Vietnam: Visuals
DAY ONE: Phnom Penh to Chau Doc
Boat at dock
Cruising down the Mekong
Chau Doc at night
Internet café, Chau Doc
DAY TWO: Chau Doc to Cantho
Breakfast at hotel in Chau Doc
Exploring floating villages by rowboat
Farming some sort of plant
Little feller with a pixie stick
Front of mosque
Carpet in mosque
Wee little cat
Old feller having a smoke
Back to dock in rowboat
Overlooking the Cambodia-Vietnam border
Lady Chua Xu Temple
Hungry critter at croc farm
A whole slew of juvenile crocs
Soup that tasted like spicy fruity pebbles
Hotel in Cantho
First time bowling in a communist country
The dragon fruit given to Buddha, then given to me
The monk who gave us the fruit off the altar
Cantho at night
DAY THREE: Contho to Ho Chi Minh City
Floating market
No minimum age to operate a boat apparently
Making rice paper
Cruising through the delta
Tour guide Hip with a water snake
Sautéed frog with curry
DAY FOUR: HCMC walking tour
Intersection in HCMC
Fish in Ben Than Market
Beans in Ben Than Market
Jesus among other gods, Ben Than Market
Uncle Ho and City Hall
Reunification Palace
View from top of Reunification Palace
War Remnants Museum
US Army tanks, War Remnants Museum
Protest poster, War Remnants Museum
Barbed wire, War Remnants Museum
Notre Dame cathedral
Inside Notre Dame
DAY FIVE: Cu Chi Tunnels
Unbiased documentary on the war
One entrance to the tunnels
Jon inside the tunnels
Listening to one of many semi-historic spiels from Tour Guide Bean
Ride on a moto across town
Front of our hostel
In the lobby at the hostel
HCMC at night
Back from ‘Nam.
Photos from Vietnam will be coming in the morning, but first things first.
The trip back to Phnom Penh had all the makings of an uneventful six hours, but such was not in the cards today, my friends. The ride itself wasn't bad. The A/C actually worked really well, but the condensation from it started dripping on the German in front of me while the Russian guy behind me talked on and on about the going rates for girls in Asia and about opium and "happy pizza." Otherwise the bus was fine.
The border crossing was what I didn't account for. Since I am not just passing through Cambodia like most of those on the bus, I needed to get a business visa instead of a tourist one, which meant I needed to fend for myself while the bus company people took the rest of the passports inside in order to cut through all the red tape. I waited in extra lines and filled out extra forms. I was asked if I had a copy of my immunization record and as I did not, I had to pay a dollar, knowing full well that this was just an easy way for government officials to line their pockets. I looked the guard in the face and laughed as I handed him the dollar bill, shaking my head, trying to shame him a little bit. I went through an x-ray machine where the attendant was talking to a young lady and didn't bother to glance up at me or my bag even once. But by the time I got through all of this and emerged outside, the bus was nowhere to be found.
Being stranded at the border with half your luggage, very little money, and no one who speaks English is a potentially very stressful place in which to find oneself. I stood there figuratively scratching my head, trying to conjure up a solution. A guard with no idea about much of anything motioned for me to walk down the road, and seemed to indicate that my bus was around the corner, but it was not. Finally, the bus company guy, the one we unknowingly paid off to get us through the border, came running up and instructed me to get on a moto, so I did and about a mile down the road the bus was pulled over, waiting.
We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are even supposed to love our enemies. I know this, or at least I nod my head when people say things like that. Nodding your head is easy. Actually loving people is hard. Especially when you come face to face with corrupt border officials who can have their way with you and will do what they want, and the bus leaves you behind, or you hear a guy talking about getting "ripped off" when they charged him $40 for two hours with a girl. In these moments you wish you could just throw those verses of Scripture out the window and strangle some people or at least punch them in the face. I believe there is such a thing as righteous anger, but I guess I am just trying to figure out how to love like God loves and hate what he hates. And this is no easy task.
Vietnam (day 5)
This morning we hopped on a bus headed for Cu Chi tunnels with some new found friends from France and Mexico who we met during breakfast at the hostel. The bus trip was about an hour and a half each way. The tunnels were interesting; an extremely complex system of underground passageways allowing for the Victor Charlie to maneuver here and there right under the noses of the South Vietnamese or the American troops, undetected. Clever little rascals. But I won't write much about the tunnels because our tour guide will be more interesting for you. The guy's name is Bean (at least phonetically), and he talked just about incessantly, editorializing freely and repeating himself quite a bit. At one point he said not to ask us about his experience fighting in the war because it is too painful to remember and he wants to forget, but then he proceded to tell us (without our prompting) more than we could have ever wanted to know. He told us the story in pieces, so I'll do my best here for you. The story goes that he fought for the South alongside American troops as a member of the Navy. He was an officer on a ship and American troops saluted him, he said. Later the story had him in the Coast Guard, where he flew the helicopter and then somehow also managed to be the guy at the door yelling "Go! Go! Go!" as troops parachuted out. He was not on the ground, he told us, so he never went near the tunnels. Later in the tour, however, he told us of leading reconnaisance missions deep into the jungle to find dead American soldiers so their bodies could be sent home. He would have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, and he showed us how he would yell, "Billy, go that way!" and "John, over here!" At one point he claims to have worked for John Kerry while he lived in New York, though he moved back to Vietnam because he couldn't stand American food. He was sure to let us know that his dad was an ambassador to the United Nations. Tour Guide Bean loves his country, but he hates his job. He will retire next year, at which point he plans to sit in his hammock and finish the book he is writing. He told us the title and encouraged us to be on the lookout for it in Australia and Europe and America, and wherever we were from.
Upon returning from the bus trip Jon and I went looking for one of the things in HCMC that we missed from the walking tour yesterday: the Jade Emperor Pagoda. We wandered for an hour or more in pursuit of the place but in the end, the search proved futile. At one point I told Jon I found it, but what I saw turned out to be the Prudential Insurance building.
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