VIETNAM: Nha Trang (July 21st - 23rd)

Our sleeper train arrived in Nha Trang early in the morning.  Our hotel rooms weren't going to be ready for awhile so dropped off our luggage and everyone scattered around the city to find breakfast.  Em and I were really starting to crave western food so we walked for a ways until we found a place that made pancakes and eggs benedict....and they were goooooood!

Nha Trang was another beach stop on our journey, located on the southwest coast of Vietnam on the South China Sea.  But, unlike all our other beach stops where they were more like small, laid back beach towns, Nha Trang is a big hustling and bustling city thats built right up to the beachfront.  Kinda had a Miami feel to it.

Our guide William had a local Aussie friend whose Vietnamese wife, Fong, took us to a beach outside the city for the day.  It wasn't a quiet, secluded beach like some of the others we had been to, but still a lot of fun.  Fong had a huge bucket of ice and loads of drinks ready to go, then spent the day grilling seafood and kabobs, making rice and noodles, and keeping us fed as long as we were hungry.  We mingled with the locals a lot more here.  Some high school aged kids had never played with a frisbee so they had a blast with us out in the water, and later we played some beach volleyball with some other locals nearby (volleyball is insanely popular in Vietnam).  We're starting to sound like a broken record......but it was another great beach day.

The next day was a blast.  We took a gondola/cable car to a huge island called Vinpearl.  It's a famous vacation spot for Vietnamese people, kinda like a smaller, Asian version of Disneyland or Seaworld.  There is an amusement park, aquarium, dolphin show....all that kind of stuff.  But the best part was the water park.  You have to remember, this is Southeast Asia....things like saftey codes and building regulations  don't really apply plus the rides are ready made for the Vietnamese not us huge americans.  So believe me when I say these were some of the fastest and scariest water slides we have ever been on.  They were insane!  On each slide it was almost guaranteed that you'd get to a point where you really started to question if you were gonna make it down without serious injury at best.....not to mention your own life.  We were actually physically sore that night and the next day......but what a rush!  We would have stayed all day, but we had to head back to the hotel, shower up, grab a quick bite to eat, and head to the train station to catch another overnight train.  Oh the life of the weary traveler.....

 The main beach in Nha Trang

 The local beach we went to with Fong

A small taste of SoCal

Cabel car to Vinpearl and the waterpark on crack

 View of Nha Trang from the cable car

 The white letters on the side of the hill say Vinpearl ( very hollywood style)

 Again, we would have loved to have had an waterproof camera.  Here are some pics we grabbed from the web of some of the waterslides we rode.

The spaceship looking slide we referred to as the toilet... when you slid down to the bottom it shot you out into the massive spaceship portion and swirled you around like a toilet bowl before dumping you out of the bottom... it was so crazy.

Jon rode the green slide.... I was not about to ride either :)

Another one Jon rode and i veiwed from the bottom.



VIETNAM:Chau Doc and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) - July 19th - 21st

We were now ready for the last country on our journey....Vietnam!  We took a bus from Sihanoukville in Cambodia, to the Vietnam border.  Once there we had to cross once again on foot, going through customs as we exited Cambodia, spending some time in "no mans land" in the middle as we got our visas cleared (we had to pay the Vietnamese border patrol agent a "convenience fee" to avoid any hassles), clear customs again as we entered Vietnam, and back on another bus.  We stopped at a small town not far from the border called Chau Doc.  This wasn't a big tourist attraction, just a place to stop for night and break up the trip.  All the traveling was starting to catch up with us so other than dinner we spent most of the time in our hotel room and were back on the bus early the next morning.

We arrived just past noon in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon).  Some people say Thailand is more hectic, others say Vietnam.  Em and I side with the Vietnam theory. Never seen so many motor bikes in our lives.  The cities in Vietnam feel much more modern than I had realized they would.  However, much less English is spoke in the country so we really felt the language barrier for the first time and it made for some interesting conversations.  We spent the rest of the day exploring the city and markets.

The next day Em and I differed on what we wanted to do, so we (gasp!) split up for the very first time on the trip.  Any guess what she wanted to do??? Shopping....I think Vietnam is the holy land of shopping or something.  Don't worry, she wasn't alone.  She spent the day with several of the British girls from our tour group.  I went with some of the guys to take a tour of the Cu-Chi Tunnels, one of the most famous battlegrounds of the war.  We had a chance to go down into the small tunnels that the Viet Cong used during warfare, check out a variety of their jungle booby traps, and go to a shooting range for target practice.....a very manly day.  I was excited to get back into the city to see my wife (all together now.....ahhhhhhh).  Em found a purse and sunglasses on her shopping excursion so a win-win situation for all!

Since four members of our group were leaving the next day and four new ones were joing us that evening, we went out for a big dinner and some drinks.  A good all around day.

Hard to tell, but we're on a fairy......with our bus.

Hard to believe, but not the largest load we saw being carried.  Honda should definitely use this for an ad campaign.

Harvesting rice....they spread it on the side of the road.  The sun and heat from the asphalt help dry it quicker.

It went on for miles.

A yummy dish cooked in a claypot.  Can't remember what type of meat, don't think it was of the domesticated variety though.

In Vietnam, people pay property tax based only on the surface area their property covers, so everything is built slender and up.

HCMC ( SAIGON)

At this restaurant we cooked our meet on a roof tile over coals in a bucket.....awesome!

At the Cu-Chi tunnels.....an example of a trap door...

....hard to see but check out the wicked spikes in the pit.

A hole.....

....Vietnamese man climbing in the hole...

....now you see him....

.....now you don't.....

....Jon in the hole...

...now you see him....

.....still see him....

.....and now he's stuck.

One of the enterances to the underground tunnel system.

Humid and cramped doesn't even begin to describe it.  Not for those who have even a hint of claustrophobia....in other words...another reason Emily didn't want to go.

Shooting the AK-47

That's a lot of shells.....no, not all from me.

Communication is obviously important

If everyone in L.A.traded in their car for a motor bike.....you'd have Saigon.

Emily.....looking excited for sleeper train number two!

CAMBODIA: Sihanoukville (July 18th - 19th)

For our last stop in Cambodia we headed south to the coastal town of Sihanoukville.  This was an awesome little beach town that gave us the opportunity to just relax and kick back for a couple days.  The main beach in front of our hotel was nice, but very crowded and full of hawkers that would swarm you the moment you set foot on the sand, so we found a private beach in front of a resort just a little to the north.  Much quieter, and we were able to swim without having to keep an eye on our belongings at all times.  We went back to our hotel for a quick meal and had a quiet movie watching night in the room.

The morning we went with our guide William to check out another quiet, secluded beach to the south called Otres Beach.  The cool part was that instead of stopping at the top part of the beach where the other tourists were, William told our Tuk Tuk drivers to keep going down the muddy road/path that followed the beach south.  He claimed there was a small bungalow restaurant/bar at the very end that no one knew about.  After about ten minutes, even our Tuk Tuk drivers stopped and tried to argue to turn around because they didn’t think there was anything down there…..but sure enough.  The path finally came to a dead end and there was a little hut called Wonderland, owned by a young Khmer fellow.  There were a few bungalow beds on the beach, some thatched beach chairs, and a couple hammocks.  It was the kind of place off the beaten path that makes you forget there is civilization elsewhere in the world.  We had the entire place to ourselves for the day.  When we got back to town we went and got some $9 massages before heading back to the hotel.

That night we ate dinner at the pub/restaurant in the front of our hotel and played some pub trivia for a few hours with our group and some of the locals before calling it a night.

Some people bring their dog to the beach....in Cambodia they bring their cow.

Very private....very quiet.....very awesome

Sihanoukville traffic

Brushing up for the next leg of our journey

The owner of the Wonderland Cafe....took good care of us.

Off the beaten path

The long road to our hidden paradise.

CAMBODIA: Phonm Penh (July 15th - 17th)

After Siem Reap we headed southeast to the capital city, Phonm  Penh.  A little larger and a little more hectic than our previous stop, but we still had some outstanding experiences there.  The first night we hit up a small local restaurant with the group, then headed over to the nearby night market so Em could get her shopping fix (I was able to pick up about ten “bootleg” dvds for a dollar each). 

The next day was the most intense and sobering of all our experiences so far.  We spent the morning touring the S-21 (Tueoul Sleng) prison and the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields”.  Without going into too much of a history lesson, S-21 was a high school that was transformed into a secret prison/interrogation center during the Pol Pot communist regime (this regime was responsible for the genocide of somewhere between 2 to 3 million Cambodian people from 1975 – 1979, shortly after the Vietnam War ended).  We got to meet one of only three survivors , out of approx. 17 thousand prisoners who were eventually either tortured to death or driven by the truckload outside the city to be put to death in the Killing Fields.  A friend from our tour group who is German, compared it to the WWII concentration camps he has visited, but said this was even harder to stomach.  The Killing fields is the largest of 74 other similar burial grounds to be found throughout the country after the Vietnamese army came in to defeat Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

After such an intense morning we needed a lighter activity....so of course for Emily that meant more shopping.  She spent the rest of the afternoon with the other girls exploring the various markets.  I headed out with the fellows to go take in some afternoon fights.  There was an arena nearby that has a combination of Thai/Cambodian style boxing on the weekends.  We had fun making little side bets with eachother and enjoyed the macho, testosterone filled event.

That night we had the privilege of visiting another school and getting to interact with some more kids.  The school was a little smaller and was a school for orphans.  The man who started the school/orphanage was the same man who had been our tour guide earlier that morning.  He has a really unique story as to how the school came into being.  His family of five also shares a home with five other families.  After school was let out we were invited upstairs to their home for dinner that his wife and daughter had prepared.  Emily and I had been a little disappointed with Cambodian food overall....it's very similar to Thai food, but with out the spice and the flavor so it seemed a bit more bland at times.....but this meal absolutley blew all other meals away.  I don't know if it was the homecooked personal touch, but it was the best meal we have had on the entire trip and there was soooo much of it.  At the end of dinner, one of the fathers who lives at the house brought out his "special tea" to share with us.  It was a special home-brewed concoction...the kind that will make a grown man cry....but here's the kicker.....at the bottom of the bottle/jug were a pile of full grown tarantulas.  I never quite understood the reasoning behind it, whether it was to infuse a certain flavor or help in the fermentation process, but they were there none the less.  But of course we couldn't stop there.  After we all finished bullying eachother into partaking in a couple rounds, we finished off after dinner delight by each sampling a tarantula leg.  Hey....when in Ro....I mean Cambodia!

Phonm Penh in all it glory....kinda looks like Vegas

Two of the prisons cells at S-21

One of the survivors of the prison

The monument at the Killing Fields, filled from top to bottom with excavated remains.

In the face....in the FACE!!!!

Freakin DELICIOUS!!!!

Notice the dark color in the bottom.....yep...tarantulas

The tarantula leg I ate.  I really don't look like I'm enjoying this experience.  We would have more photos but Em was too squimish to keeping snapping pics.