hey! well we are now in saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City depending on
who you're talking to (anyone who works for the government or is of a
vaguely communist persuasion will prolly try to shoot at you if you
call it saigon). its really cool to be here, its a pretty mad city,
like bangkok but more traffic (it shouldn't be possible but i think its
true), theres about 4 million motorbikes here, and the ride into town
was an adrenaline rush. playing roundabout russian roulette with
motorbikes on a fully loaded mountain bike should be an olympic sport.
some guy just fell down the stairs behind me with a photocopier. cool.
so its been awhile since we last posted anything, must be a week
but seems like a month. we left phnom penh by bus, because again we
were running low on time, and showed up in sihanoukville 5 hours later
(it would have been a 4 day ride). this seaside town is cambodias only
beach place and port (due mainly to thailand and vietnams territorial
encroachment over the last 200 years) and is a pretty good place to do
nothing for extended periods of time. apparently its not up to thai and
naam beach resort standards, but after 3 months in the heat with not
much swimming, it was pretty damn good. white sand and very cheap
cocktails. we headed out to the islands and did a day of snorkeling
around collecting shells and what not. didn't see many fish, but it was
good to get away from the peddlers and massage lady who for some reason
was really offended by my toes. lissa caved and had her nails cut and
waxed and all that. as soon as they see one of their number make a sale
however, the vultures descend, and we were soon surrounded by a horde
of small children, ladies, and lady boys trying to sell us bracelets,
books, lobsters, and whatever the ladyboys sell. i didnt hang around
long enough to find out, would rather sit in the wave breaking line and
watch them break over my head. i played that game for many an hour. its
awesome. the beach comes alive at night, when all the bars start
cranking out $1 or $2 cocktails, and there were usually 4 or 5
lightening storms strobing away in the distance, and at our bar a dude
with a firestick who was fuckin awesome. they use petrol instead of
kerosene, which is just a little more dangerous, so i stopped using his
firestick after i figured that out, and just watched. glad i didnt do
any fire breathing.
the people that we met there gradually started to drift away, and
i was getting close to complete liver failure, so we caught the bus
back to phnom penh, and spent the last day going to the market and
doing stuff that we had been meaning to do all week. went to the rifle
range finally (memories of the killing fields and whatnot having been
smoothed over) and paid the army heaps of money to fire an AK, throw a
grenade in a lake (freaking lissa out... haha) and fire a chinese
handgun that kept jamming cause it was chinese. the dude used a stick
to clean it out, and i was just about to fire it again when a cambodian
guy next to me reached across and grabbed the stick. i almost shot him
in the arm. the security precautions were pretty lax, with barangs
(foreigners) walking around with loaded assault rifles and shit. it
freaked us both out, so we left. they have a menu of guns to use at
that place, included m203 grenade launchers, m60 machine guns, rocket
launchers, all kinds of shit. just reinforces the fact that as long as
you have the money, everything is legal in cambodia.
time to leave, so we loaded up our bikes. my panniers are now
completely full, time to do another mailage home of stuff not needed.
we went to the supermarket (!!!!!) and stocked up on goodies for the
ride. bought fruit juice (!) mars bars (!) dried fruit, cashew nuts,
salt and vinegar chips. fuckin awesome. such luxury. and headed off
towards some town that i can't remember the name of. hit a road after
30 kms that was being rebuilt and was very glad for the very gay
looking nike sunglasses that i bought for 4 dollars (all sunglasses
look gay on me). they saved my eyes from dust laceration. we
evenatually got to a river and caught the ferry across, with some guy
chasing us for like half a km and onto the ferry trying to sell us more
sunglasses (even though i was wearing mine already). he wouldnt give
up, and bargained himself down from 4 dollars to 1 dollar, all the time
scraping the glasses with a screwdriver to demonstrate how strong they
were. if i was going to buy them before, that would really have stopped
me. so we stayed for the night in this town that was accidently
flattened by B52's just after the american war because they thought it
was a KR stronghold. they killed 170 people and offered 100 dollars to
the family of each person killed, and fined the pathfinder pilot 700
dollars. it would have cost them more for the petrol used by 2 or 3 of
the B52's on the raid. cambodian life is cheap. the town didn't have
much going on so we cycled to svay rieng, cambodias easternmost town
early the next day. it rained on us heavily just before we got into
town, cooling things down considerably. we were a bit fed up by that
point so we settled for the first guesthouse that we found, and were
shown around the town by a 21 year old guy with really good english and
a growth deficiency that left him looking like he was 10. he didnt tell
us how old he was at first, and i thought it a little strange when he
said that his girlfriend had broken up with him, and he was going to
university soon, and he wants to be a manager when he finishes
studying. he showed us an awesome restaurant where i ate 3 mains. was
hungry. got the cambodian version of fish and chips for dinner. no
newspaper though, everything comes in styrofoam packaging here. its
better for the environment.
left svay rieng really early the next day wearing wet clothes
because my bag is full of dirty washing, and cycled to the border. i
gave all my remaining riel to a lady who was begging. it was a massive
wad of small denomenation notes, prolly adding up to about 75 cents.
she looked pretty shocked. we bought a kilo of strawberries from some
lady at the border, and ate them for lunch. at the border we were told
that the cambodian visas that we were corrupted into buying at fuckin
dong kralor (the great visa scam saga) were in fact fakes, and the real
ones that we had been told were fake were in fact... real... what are
the odds. the official rolled her eyes when we said we were scammed at
dong kralor. if i see that fucker with no ear again im going to chop
his head off. the border crossing was especially painless, not even the
full bag search that we had been told to expect. smoothest crossing so
far. we said goodbye to the crazy country of cambodia and its insane
people and continued on a smooth smooth road into naam. we bought the
strongest coffee i have ever tasted, almost impossible to drink, at a
small cafe then smashed 40 kms through progressively heavier traffic
into the center of saigon where... it started raining again. the moped
drivers all stop to put on their ponchos, making the roads look like
they are full of motorised ghosts who have all just been paintballing.
after 2 hours of riding around in the wet, we finally figured out where
we were (LP maps are not very good) and got a guesthouse then randomly
met up with a couple of girls who we had been hanging out with in
sihanoukville. had some beers and i bought some Hunter S books from one
of the many book peddlers on the streets. have to find a post office
today, cause i have no intention of carrying them any further.
i need a fruitshake, so going to sign off. might visit the war
relic museum this afternoon, a museum that is pretty much dedicated to
american war atrocities (they have a justifiedly one sided view of this
stuff) then might head back to phalang street and drink some smooth
saigonbeer.
aux
