Queen for a day

We spent most of the day on the bus going from Phnom Penh to Kampong Thom.  Tomorrow we start visiting the temples of Angkor Wat and we will stay in nearby Siem Reap for the rest of the tour.  In the middle of today's bus trip, however, we rode our bikes thirty five kilometers along a very rural and remote road.  In Vietnam, children would occasionally wave to us and say hello, but today, everyone did.  The children would run to the road and yell hello, hello.  Parents would bring their toddler to the road to wave to us.  A few brave children would stand on the side of the road and put their hands out for us to slap as we rode by.  We waved and said hello back to everyone, and slapped hands even when it was difficult to maneuver while steering with one hand on a sandy or gravel road.

After a while, I felt like Queen Elizabeth and wondered if she gets tired of that little wave she does.  I don't think they see a lot of Westerners here, but it was a bit odd to have people running on both sides of the road to be able to say hello to ME.  Which made me think what I would do if I were the queen ...

If I were the queen with unlimited power to implement my ideas and policies, I still don't know what I would say about the single biggest problem I have seen here:  the choice between prosperity and health.  Your money or your life?  As Jack Benny would say, let me think a minute.

The most surprising thing I have seen in Vietnam and Cambodia is the large number of people who wear face masks, particularly when driving.  They know they are killing the environment and themselves, but what choice do they have?  Today as we were leaving Phnom Penh, we passed workers striking at several clothing factories.  They want a raise to $160 a month (from $80 a month according to the New York Times or $140 a month according to our guide).  Either way, $160 a month is approximately $40 a week or $1 an hour if they worked a 40 hour week, which they don't.  They are also striking to work only five days a week, not five and a half.

The factory owners are Chinese.  If I am the queen, do I lean on them to raise pay to $160 a week?  Or do I demand that they build factories that are safe for the workers, are located away from residential areas, and dispose of wastes properly?  If I do the former, the workers (predominantly young women) will work in unsafe conditions for $1 an hour.  If I do the latter, the Chinese will move their factories to another country and the women will not work at all.

There is no zoning here.  There are no safety standards.  You can't drink the tap water.  The air quality is deteriorating as more vehicles emit more fumes and more factories generate more waste.  In most places there are no sidewalks and garbage all over the place.  Road safety is a non-existent as are road rules (like driving on the right at all times.)  The Mekong is the lifeblood of the area we have spent the last week in and it is also the repository for all of the waste generated by the millions of people who live here.  And the Mekong will change for the worse as countries upriver are damming it for their water needs.

But I digress ...  how can you tell a third world country that it needs to implement first world standards of safety and cleanliness?  The cost would be prohibitive and there is no infrastructure in place anyway.  Who would enforce the standards?  Don't even get me started on corruption and where most of the money goes.  In the real world, if you put in standards, the enforcers would take money to not enforce.  But I am the queen with unlimited power.  Do I put in the standards that slow development but improve the quality of life?  What is quality of life if you don't earn enough to feed yourself?

Here the people are voting with their feet.  It is mandatory in Vietnam to wear a motorcycle helmet and everyone we saw wore one.  It recently became mandatory in Cambodia but few people wear them.  If they get stopped by a policeman, they have to pay him off.  So they wear helmets during the day when police are around and not at night when police do not stop you.  Your money or your life?  That's easy.  We wear a helmet to save our money, not our heads.

The people in Vietnam and Cambodia are struggling not just to survive but to thrive, and the cost is the ubiquitous face mask.

Your money or your life?

A very full day

We left our bikes and mechanic in Vietnam, so this morning we got our Cambodian bikes and mechanic.  Then we took a ferry across the river and rode a loop around the island of Dach Koh.  (Since Koh means island, that sentence is a bit of a redundancy.)  Dach Koh is almost completely agricultural.  It was a lovely ride past fields plowed by teams of cows, pagodas, and very few shops.  The houses were all on stilts, and the people had cottage industries on the ground level.  We stopped to watch two women weaving on looms.  We also saw young monks for the first time, which I know I will see a lot more of when I go across Laos and Thailand.  They walk down the street and people give them food and pray with them.  There was almost no traffic.  It was just a great ride.

We only had time for a quick lunch so we went into the French bakery next door to our hotel.  I wish I had discovered it for breakfast.  They had THE BEST pastry, croissants, donuts, and bread.  The best.

In the afternoon we visited the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum - two separate places.  There is nothing to say.  I knew the general history but the Cambodians are trying to both acknowledge their past and make sure it never happens again, so the exhibits are quite graphic.  Of all the horrible mass murders of the Twentieth Century, the Khmer Rouge killed the most on a percentage basis - a full one quarter of the country's population.  No museum can make this understandable.

The US Embassy sent me a warning two days ago about demonstrations in Phnom Penh.  We saw nothing yesterday, but on the way to the Genocide Museum today our bus ran into a demonstration and had to take a detour.  Everyone we talked to gave us a different reason for the demonstrations but they have gone from weekly to daily.  Someone is serious about something.

For dinner we went to a restaurant named Friends which serves Western/Asian tapas.  The restaurant is owned by Friends International which helps "urban marginalized children," i.e. street kids.  All of the kitchen staff and waiters are these young people learning skills in the restaurant industry which is growing rapidly in Cambodia as tourism increases.  And the food is good.  I had the perhaps incongruous combination of a chicken banana flower salad (it was so good last night) and braised pork quesadillas.  Others at the table had pesto penne, fried zucchini, and shrimp wontons.  It was a pretty eclectic menu.  But we did not have dessert.  Suzanne and I, together with Pam and Ian, took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel (without incident tonight) to hit the French bakery one more time.  It felt like being in Bella Bru or any coffee shop or cafe in the States.  Very comfortable.

And now we are in Cambodia

We took an early morning speed boat ride up the Mekong from Chau Doc, Vietnam to Phnom Penh.  The first hour of the ride was in Vietnam.  During that hour, a young man in jeans and a baseball hat gave us an visa form to sign, and then took our passports along with the form, a passport photo, and $23.  Then he came back around the boat and offered to exchange dollars or Vietnamese dong to Cambodian riels.  When we got to the border, we stopped and sat in what looked liked the waiting room of a bus station while mysterious people in the back did something.  Then suddenly the young man said we could go.  We never could figure out if he was a government official or who he worked for.  We got back on the boat, went for five minutes, and got out again.  This time we were in an outdoor courtyard.  Four men sat off to the side at a table under an open sided structure doing something to our passports.  One at a time, the young man would bring a completed passport to its owner who would then bring it to a window in a trailer-type structure where two men put three different stamps on the passport and visa form, and then kept the form.  Finally, someone in a uniform checked before we got onto the boat that our passports were now in order.

The point of this long story ...  next to the window in the trailer type structure was a Suggestion Box and a sign that said:  Please give us your suggestions for how to improve this process.  Duh!  I could write a treatise on this one.  I don't even understand what the process was.  And what happens to people who didn't read the advance instructions and have a passport photo with them?  Ya think there might be a more efficient way to get a visa for Cambodia?

We met our local guide and took a tour of Phnom Penh in the afternoon.  We saw the National Museum which is in a beautiful building built by the French.  The building was more interesting than the collection.  Then the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda which were very impressive.  Cambodia has a very different feel to it than Vietnam.  Although it is a significantly poorer country, there are more cars here, particularly newer ones, and fewer motorbikes.  Since fewer people own their own vehicles, the main mode of transportation is the tuk-tuk which is a rickshaw pulled by a motorbike.  Also, although the riel is the official currency, everyone likes dollars here.  We can pay anywhere in dollars and get change in dollars.

We ate at a local restaurant that had Cambodian, Thai, Chinese, and Western food along with, of course, pizza.  Suzanne, who manages to eat five meals and several snacks a day, went with a cheeseburger for an appetizer (!) and curry for dinner.  I had the banana flower salad.  I'm really not sure what a banana flower is, but it was a good salad.

After a brief walk around the night market, it was time for ... another massage.  The farther from Saigon we go, the cheaper the price is, so we get one every other day.  Today we went to a place that has blind masseuses.  Oh, the price is down to $10 for an hour.  After the massage, we hailed a tuk-tuk to take us back to our hotel.  The driver had no idea where our hotel was, so I pulled out the card and showed it to him.  He stared at it for five minutes and could not decipher it.  So I pulled out my map and showed him where to go.  He still didn't seem to get it.  We were not terribly inspired with confidence, but he finally nodded that he understood and took off.  When we got to the street our hotel was on, he had to turn left, but it was a divided highway with a center barrier.  No problem.  He turned left into the oncoming traffic and proceeded up the left side between the parked cars and oncoming vehicles.  Hell, a motorcycle doing the same thing passed us at one point.  And we got to our hotel in one piece.  Things just happen differently here.

Last day in Vietnam

Today was a long travel day with a 30 kilometer bike ride in the middle.  We drove in the bus a few hours outside of Can Tho before hitting the saddles for a lovely ride along a canal, with villages and rice paddies on the other side.  We saw lots of tents and cafes with hammocks in them, and the houses were clearly poor, so I thought people slept outside.  But I thought wrong.  The hammocks are for day use only in hammock cafes.  Since the main mode of transportation is bicycle and motorbike, the riders need to stop and rest after a couple of hours.  In a hammock cafe, they can buy a cup of coffee or a drink and use a hammock for an hour.  We had brought a picnic lunch, and after our ride, we ate at a hammock cafe.  I'll send the picture of us all in the hammocks which Suzanne took on her camera when she sends it to me.

After our ride, we continued in the bus to the Cambodian border village of Chau Doc.  On the drive we saw lush countryside and the first mountains we had seen.  Chau Doc has a mountain named Sam and we climbed it to watch the sunset.  Binh says Sam is not really a mountain, just a hill, but there are stairs going to the top and my knees were killing me.  Seemed pretty mountainous to me.  After about a million stairs I got to the top and discovered ... a road.  So after enjoying the beautiful view, for $1.50 I took a motorbike taxi back down the mountain while the others went down the million steps.  It took ten minutes on a motorbike.

While I was waiting for the others to descend, I watched a group of boys playing a game that looked like bocce but they were using their flipflops, skimming them across the paved park.  Suddenly nine boys who looked to be about twelve years old left the game and began to practice the dragon dance.  The dragon was about fifty feet long with long sticks about every six feet.  Each boy held a stick and they moved the dragon around in choreographed moves, sometimes jumping over a section.  It was like a combination of twirling and jump rope.  Very impressive.

After a quick visit to a Taoist temple, we returned to the hotel for dinner.  Tomorrow we take a power boat to Phnom Penh.

Can Tho

We got up early to take a boat to the floating market at Cai Rang.  Villagers come from hundreds of kilometers away to sell produce at the market.  At first I thought it was like a farmers' market, but it turns out that the villagers who come here are merchants.  They come for a month or two at a time with their entire families.  They first buy produce in their home town and bring it to Cai Rang to sell.  Then they purchase other produce at Cai Rang and sell it at another floating market maybe twenty kilometers away.  They buy and sell boatloads a few times and then return home, hopefully with a profit.  Local entrepreneurs appear in smaller boats selling fruit and drinks to the tourists, so I never missed a Diet Coke.

After the boat ride, we took the nicest bike ride we have had with a local guide, Mr. Huy.  He took us on increasingly smaller lanes until it was no wider than my bike trail.  There were occasional motorbikes, but mostly we had the trail to ourselves as we rode along the canals of the Delta passing the fronts and backs of houses.  Some houses back onto the water and use boats for transportation.  The land on the far side in this picture has no motorbike or even bicycle access.  The only connection for the residents is the "monkey bridge" with one handrail.  Mr. Huy lithely walked across but we were not allowed to.  The residents are concerned that we clumsy foreigners will break their bridge and destroy their only access.  We had a chance to cross a monkey bridge with two handrails later and it was a lot harder than it looked to me.  I'll post the picture Suzanne took of me on her camera when she sends it to me.

Mr. Huy also walked us through a local fruit orchard.  Besides the obvious papayas, mangos, pineapple, coconuts, and bananas, they have some very weird fruits here like jackfruit and dragon fruit that I have never seen before.  Even their apples and bananas are quite different from ours.  We had such a great ride with Mr. Huy that we begged him to take us further, but we had ridden a loop around the village and when it was over, that was it.

Finally we had a free afternoon.  Suzanne and I walked around Can Tho and had a late lunch at a riverside restaurant with a couple from our group who happened to wander by.  Then we did our "serious" souvenir shopping since tomorrow is the group's last day in Vietnam.  I'll be back for quite a while.  I think I managed to spend $10.  I tried to buy a piece of embroidery with an asking price of 120,000 dong ($6).  I offered 100,000 dong ($5) and she countered 110,000 dong.  I walked away and was surprised she did not run after me.  I guess this is not Guatemala anymore.  And for fifty cents (and some lost pride), I didn't go back.

After all our riding and walking, Suzanne and I treated ourselves to foot massages for $5.  We are trying to help the Vietnamese economy $5 at a time.  Most of our group cashed $100 when they got here which is 2,000,000 dong, so we are all millionaires.  In fact, we carry around millions in our back pockets quite casually.

Christmas in Vietnam

After our Christmas breakfast of baguettes and jam, we took a group picture before leaving our homestay.

Then it was onto our bikes for our longest day of riding.  We wandered through the villages and back lanes of the Mekong Delta, stopping whenever we saw something interesting.  We stopped at a "factory" where they put coconut husks through a shredder to make feed for animals.  They also weave longer strands into rope.  We also stopped at a rice mill.  We passed an elementary school during recess and stopped to make friends with the children.

Merchants in the same business are all located on the same street to make it easy for customers to comparison shop.  We rode through the nursery section.  Besides plants and flowers, there were several topiary sellers with topiary gazebos, animals, and even an Eiffel Tower.  Below are two topiary dragons.

We passed a few churches and stopped at this one which turned out to be a convent with 150 Vietnamese sisters.  We loved the forest scene in the back.  I'm not sure what they are made of, but the animals are not real.

We rode 35 kilometers before lunch.  After another seven course "typical" Vietnamese lunch, we took off for another 25.  In the afternoon ride, we finally got away from the villages and markets to the lush rice paddies.  It was a beautiful ride until a late afternoon downpour.  We waited it out for half an hour and when it seemed to let up, got back on for the last seven kilometers, all except the two Indian/New Zealand doctors.  They rode the bus while the rest of us rode in a light drizzle just so we could say we went the whole 60 kilometers.  Any coincidence that the two most highly educated people in the group knew enough to come in out of the rain?

Then we took the bus to Can Tho, a city of one and a half million that is the main city of the Mekong Delta.

Trains, planes, and cars

Trains, planes, and cars may be the only modes of transportation that we did not use today.  We left Saigon and drove south into the Mekong Delta on our bus for about an hour.  Then we rode our bikes for about twenty kilometers, stopping at a famous pagoda whose name I have forgotten.  I took my obligatory Claremonster Racing in Vietnam photo in front of the laughing Buddha.

Next we took a barge across one of the tributaries of the Mekong.  Here is my new BFF, Suzanne, and me on the barge.

  We had a "typical" Vietnamese lunch of seven courses including this vertical fish.

After lunch we took a horse cart for about 100 yards, although it was not clear to me why, followed by a canoe with an oarswoman on the back.

Then it was back on the bikes for another 25 kilometers to our "homestay" which turned out to be more like summer camp.  We shared a large dormitory room with camp beds complete with mosquito nets.

Cu chi tunnels pictures

I took the obligatory first picture of myself with my "new" bike in front of a pagoda, not realizing that all you notice is the column in front with a line of swastikas on it.  We were an odd looking group in general on our bikes.  A row of eleven obviously non-Vietnamese followed by our truck with the mechanic, followed by our air conditioned bus.  You wonder if the locals were staring at us in disbelief.  Why are these crazy people riding in the heat when they could be riding on the bus?

I

I managed to upload the pictures which show me lifting the trap door, dropping into a tunnel, waving goodbye, and disappearing.  I reappear and climb out about twenty yards away.

First day on the bikes

The drive to Cu Chi was interesting - our first view of Vietnam outside of Saigon.  We went on the main highway that goes all the way to Hanoi.  After an hour and a half, we met our bike van and were given our bicycles.  Mountain bikes are not my favorite, but the roads have gravel on them and lots of potholes, so mountain bikes it is.  I'm wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt and working up a sweat.  What's not to like?

We rode an easy twenty five kilometers on flat roads through farmland and a few small towns.  Obviously we passed rice paddies, but also rubber tree groves and fields of beans, basil, and other crops.  I can't say that the ride was particularly pretty.  There is a sameness to poor areas in warm climates.  Except for the fields (and sometimes there, too), the land is scraggly and unlandscaped.  Scrawny dogs, chickens, and cows wander around.  The houses are huts of simple wood or corrugated metal set on bare ground.  When the people have a little more money, they build better houses, maybe out of brick, and put tile porches or patios around the houses.  Often they fence the house and tile patio.  But the houses still sit in the middle of bare ground.  So you see barren landscape dotted with shanties and increasingly nicer houses.

The Cu Chi tunnels were much more interesting than I expected them to be.  The highlight was a 1967 Viet Cong propaganda film that they showed us.  It extolled the Viet Cong heroes who were bravely fighting the evil American invaders.  The tunnels were big enough to walk in bent over and they were lighted, so I didn't panic like I did crawling through the Bar Kochba tunnels in Israel.  Besides, Steve wasn't here for me to grab his ankle as we crawled interminably in the dark.  And my Kiwi roommate, Suzanne, had reminded me to bring my torch, so I was set for the dark this time.  Besides the tunnels, we saw huge craters from the bombing, and they showed us the booby traps that the Viet Cong set.

The kept man from England managed to get Binh to take him to the shooting range.  Then Suzanne and I accompanied him and his wife back there for her to shoot off a clip from an AK7.  I've never seen any one fire a rifle except on TV.  It is LOUD.

During the bus ride, Binh gave us an overview of Vietnamese history, culture, and language.  Some interesting tidbits...  In a country with a population of 90 million, a third of whom are under the age of 18, there are 40 million motorbikes.  Sixty percent are Hondas and cost $1,000, but you can buy a cheap, Chinese motorbike, a Honga, for $200.  There was a reason I saw families of two to four on the motorbikes:  it is illegal to have more than two children under the age of twelve on a motorbike.

Also, Vietnam is still a Communist country meaning it has only one political party, but it has a capitalist economic system, which according to Binh, was forced on Vietnam by the World Bank.  Binh sees some positives in capitalism.  For example, he thinks it is good that factories pay for piece work.  When everyone received the same wages, he said people didn't work too hard.  What a concept.  I have the same questions I had in Cuba:  what does it mean to be Communist and capitalist.  Is that a contradiction in terms?  And to put the cost of a motorcycle into perspective, the average annual salary was $1,600 last year but Binh thinks will be nearly $2,000 this year.

In the evening, we went to see the famous water puppets.  According to the brochure, you cannot understand Vietnamese history and culture unless you see the water puppets.  It was slightly underwhelming, but I expected that.  Only tourists go these days so how "cultural" can it be?

Day 2 in Saigon

Our group was supposed to meet at noon today for a walking tour of Saigon, but things change.  Since I know no one here, I was surprised by a knock on the door.  It was the bellboy with a message that our start time had changed to 4.  With a full day, I decided to hire a private guide rather than just walk around again.  I made one phone call, but before the guide could get back to me, I got a phone call from Suzanne, my new roommate.  Although I had specifically booked the hotel where the tour group was staying and requested when I checked in to be able to keep the room ... easy to see where this is going.  I moved in with Suzanne and she asked if I wanted to walk around for the day.  When the guide called back, he charged more than Suzanne wanted to pay, so we went out with me as the guide based on my vast experience from the day before.  Suzanne was afraid to cross the street without holding my arm.  She was as awed by the traffic as I was, but couldn't believe that we should just step into the river of motorbikes and trust them to go around us.

Suzanne is a 40ish elementary school student from New Zealand who loves the kids and teaching but hates the administration.  So she is taking a sabbatical year.  She has traveled much more extensively than me in this part of the world.

We walked around the sites I had seen yesterday and then a few more.  Then we decided to get massages before our afternoon meeting.  There are spas on every block and girls outside with flyers.  We stopped to talk to one women whose flyer said an hour massage was $16.  Suzanne was trying to decide between full body, shiatsu, etc, when I pointed out that a two hour back, feet, and head massage was $24, so we went for it.  Meanwhile, another young women stopped to listen to our deliberations and joined us.  She was an elementary school teacher from British Columbia who loves the kids and teaching but hates the administration.  So she is taking a sabbatical year.  (Where have I heard that before?)  She was on the last day of three months traveling around.  So they walk the three of us around the corner into an art gallery/frame shop.  We sit down in the back and sign papers.  Then we go up the narrowest winding staircase to an attic room with several massage tables separated by curtains like in a hospital ward.  The three of us lie down on tables no more than two feet apart and can talk during the massages.  It starts with these tiny but incredibly strong Vietnamese women crawling up our legs and digging their knees into our tushes while massaging our backs from behind.  It was different than any massage I have ever had but two hours ... what's not to love.

Back at the hotel we met our group for orientation and then had dinner together at a "traditional" Vietnamese restaurant that is clearly for the tourists.  The man next to me got one of their "set menus" and they just kept bringing him more and more dishes, some recognizable, some not.

The rest of the group includes a young (fortyish also) Indian doctor couple from New Zealand, and everyone else is my age.  Two couples from England, one more from New Zealand, and a woman who I think is British.  The one British couple that I sat next to at dinner were interesting.  She is a family law judge; he sold a business a few years ago and is semi-retired, so he says he is a kept man.

I thought I had managed to get onto Vietnamese time and fell asleep at 10, but awoke at 4 and realized I was not going back to sleep.  So I came down to the lobby to write this and talk on the phone without disturbing Suzanne.  With the time difference, this is the actually the perfect time to try to reach people.  At 8 we are meeting for our first tour and bike ride.  The tour is to the Cu Chi tunnels used first by the French and later the Viet Cong in "infiltrate" the South.  Since it is a two hour ride to the tunnels and we are coming back here tonight, I can always sleep on the ride.  Apparently at some places where you visit the Cu Chi tunnels, you can shoot AK7's.  The British kept man wanted to do that since, as he said, he lives in a very restricted society.  The guide, however, says it is not recommended.  Something about guns being dangerous?  The guide, Binh, speaks perfect English but his answers seem to be non sequiturs to the questions asked so we are never quite sure what he is telling us.

6:30 AM.  I have been up for hours and it is still half an hour till breakfast.  Is this how the other half lives?

First impressions of Saigon

I know it is December 20, but there are way more Christmas decorations than I expected to see here.

The most noticeable thing you see walking around here is the traffic.  There are buses, cabs, a handful of private cars, and a million motorbikes.  The rules of the road are very fluid.  The motorbikes just interweave in all directions, and somehow the vehicles do also.  So they turn left into and across the oncoming traffic and everyone just goes around.  Crossing the street is an adventure, too.  You just start walking and the vehicles go around you, too.  This is one of those places where red lights and do not enter signs are just suggestions.  The motorbikes go everywhere, including on the sidewalk if the traffic on the road stops for a second.  On Saturday night, every motorbike had a family of two to four people including little babies.  The streets were so crowded, it seemed like a never ending parade.

Traveling in the 21st century ....  I was getting hungry but did not want to just stop at a random restaurant.  Of course I want to go somewhere "authentic," but too authentic is too strange and difficult.  Probably no English menu.  And non-authentic is certainly comfortable.  Then I remembered I had downloaded one guidebook onto my kindle.  I sat down and pulled it out and looked up the recommended restaurants.  One seemed the right mix of authentic and accessible, but I couldn't find it on the little map the hotel had given me.  Then I remembered I had my cel phone with me.  I pulled it out and discovered I was in a free wi-fi spot.  So I pulled up google maps and found the restaurant was only a few blocks away.  Wish this story had a better ending, but the "restaurant" was way too authentic for me, if it was a restaurant at all.  There was a lot of food in a case and a lot of people standing around, but I saw no where to sit down and no one eating.  So I gave up, continued walking, and went into a random restaurant that was quite good.

I had eaten early but went later to check on someplace else in the guidebook.  There is a huge, indoor public market.  After it closes in the evening, they set up street food on the adjacent streets.  I thought that meant carts or food trucks.  Nope.  They set up entire restaurants with tents, tables, chairs, burners, and barbeques.  It takes about an hour to set them up and they stay packed all evening.