The last month has been spent heading up and down the mostly sunny coast and beautiful halong bay of Vietnam along with many other backpackers (our official vocation in life it seems) including our mates Ben and Vicky, a Northern Irish couple we met while working together in a roadhouse in oz (for a week,before they got the sack and we quit several weeks later!) As they were on holiday just for a couple of weeks on their way home from Australia, and coming straight from such an expensive country, $50 seemed an absolute bargain for a 4* hotel. Which it is but you cant be doing that if you're in it for the long haul, so you can see where differences arose but we reached a happy medium (mostly) and slept and dined and wined in very fancy places for us and quite disappointing but absolute bargain spots for them! After they left (to spend a week in a $2000 a week resort on kho samui Thailand!!) we met wee Jessie Lalor for an evening then began the long journey south again. After learning our lesson a few times that the 11 hr journey will probably take 18 overnight on the dirt road, we invested in some sleeping tablets and they flew by! On return to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), after some lovely beachie weeks, we met up with Jo's old pal Neville, his girlfriend and what seems to be most of his dorm mates from Wilsons Hospital School, all out here teaching English. Over several evenings drinking bottles of ridiculously cheap rum, we hear wonderful stories involving them earning $16 an hr to be worshipped and make animal noises. When a beer is 50c, that's 32 beers an hr!! We are sold and see currently doing our TEFL (teaching English cert) online to join them in this wonderful life living like kings.
It's not all sitting indoors on computers however, we are now trundling around Cambodia. I say this as I am very much trundling at the moment, on a very rickety bus on an extremely potholed road! Despite booking our bus ticket at the busiest hostel in Phnom Penh, opting for the cheapest bus must not be an popular option as we are the only westerners on board, as usual! We decided to stay in said hostel after a couple of nights in a very cheap but pretty out-of-the-way guesthouse where once again it was tricky to get fed, all the restaurants had a big bowl and stove on every table where customers got a massive plate of everything imaginable and put it in this pot themselves to make some sort of soup. We did find a place that had some nice normal fried rice, quite the special occasion having us there it seemed as the place was packed but the manager lingered beside our table the whole night to make sure we had enough of everything at all times! The hostel wasn't all that, more expensive to be in a 12 bed dorm than our en suite room previously and if you don't happen to be the last one to bed, you are woken every time someone comes in, stumbling all over the place clattering about and the same again at 5-8am when everyone seems to get early buses. We did find a sports bar playing the football next door which we were all ecstatic about-lots of cheering, jugs of beer and general football chat with other northern English blokes! Needless to say tonight we are booked in to 'Tom and Jerry guesthouse', $5.40 for private room! En route to Siem Riep (if we ever get there) to see the temples of Ankor, supposedly the 8th wonder of the world. From the bus window, Cambodian village life seems very like what Ireland, or maybe France would have been a century ago, little wooden shacks with thatch or tin roofs. Except they are on stilts and the whole extended family plus a few cows, pigs and chickens , mull about under the shack sheltering from the sun/monsoons doing not a whole lot. A great way of life and nice to see after visiting the genocide museum and killing fields where the Khmer rouge tortured and killed anyone they didn't like or was educated or wore glasses basically and turned the rest of the county into slaves...and this was only in the 70's! The Vietnam war museum in HCMC was also a horrifying experience but interesting and worth seeing.
On a brighter note... 6 days til my birthday!!!
Over and out.
