Fast-Paced Vietnam And Ancient CambodiaORScooter Hookers In Vietnam and Indiana Jones in Cambodia

Yes, that second title is a joke. During our pre-port meeting the night before docking in Vietnam, our Assistant Executive Dean Tom Jelke, or “The Voice” as he is called due to his many announcements over the PA system, did a presentation on some of the logistics of our debarkation in Ho Chi Minh City. At the end he had some pictures of all these girls on scooters and told us to beware of the scooter hookers. It was hilarious and scooter hookers, or “sco-hos” as we liked to refer to them, became a regular joke between me and my friends throughout our time there. Not to mention, the Vietnamese currency is the “Dong”, and you can only imagine that every time we discussed money it turned into a big joke. “Let me just take out my dong here…” Hahaha, it never gets old…

Anyways, on to Vietnam and Cambodia. What a great country. I had an absolute blast in Vietnam, even though most of my time was spent in the captivating country of Cambodia. Vietnam is crazy, and everyone is so nice there. All the Vietnamese love Americans, which is so surprising given the history of relations between Vietnam and America. The people in Vietnam would come up to us all the time to practice their English and to just learn about us and America. They are very nice, and not everyone tries to sell you something like in the past few countries we have visited. The same goes for the people of Cambodia as well. I am starting to ramble about random things so I am going to start my story so this all flows together…

The morning that we pulled into port I got up early. We had to travel up a river to reach the port of Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it was formally named. The travel up the river took about 3 hours and it was amazing. Our huge ship barely fit, and the draft was sucking all the water out from the sides of the river and throwing it all back in. It looked like we were creating a tsunami, and I kind of felt bad for the Vietnamese fishermen in their tiny boats holding on for dear life as we passed. We docked around 8am, and several of the parents soon arrived who were on the parent trip to meet the ship. A couple of my friends parents were there and some teary reunions came about. After a couple hours, the ship was cleared for debarkation. I was still debating whether to go to a tailor with everyone. Suits are really cheap in Vietnam, and everyone was going to tailors to get one made. I eventually made the decision not to get one because I had to buy a new camera and buy a rail pass for Japan, and I did not want to load up my credit card with more stuff I didn’t really need. I don’t really need a new suit; I just got one in May. Anyways, Grant had a field trip to go on so we planned to meet him in the afternoon. Ryan, Alex, Mark, Quinn, Natalie, and I went out into the city. There was a shuttle that ran from the ship to the city center, and it only took 10 minutes. As soon as I set off the ship, I started sweating. It was incredibly humid out, and I was soon glad I brought my nalgene bottle in my backpack. We got off the shuttle, and immediately we were hassled by moped drivers and cab drivers for them to take us places. I thought India was bad for this, but in Vietnam they actually grab you and try and pull you on the motorcycle when you’re telling them you want to walk. We eventually realized that we didn’t know where the tailor everyone wanted to go to was, so we got on the back of the mopeds and told them to take us there. Welcome to the scariest and craziest moment of my life. Riding on the back of a motorcycle in Vietnam is the most hair raising experience I have ever had, even crazier than India. The traffic in India is like a moving brick wall. It is all mopeds and bicycles; there are very few cars or trucks. Therefore, there are so many of these and they absolutely FLY down the street. I was on the back of this moped, white knuckled and flying through intersections without even slowing down. I saw my life flash in front of my eyes at every turn and intersection. I looked at my friends on their “scooters”, and they were holding on to their drivers for dear life as we flew to our destination at high speeds narrowly missing other mopeds. I don’t know exactly what to call them; motorcycle, moped, or scooter. I have heard them called cyclos, maybe that’s what they are I don’t know. All I can tell you is they are fast and everyone has one. We seriously would fly right through an intersection without stopping, and all the other scooters coming in the other directions would just fly around us. It was crazy. We also learned before we came to Vietnam how to cross the streets with all the traffic. We were told that once we started crossing, just keep on walking at one pace, and do not stop, or you will get hit. This statement sounded ridiculous to me until I crossed the street for the first time. It was absolutely correct. Once you start crossing, you just keep going. All the traffic just flows around you like water flowing around a rock. If you do stop, which the girls always did, people would honk and slam on their brakes.

Anyways, after making several stops at crappy tailors we didn’t want, we finally got our drivers to take us to the place we wanted to go to, to find out that it was closed on Sundays. We paid our drivers, who of course wanted more money than we agreed on. They got what we agreed on, and we started walking down one of the main streets of Ho Chi Minh City. We found a tailor and went inside. We spent a couple hours there, I decided not to get a suit, but Mark, Ryan, and Alex did. After that, we went to go meet Grant at the shuttle stop. I figured that we would never find him in the craziness of the city and it would be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Besides, we were fifteen minutes late and I figured he had already left to go do something else. We reached the shuttle stop and I saw the over 6ft Grant towering over all the Vietnamese walking towards us. It was luck, but we found him. After that we decided to go to lunch. We found a place in the center of the city and had a wonderful lunch and a great time. I had a whole pizza, plate of garlic bread, Tiger beer, and coconut cake all for $9.00 U.S. We were at a really nice restaurant too. This was when I first realized how cheap this port was going to be. After lunch we decided to walk to the big market down the street. On the way to the market was all kinds of little cheap stores on the side of the street, so it took us a while to get there. It didn’t really matter because all the shops had most of the same stuff that was in the markets. We spent the day shopping, and I bought a ton of stuff, for so little money. Some items I bought were lots of bootleg DVD’s, t-shirts, and fake Rolex watches. Vietnam is known for its counterfeit items, and what’s great is you can not tell the difference. My bootleg DVD’s cost $1, and they are awesome. My $24 fake Rolex is still ticking, and I am wearing my $2 Tiger beer t-shirt right now. After our day of shopping, we headed back to the ship. We ate dinner and I went to bed early after watching my new “Just Friends” movie because I was exhausted and had to get up for my Cambodia trip the next morning.

I woke up early the second day and met Grant and we went to the union for our Cambodia trip. This was an SAS trip because you are not allowed to travel to Cambodia independently, as you can not travel outside the country we port in, it is prohibited unless on an SAS trip. We all left the ship and boarded the buses for our 1pm flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We arrived at the airport and got on our 40 minute flight. We boarded the buses when we got to Phnom Penh, and we started driving to the Royal Palace. The sites of Phnom Penh surprised me. The cities of Cambodia were much more developed than I thought they would be. When we drove through the rural areas it was how I had pictured it to be, but the cities were much more advanced than I had previously thought. It was really cool. The palace was made up of beautiful landscaped grounds and ornate buildings. It was unbelievably hot there, and I probably drank like 4 bottles of water. After that we went and visited the National Museum. Some of the artifacts were interesting, but you know how I am with museums. After that we went and checked into our hotel, the Phnom Penh Hotel. It was a really nice hotel. I am not sure why, but every hotel I have stayed in outside of the U.S. has a phone next to the toilet. I think Grant and Ryan are sick of getting calls from me on the toilet. There is also an entire control board on the nightstand next to the bed that controls the TV, air conditioning, alarm clock, and lights in the room. It is like the lazy man’s heaven. Anyways, we dropped off our bags, I changed into shorts, and we boarded the buses to head to the river. When we reached the river, we boarded big long boats and took a sunset cruise down the Mekong River. It was really interesting, and we passed all sorts of little river villages, and I got to see what rural life is like in Cambodia. It was fascinating. There was no electricity in the villages, and all the people lived off the land and the river. After the boat ride, we transferred to a restaurant for dinner. There was tons of food, and I knew what none of it was. Jen and I had a fun time trying to figure out what some of the things were. Luckily, a lot of it turned out to have coconut in it, which my favorite. They had coconut ice cream, and I was in heaven. It is rare I see ice cream, let alone my favorite flavor. Jen told me not to get her any, but I did anyways. These girls and not eating junk food, what’s up with that? After enjoying our wonderful ice cream, we went back to the hotel. Grant and I had a beer in the hotel bar, which cost me $3.30, which was odd. In the bar we met an American diplomat who works with the embassy. He was really cool and told us all about his job, and it sounds really interesting. We were to get up early, so I finished my beer and went to bed.

The 7am wake up call did its job, and I showered and met down in the lobby. We first drove to the Toul Sleng museum. Before I talk about my experience at this museum, let me say that Cambodia, and Phnom Penh in particular, has a very dark but recent history. This history is not publicized much, and many people don’t even know about it. I was never taught about it in school, and very few people on our trip knew the full extent of what happened in the mid to late 1970’s. The Khmer Rouge regime could easily be compared to the Nazi party of Germany. In my opinion, what this regime did was just as bad as what the Nazis did, if not worse. Mass genocide was executed by the Khmer Rouge regime against the Cambodian people. The museum we visited was called Toul Sleng, and it used to be a Khmer Rouge prison called S-21. This prison was secret, and it housed many people who opposed the horrible Khmer Rouge. One of the first signs I saw when I entered the prison had a phrase in it that said, “There were over 12,000 prisoners in Toul Sleng from 1975-1978, and out of those 12,000, only a dozen survived. That was when the severity of this conflict actually hit me. I did not take many pictures in this museum, as it was very disturbing. It affected me a lot more than I thought it would have. Several of the rooms that you walk in had nothing in it but a steel bed. On the bed was a torture device, and above the bed was a picture of a dead body on that exact bed with the torture device. It was very simple, yet it said everything. It was incredibly powerful. A lot of people there were crying. What made it more disturbing was that it happened so recently. It was only 30 years ago that this took place. I would have expected it to have happened in the early 1900’s. Other rooms that I went in had walls and walls of pictures of the prisoners who were held there. Some of the pictures were of them alive, and many of them were pictures of them dead. Many of these prisoners were children. We left the museum and I read my pamphlet about it the entire bus ride back. I was blown away that I have never learned about something that had happened only several years before I was born, and it was something that had such an awful impact on the people of Cambodia. I had no idea Cambodia had a history like this, and I was immediately glad I chose this trip. After leaving the museum we went to the killing fields. This is where the Khmer Rouge carried out their genocide. As soon as I walked onto the grounds of the killing fields, I immediately felt like I had entered the remains of a Nazi concentration camp. There were two structures on the killing fields. They were both built to tell the story of what happened. One of these structures was a small pavilion that showed pictures and told the history of what happened at the killing fields. It told how these murders were more brutal than the murders of the Germans. Everyone just sat their silently and read the signs. Right next to that was a tall thin large structure. The structure was made of glass, and it was filled with human skulls. I wasn’t sure what to think. It was disturbing, but at the same time it gave me an understanding of the amount of people that were killed. I will never forget being that close to that many human remains before. I then went and walked around the mass graves of the killing fields. 86 of the 129 mass graves have been unearthed, and there are still over 8,000 people buried in the graves. I wish I could describe to you how bad I felt for these people who suffered and were killed on the grounds I was standing on. No words will describe the feeling of being at that site. I just had no idea…

After the killing fields we drove to the Russian market. Why it is called the Russian market, I have no clue. It is a huge market with all kinds of stuff, most of the same stuff that is in the markets of Vietnam. Grant and I bought some bootleg computer programs. He got $1,000 worth of Adobe software for $7. I bought some DVD authoring programs. After the markets we went to a restaurant. The restaurant was cool, but the food was a little weird. Grant, Jen, and I sat at a table with about 5 other people and there was a big circular plate in the middle of the table that spun. They would bring platters of food and place them on there and we would spin it around and take the food. The food was a little strange, especially the gelatin type desert that was so sticky that it would pick up the plate when you tried to grab it with your fork. After lunch we drove to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap. Siem Reap is another city in Cambodia. It is where Angkor Wat and all the other Angkor temples are located. The main thing I had wanted to do on this entire voyage was see the temple complex of Angkor Wat. So as you can imagine, when we got off the plane I was so excited to go. We boarded the buses and drove to Angkor Wat for sunset. As we approached it I could not see the 3 distinct temples that make up the complex. It wasn’t until I walked through the first stone building that Angkor Wat appeared. It was spectacular and I was so happy to be there. I ran off and explored the entire complex within a half an hour. I was so excited to be there. I felt like Indiana Jones. Angkor Wat was built in 1150, and it was insane walking around in a temple that people had built with their bare hands over 900 years ago. I eventually found a small temple just outside of the complex that was deserted from tourists and SAS’ers, so I sat on it all by myself and watched the sun set behind me and cast its shadows on Angkor Wat. It was so peaceful and I was as happy as can be. When I told my Grandma I was going to try really hard to get to Angkor Wat, she told me I have to go and I can not miss it for anything. She was right. After the sunset, we went to a restaurant where we had Tiger beer, lots of good food that I could tell what it was, and coconut ice cream! There was a cultural dance show which was interesting, and then we went to the Prince D’Angkor hotel to check in. We checked in, and Grant and I were walking around when we found the huge beautiful pool. It was one of the nicest and biggest pools I had ever seen. The scenery all around it was set up so you felt like you were swimming in an ancient temple. So of course, we went swimming with a bunch of other SAS’ers until around midnight, and then I went to bed.

The next morning I awoke at 4:30am to go to an optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat. It was optional, but who would miss that? Apparently a lot of people went drinking the night before (some things will never change on this voyage) so only about 20 people showed up. The sunrise unfortunately wasn’t that great. It was very cloudy and foggy, and we didn’t see the sun. It was ok though because I got to spend more time at Angkor Wat. After that we went back to the hotel for breakfast. After breakfast we visited Ta Prohm and Preah Khan temples. Both of them were incredible. They were set back in the jungle and they had trees, roots, and vines growing all over them as you climbed through. It really felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie. After the temples we went back to the hotel for lunch, checked out, and then headed out to another temple of Angkor called Bayon. It was a really cool temple. It wasn’t sent back in the jungle as much as the other ones, but the carvings in the building were amazing. Many of the parts of the temple were carved into large faces, and it was freaky when you turn a corner and there is a huge stone face staring at you. After that we visited many of the terraces and gates of the temples outside of the complex. Right outside of the Bayon temple were a few shops, and I picked up an amazing painting of Angkor Wat from a local artist for $20. Not to mention I had bought many t-shirts as well. After all our temple visits we headed back to the airport. In the airport, I bought lots of candy, and we feasted on mentos, jelly bellys, and all sorts of candy we have missed in the U.S. We flew back to Ho Chi Minh City and arrived back at the ship around 10pm.

I got up the next day around 9am, and Ryan, Quinn, Kelly and I headed out to spend the day in Ho Chi Minh City again. The first day I was in the city before we left for Cambodia, I saw a lot of amazing Vietnamese swords. I had spent the next few days trying to figure out how to get one home if I bought one. I was not allowed to bring it on the ship, which is ridiculous. I want to hang it on my wall, not kill anyone. They wont even store it for you on the ship which I think is awful. So my options of bringing it home on the ship were out. I realized my only other option would be is to ship it. So when we went out in the morning I went to find a Fedex store. We eventually found one after about an hour of searching, and I learned that if I wanted to ship any type of package to the United States, it would cost me at least $130. Seeing as I could buy a sword for under $50, I was not about to spend that much to ship it. So, much to my disappointment, I did not buy a really cool Vietnamese sword. After figuring out that wasn’t possible, we shopped at the market for a bit and then went to a place called “Underground” for lunch. We had awesome food, and Ryan and I played some pool. He won every game. Not playing in 3 months has gotten me rusty. After that, Ryan and Quinn had to go back to the ship for a trip to a museum, so Kelly and I walked around the markets some more and bought tons of bootleg DVD’s. I bought EVERY season of Seinfeld for $24. I am not even going to list the $1 movies I bought, there are so many. I have been watching them and they are awesome. After that we somehow found Grant again at his tailor, and then we just shopped with him until we met Ryan and Quinn again at 4. Ryan went to pick up his suit and then we went to a travel agent we had checked out earlier. We needed to buy our rail passes for Japan. Grant, Ryan and I are going to travel all over Japan together, so we needed to buy a rail pass so we can get to and from the cities we want to go to. The rail pass cost us $323, but it is worth it, and it is our only option. So after buying our rail passes we went back to the ship and dropped all our stuff off. About an hour later, we went out to dinner. We were walking around Ho Chi Minh City trying to figure out where to eat, when we ran into a couple of the adult passengers we knew. They are a really nice couple, and they told us how to get to a restaurant that they just came from. They said that it was a local place and we would be the only white people there, but the food is really good and they both ate dinner for a combined total of $10. On that note we were sold, so we walked a little ways until we found the place. They were right, and we were the only foreigners in the place. It was a crazy experience and I am glad we went there. The place was all open air, and there were hundreds of tables. The place was packed, and there were Vietnamese people drinking, being loud, and having a great time. It was very lively, and we felt so out of place but were having a great time. We had several Vietnamese people just pull a chair up to our table and talk to us. Like I said, they love to talk to Americans. We ordered our food, but apparently the way the restaurant works is you just order food for the table. If we had known that, we wouldn’t each have ordered a meal, because they were huge, we ended up with four huge plates of all kinds of rice and shrimp in front of us. We had more food than we knew what to do with. I ordered rice with pineapple, which I assumed was rice with chunks of pineapple in it. Instead, I was surprised to see them bring to the table an entire pineapple, cut in half, filled with fried rice, and then closed back up. It was hilarious but it tasted so good. In the end, we ended up paying only about $6 each for the massive meal and beer we had. It was a great night, and we decided to go to the Rex Hotel. Apparently the Rex hotel is famous because during the Vietnam War, all the soldiers would drink on top of the hotel as fighting and the war went on in the streets below. Everyone says that having a drink on top of the Rex hotel is something you must do, so we did. We went to the top, and there was a band playing and there were palm trees lit up and it was very lively. We had a drink, hung out for a bit, and then called it a night. On ship time was 11pm, we got back around 10pm, and then I hung out with people and shared pictures until I went to bed.

That is all for Vietnam and Cambodia. I had a great time, and I really hope to come back and visit some day. Maybe next time I can get my sword. Life on the ship has been great. Time between the ports has only been two or three days, so we have been busy between them. We dock in Hong Kong tomorrow. The ship will be there for two days, and then it sails and docks in Qingdao for two days. We are not required to be on the ship during that time, but we must meet the ship in Qingdao on the last day. I will be spending the first day in Hong Kong, then flying to Beijing, spending 3 days there, and then meeting the ship in Qingdao and spending the second day there. In Beijing I will see things such as the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, etc. I can not wait. There is a little under a month left in this voyage. After Hong Kong and Qingdao, all that is left is Japan. I am not ready for it to end. I don’t want it to end…

P.S. – I am still trying to fix my computer. I promise to have it fixed this week and get my Myanmar, Vietnam, and Cambodia pictures up.


Quote of the week:
Me – “The ship is moving so slow, I think a turtle just passed us.”
Quinn – “It was probably just a circular shaped log.”
Me – “Wow that went right over your head…”