’s a fun atmosphere. I know two of my friends that are going to be on my India home stay with me, and we’re getting sooo excited! Except for the boy, Adam, is already talking about trading me for a cow haha. But yeah I’m having a lot of fun with the people and everybody is passed the point of stressing out about classes lol so we’re all just kind of doing our best and hanging in there. For me, journaling and sleeping so that I’m not sick in these countries is sometimes a priority over doing homework that’s not due. So yeah I have a lot of catching up to do, but I’ve been experiencing everything safely and healthily and doing tons of trips so it is really wonderful.

However, there has been an outbreak of infectious diarrhea. If more than 2% of the ships population has it, our doctor is required to report it to the Center for Disease Control. From there, CDC has the right to board our ship, quarantine us from port, quarantine just those individuals that are sick, etc. We are supposed to dock in Thailand tomorrow and currently we are pushing upwards of 5% of people here having diarrhea…so it’s really serious…we really may not port tomorrow in Thailand. So that’s kind of scary, but hopefully my peers are taking care of themselves so that our doctor doesn’t have to lie (because she is definitely not going to put her medical license on the line so that we can give Thai people with leprosy and aids infectious diarrhea) and so that we can go to Thailand. Assuming all goes well, I’ll be headed off for more adventures tomorrow!!!

Until next time,
Hilary