Siem Reap

Next stop on my trip was what ended up being a very fleeting visit to the famous temples outside the town of Siem Reap. Even though the trip was short you should prepare yourselves for the number of photos that this blog will contain. I arrived in Siem Reap on one of the greatest buses I have ever traveled on; only 3 seats per row and each one the size of a reclining sofa. All of that for a $1 premium over the standard bus that happened to be sold out. Anyway that "interesting" story out of the way, I booked into a hostel for the night and then went to get drunk. The next morning the first hostel that I had checked into kicked me out as they had booked out the bed I was in. I wasn't too unhappy when I managed to find a new place to stay for $2 a night... even if it did only have 3 walls and half a roof (I wish I was exaggerating).

Once the new place was secure me and Megan, a girl I had met in Phnom Penh, grabbed a Tuk Tuk who would be our temple tour guide; for the next two days. The first day the plan involved doing a short loop around some of the temples including Angkor Thom (below) and the "Tomb Raider" temple (above).

The next day we were supposed to be up at 4:30 to get to Angkor Wat for sunrise. Of course this seemed like the perfect time to go out and drink until after half 1 in the morning. Sleep was made even less likely by what I can only assume was some sort of dinosaur, rawr'ing (spelt how Fil would approve) on the half roof. Either way after about 2 hours of sleep I was up and off towards the temple.

Thanks to performing my standard level of research on what to do at the temples when we arrived at Angkor Wat we had no idea where to go in the pitch black (obviously I didn't take my torch). Eventually we found the temple and a small lake outside the front of it, the bank of which proved to be a great place to watch the sun rise from.

After the sunrise we went in to explore the rest of Angkor Wat and inside discovered a monk praying at the feet of a large Buddha statue. Not an uncommon sight in Asia but nice to spot whilst at the largest religious building in the world.

The rest of the day was filled with temple after temple after temple... This was interrupted only by a few reminders that we were in the middle of a forest visiting temples that had only partially been reclaimed from the trees.

Towards the middle of the second day I realised that I was looking forward to the Tuk Tuk ride between temples rather than the temples themselves. At this point Pete's suggestion of meeting him at the beach seemed pretty irresistible and when I got back to town I booked the night bus for that evening.

The final day I was in Siem Reap happened to be Australia day so drinking 3 pitchers of cheap beer proved a  suitable way to celebrate, and also helped the night bus to go much more smoothly!

Phnom Penh

Leaving Vietnam towards Cambodia was actually quite a painless border crossing compared to all the things people usually say about it. The trip didn’t take that long and the bus was really comfortable. The only problem we had was that the place in Phnom Penh we wanted to stay in had been recently evicted so there was apparently nothing there but a dried up lake being filled in by Koreans! Instead we went towards the centre and settled for a place there for one night.

In the morning Pete just about (muted iPod = no alarm) got on a bus to Sihanookville and we were both alone for the first time on the trip so far. Most of the sights in Phnom Penh revolve around the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 70s. In the morning I visited one of the killing fields, used for prisoners who had committed “crimes” such as being literate, where there is a memorial built in memory of the thousands of people who were killed there.

In the afternoon we returned to Phnom Penh to visit S21, a former high school converted into a prison for “offenders” who would later be sent out to the killing fields. I have noticed Pete has started adding more text to some of his blog entries so I’m evening the score by putting an arty photo up here.

To deal with the days depressing tone me and a few people staying in the same hostel went out to get some alcohol and stumbled upon some Cambodian alcohol called simply "White Spirit". It sounded like a terrible idea but at $1.20 it seemed too good to miss. It smelt pretty much exactly the same as paint thinner and got us all incredibly drunk. It was quite a shock to wake up in the morning and discover that I wasn't blind.

The final day I was there we visited the kings palace, which turned out to be a massive disappointment. It cost a lot to get in and the biggest attraction was massively underwhelming. The silver pagoda has a floor made of about 5 tonnes of solid silver. Unfortunately this isn't very impressive when 3 quarters of the floor is hidden under carpets and the bits that are exposed are held down with duck tape. No wonder they won't let you take photos in there!

The last interesting part of Phnom Penh is the synchronised night time dancing that takes place on the riverside and in the parks every night, weird.

Saigon

After finishing the huge journey to the city we took a day off to chill out and fully relax for the first time in a while, not having a bike to ride in the near future seemed to take a weight off our minds.

The main sights in and around the city are Vietnam war related, the first that we went to see being the Cu Chi Tunnels. These are a network of underground tunnels formed by the north Vietnamese as places to live and hide from the American forces and their bombing attacks. We learnt all about the tunnels from a highly propagandist video before being shown around and moving through some reconstructed tunnels. The small diameters of the tunnels makes it really hard for a tall person to get through though I guess that isn’t such a problem for the average Vietnamese…

The mystery of the holes in my legs was also solved. I must have gone for a walk into the jungle and stumbled upon an old booby trap like this set up in the war:

The whole time you are in and around the tunnels the sound of gunfire is in the background getting louder throughout the day. At the end of the tour it was revealed why… they have a shooting range at the end of the day where you can fire leftover weapons from the war! Kind of like visiting Flanders fields and at the end of the day shooting a Mauser. Still we weren't going to turn down the opportunity and both had a go on Rambo’s gun, the M60.

Thanks to a balls up with timings for our bus and the fact it had a 3 hour lunch break I didn't make it to the war museum in town but I did get to visit the Reformation Palace. This was where the war was finally ended when north Vietnamese tanks stormed the gates in 1973. Since then most of the rooms have been untouched, left exactly as they were on the last day of the war.

To balance all of the war stuff we were seeing we treated ourselves to the best ice cream in the world, at a place called Fannys, and picked a 20 scoop sharing platter between us. The waitresses laughed at our order but 10 minutes later when we had left nothing on the plate we were sure they were impressed. 

One of the most interesting things about Saigon (that is what we were told to call it by the people in the South...) is their approach to wiring... I wouldn't want to be an electrician there!

The Top Gear Challenge Part 8 (2029.3 - 2277km) The End

We left Mui Ne reasonably early for the final approach to Saigon, as we were expecting the last 30km to be ridiculous. In the morning the journey was a straight forward ride along quite quiet roads following the coast so that we could again avoid highway 1. We had our final bowl of Pho Bo (a meal I will not be sorry to see the back of) for lunch and then left town to find the roads had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Luckily we had set off early enough to allow for this and we were soon on the edge of Saigon.

Though the traffic was insane and probably a lot worse than in Hanoi, the last leg of the trip didn’t actually take us that long, probably due to the fact that we had gained a little bit of confidence and knew how the roads worked a little better by this stage. We also saw our second bike crash whilst checking where we needed to head. Again it was a low speed crash between 2 bikes and within seconds both parties were helped to their feet and were on their way with no fuss (though bleeding slightly).

The feeling of finally arriving was amazing; we had covered exactly 2277km in 11 days of riding on some of the most dangerous roads in the world, using only a small scale tourist map to navigate and without any major incidents. 

The complete route we took is shown on the map below (the map we actually used was nearly as good as this one!)

The last thing to do was to sell our bikes, now a little worse for wear, to some travellers planning to do the same trip in reverse.

The Top Gear Challenge Part 7 (1744.6 - 2029.3km) - The Mystery Holes

The only real activity we did in Nha Trang was a boat trip around a few of the local islands. During the trip we managed to consume a lot of beer. Upon returning to our hotel we had a nap for a few hours and when we got up apparently forgot that we had been drinking all day. This meant that when we went out again later we carried on drinking at a regular speed. The result of all this drinking is shown in the picture below (skip past if you are squeamish). 

To this day I have no idea how this happened all I know is it led to me getting 2 stitches in my right leg, 3 stitches in my left and losing the feeling in half of my right foot for about 3 weeks! I also got to experience Nha Trang’s hospital which was interesting to say the least. I was even taken to a special room with the sign “foreigner room” above the door to be charged £12 for the stitches. 

Gratuitous photo of a car made from a 2cv...

After Nha Trang our next stop was Mui Ne (luckily I could still ride my bike). This was one day where nothing actually went wrong and we made it comfortable into town with enough time to find somewhere quite nice to stay. There wasn’t much to do in town except sit by the beach. Whilst we were there some kite surfing championship was occurring so we spent an afternoon watching the mayhem that they called a race. 

On our final day in Mui Ne we were unpleasantly woken by an explosion in our room. It seems the cheap iPod charger that I bought when my cable broke wasn’t really up to standard and it had blown up sending half of itself flying across the room!

We used the wake up call to go and visit the main attraction of the area, the sand dunes. On the way we stopped off at the fishing village where the banks by the sea are used to create the worst smell in the history of noses. They dry out huge quantities of shrimp in the sun which fills the air with a smell so thick that you feel like you can see it! 

It the sand dunes we were attacked my about 20 small children all trying to get us to hire small sheets of blue plastic off them to go and slide on the dunes. We decided it was something that we had to try so got a couple. It seems that we had also hired the child as a guide and he followed us up into the dunes to help us find the best spots to slide (as well as trying on all our stuff).

 










The sledging wasn’t as good as we had hoped mainly because it is so dam tiring running up sand dunes. The sand was also really fine and got everywhere, nearly killing my camera again (luckily it still seems to be indestructible).

The Top Gear Challenge Part 6 (1413.1 - 1744.6km) "Don't fill up on frog or you won't eat your weasel"

The 90km trip into Quy Nhon actually went quite well apart from a little sprinkling of rain in the first 10 minutes. We had been promised (by an old American lady in Hoi An) that Quy Nhon was a lovely little seaside unfortunately this is not what we found. For quite a long time we were riding through an ugly sprawling town. Eventually we busted out the pocket compass again and headed east hoping to run into the coast, this plan worked and the town was actually much nicer on the sea front. Since we had most of the day to use we rode to a nearby beach that was deserted and, despite the weather not being the greatest and the sea being really rough, had a swim. 

We spent the rest of the day drinking incredibly cheap (<30p a bottle) local beer. Eventually feeling hungry we went to a local restaurant with some really interesting options on the menu. We ordered snake head fish, weasel and fried frog, most of which was really good. The weasel was a little bit weird but strangely we both thought we had tasted it before… at the local party on the second day on the bikes.

The next day we set off towards Nha Trang, at first along a nice quiet coastal road with some really good views. Eventually we had to join highway 1 and just as we did we tried to fill up with petrol. Unfortunately when Pete took the petrol cap off his bike half of it fell into the tank and the cap wouldn’t go back on. This was temporarily fixed by wrapping an inner tube around the fuel tank to block up the hole.

After a while the wind picked up so we pulled over for a drink. As had been annoyingly common in the south of the country there was a very small choice of drinks; red bull, tamarind juice (not good), water and beer. We went for a beer each and whilst we were drinking them discovered that the café place we were in had a collection of weird pickled animals in jars including the usual snakes but also geckos, 2 little monkeys, a wild cat!

The rest of the journey into Nha Trang was a nice ride along a really deserted 4 lane road that followed the coast. We weren’t sure why it wasn’t being used as it had been recently resurfaced and was a really nice relaxed end to the day even if it led to us riding slightly faster than we usually would!

The Top Gear Challenge Part 5 (968.6 - 1413.1km)

The next leg of the journey should have involved two relatively relaxed days of about 260km each. Unfortunately, as was becoming too common, this was not how it worked out. We had a slow start thanks to needing to post home our suits and shoes. After this breakfast took much longer than we thought and then we decided to get out bikes cleaned and give them an oil change. By the time we left town we had managed to waste all of the morning (though our bikes were awesomely shiny).
 

This quickly became worse as after only 20 minutes on the road, just long enough to get away from civilisation, my bike packed up and showed no sign of wanting to start. This put me in a bit of a panic until some locals came over to give us a hand. The bike was soon wheeled over to what turned out to be a mechanics and after 10 minutes it was running perfectly. A small electronic control box had failed and luckily this was one spare part that we did have. As we still had to pay for labour we were charged another huge amount, this time 66p!

With such a bad start to the day we needed a miracle to get back on schedule and of course this is not what we got. Another half hour after the breakdown we realised that we were not on the right road. After being sent backwards and forwards by locals for an hour we decided to just stick with it as we knew we were at least going vaguely the right way (thank you compass keyring). This turned out to be a bad decision (though not the worst of the day). We ended up spending about an hour riding through 6 to 12 inch deep mud (bye bye shininess) at extremely slow speeds. What made this worse was the locals whizzing past us on little scooters. Eventually we found the road we should have been on; though it was on a bridge going over our heads.

We started making good progress for a few hours and then came the really bad decision. I thought we could make it 55km before dark in about an hours time… I was wrong. After about 20 minutes it started raining heavily making visibility bad and the roads treacherous. This meant we had to slow down and so we were caught out in the dark (what was it we were told about riding in the dark… oh yeah “suicidal”, I wonder if rain improves this?). In the middle of nowhere with no sources of light it was soon pitch black meaning we were even slower and so wetter. Eventually we hit Kam Duc at about half past 6, soaked through and miserable, luckily stumbling straight upon a guesthouse.

The next morning, now with lots of distance to make up, things didn’t get any better. We woke to the sound of rain hammering on the guesthouse roof and looking out of the window it didn’t seem like it was going to let up. We had to bite the bullet and set off in the rain. This meant the progress would again be slow though on the plus side at least the bikes were clean again!

Luckily the rain only lasted about 3 hours and then suddenly cleared up. We then nearly managed to make a worse mistake than the previous day. As the sun was starting to look low we were contemplating either trying to hit Quy Nhon (our next planned stop) or stopping short. In the end we decided to stop short and leave 90km for the next day. This was definitely the right decision as it turned out the rain in the morning had stopped my watch for an hour or so meaning we only had 45 mins of light left and not an hour an 45.