Phnom Penh

   

  Joy of joys, we managed to find a hotel in our price range in Phnom Penh with a pool!!  Coming back hot and sweaty from walking around the city it has been amazing.  Eureka Villas also has a DVD player so it's back to buying bootlegged movies.  Tonight is 'I Am Legend'.  

     The first day we got here we went out looking for The Vegetarian.  It claims to be number one-fifty-eight on nineteenth street but the map had us walking one way and Google Maps the opposite direction on the same street.  In one direction the numbers run for a few houses from somewhere in the two-hundreds downwards than starts going five-hundred up and then there's seventeen through nineteen on the corner.  On our first try we turned right at the Smile Dental Clinic but after a couple blocks walked back the way we had came.  Past the clinic we walked another few blocks before stopping again and examining the map from a different angle.  Back the way we had come and this time we resolved to walk in that direction until we found it or until we reached Sihanouk Blvd.  It was on the block before the boulevard sandwiched between to completely unrelated numbers.

     Behind a screen of vegetation there was a shady-ish courtyard where we sat to eat, but it was very disappointing.  My personal gripe is that my dish came with green peppers (urgh) when they were most definitely not on the menu but overall service was slow and food bland.

     I've been feeling wiped out for a month or so now and though I was promised a week or two in one place it was finally decided that I only get the four nights we have here to sleep and do nothing.  So while I made good on the promise my parents walked to a market and found a movie store on their way, returning longing for a swim and ladened with fruit and treats.  Phnom Penh has Kettle salt and vinegar potato chips!  I don't believe it.  I was expecting not to be able to find them when we were in San Francisco.

     After a swim we watched a movie and ate pizza for the first time in months.  

      In the morning I slept past eight for the first time since Piriápolis almost two months ago!

     Our hotel comes with breakfast and toast with a variety of spreads.  I saw peanut butter for the first time since leaving home and was happy about that, but vegemite tastes like iron concentrate with an extra-large helping of salt.  I was expecting it to be more along the lines of semi-liquefied bouillon cubes and was severely disappointed.

      At lunchtime my parents took me back the couple blocks to the river and we took our chances with a restaurant there, passing by the one that serves marijuana pizza.  For a place we chose randomly the Pink Elephant served really good food.

     The royal palace is two very long blocks from out hotel and we walked there that afternoon.  Despite shoulders being completely covered apparently sleeves are needed too (and shawls are not an acceptable alternative) so we left to go back later.  My dad and I went back to the hotel and my mom went to a cafe/bakery for some time.  

     Dinner was at a vegetarian place on our street with a crazy amount of items on the menu.  The noodles were ramen  noodles but the food spicy and traditional and good.

     That evening we all went for another swim and watched our second movie (500 Days of Summer). 

      I don't believe it, but I slept in past eight the next day, too.  The hotel has a severely limited breakfast selection and we walked to a restaurant/bakery called The Shop that I have to love because it serves passionfruit tea.  It was apparently next to a chocolate shop but because somehow here stores and shops have a way of blending in as well as a way of not being where they're supposed to we almost didn't find it.  Definitely a tourist place, it served brilliant fruit toast with creamcheese and my mom loved the palm sugar syrup thingy for coffee.

      Back to the royal palace to find that, this time, the throne room is closed for the morning and we decided to go back in the afternoon.  After dropping me at the hotel (hey, I've been on the road for five months I deserve a little vegetating) where I gorged on fruit for a couple of hours they explored another section of the city.  I think most people know lychees, but does anybody know that elliptical fruit hidden in a really scaly and sharp skin?  It's a pain to peel and I cut my finger on it but the fruit is tart and juicy and delicious.   

       The city has insanely long blocks so what looked like  a short walk to our lunch spot was much longer.  Set back from the street a little bit, the restaurant was empty and though service was slow the food was worth it.  It was called... La Clef de something.  If any of you go to Phnom Penh and want to got there sorry that isn't helpful.

      When we were done with lunch we caught a tuk-tuk back to the hotel.  At two we walked a third time to the royal palace and this time got in without a hitch.  Guides were available at the entrance and we were so glad to have one.   It took about an hour to walk through the grounds and visit most of the buildings.  Especially compared to the surrounding countryside the opulence is horrific and disgusting.  I don't get how somebody can own a building with a floor made of hundreds of one-kilo silver tiles in a room with a 90-kilo solid-gold buddha, studded with diamonds and surrounded by smaller but similar statues, but in this country particularly it is shocking.  I came out feeling sick, none the less for learning that the kings and queens really are respected and revered and if one single one of them could show some uncorrupted leadership they could do so much.  I need to specify uncorrupted because one man--I think King Sihanouk's grandson--is the leader of the Funcinpec Party which is just as corrupt as the rest but hasn't won (despite having a huge majority of the votes) due to multiple factors but mostly the corruptness of the current prime minister (a level of corruptness unto itself).  I'm way oversimplifying but I don't know enough about it to write about it.

 

     

That night we didn't eat dinner, just snacked and were carried on from lunch.

     Today we ate breakfast at out hotel again.  The eggs were basically inedible but I got my protein by peanut butter toast.

    Outside our hotel there was a collection of taxis and we hired one to take us to the Choeung Ek, fifteen kilometers out of time.  It got dusty and we had to where face masks but the road was paved all the way and we weren't too jostled.  

    Based on what we learned from our guidebook we expected a grassy field with a stupa in the center and weren't expecting the emotional memorial sites there were.  At the entrance we were given audio headsets, narrated by a surviver of the Khmer Rouge.  There were eighteen different recordings, most of them narration of what we were seeing but several accounts from survivors.  Several of the stops were simple wooden signs detailing what had been there before it was torn down and others were mass graves covered with thatched roofs.  Two were glass cases, one filled with clothing and the other with bones.  The killing fields were used as an execution site for thousands of people who were dumped into mass graves by Pol Pot's decree.  Large indents dotted the earth, marking the excavated places of mass graves that have slowly been eroded by wind and rain.  Every few months a team comes through and collects the bone fragments and cloth that drifts to the surface, and shreds of cloth and pieces of bone dot the ground.

     The last site was the large stupa in the center.  Seventeen levels are filled with skulls of the victims and though I felt a need to bear witness to this I wasn't able to go inside and instead looked through the glass and left a flower outside.  

                              

     On top of this experience it seemed too emotionally exhausting to visit the prison and it was a very sober trip back to town.

     Once home we had a very quick dip in the pool and went back yesterday's lunch spot with the name I can't remember.  Somehow everything tasted less flavorful.  Maybe they had a different cook.

     My parents walked to the night market while I practiced but it turned out it was only open on the weekends.  When they got home my mom and I went to the cafe  where she went by herself yesterday but it turned out it closed at five, so instead we returned to The Shop, ate a ton of sugar and read goofy magazines.

     For the next three to six days we will be out of wifi range, first in an eco lodge on the river and then for our first beach time since Uruguay.  Since the same beaches are described as 'Immaculate, gorgeous, untouched, unspoiled, etc' and 'Filthy, covered in trash, not worth it, etc' it should be interesting to see what we find.

     It's been a couple high-nineties days and I'm really getting used to the heat.  In Olympia I put on shorts and a tanktop if it cleared sixty. 

      

Mekong Towns to the Big City

     The day after our trek we had to wake up at six for an eight o'clock bus to Stung Treng.  It was another mini van bus so there were four of us crammed in.  Music was blasted out of a speaker right above my ear but luckily the three-hour time estimation included all the stops we had to make.
     The bus dropped us outside a hotel where were able to use a phone to call the place where we were staying (a wifi-less ecolodge four kilometers or so out of town).  A tuk-tuk came to pick us up and it was a bumpy but not unpleasant to the collection of cabins on the river.  Nobody at the lodge spoke any English and somehow they brought us three dishes of everything we ordered plus something we didn't order, but we conveyed 'save it for later' and polished everything off at dinner.
      Until six we were powerless but my parents went on a boat trip onto the Mekong while I caught up on some much-needed sleep.  It was still sweltering when they got back and we sat on the porch reading and swatting mosquitoes.  Malaria is so uncommon here that we've opted out of pills but apply bug spray religiously.
     The food had turned soggy by the time we ate but the setting was pleasant and it was cooling off enough to be comfortable.
     Maybe because of the large gaps in the floor, walls and roof and maybe because they don't really clean the cabins there were three spiders that we found in the room.  They went from big, bigger, to biggest but since I have no photographic proof I doubt anybody will believe me when I swear that the last, legs included, was the size of my dad's hand.  The large holes in the mosquito net were not reassuring.
      Apart from a frog in the toilet that my dad caught in a metal bowl and evicted after much clatter and clashing and some giant geckos fighting on the walls we were able to get safely under our placebo nets fairly quickly.
      The next morning we woke up at five thirty to pack up and go on boat trip.  Supposed to last until eleven it was almost nine before the tuk-tuk even brought us to the place to launch the boat.  We stopped for breakfast--spreadable cheese and pineapple marmalade that tasted of the fluoride you get at the dentist, but in a good way.
     I don't know what to call the boat.  It was the basic shape of a canoe but larger, and wider and flatter in the center.  There were no seats so instead we sat on a mat on the floor while the boat driver sat at one end and the two people from the hotel who accompanied us sat at the other.  A canopy covered three-quarters of the area.

     It took about an hour to reach our first stop.  It was a place where the river widened and a sand dune led up to a rocky plateau dropping off at off points to have waterfalls.   To get to a place where we had a view of a bunch of falls was a short walk and, including all the detours we had to make and jagged rocks we had to avoid, we were up there about forty minutes.  When we again came to the river we swam for a little while and then cut up and ate a couple of mangos.
                                     Since it's the dry season now a lot of what is normally submersed isn't, including the trees lining the banks.  Many of them with driftwood embedded in their branches, they are all bent over in a way some trees on the Oregon coast are from the wind.  Only here it's from the current.
     After backtracking to a few buildings with a line of flags in front of them, above where the river has eroded, the boat is stopped and our companions leave for a few minutes.  I'm not sure, but possibly it was the Laotian border crossing or at least a check-in about how close we would be to the border.
      There was a very small area not far from these buildings where the Mekong dolphins swim.  We stayed there for about forty five minutes and during that time a fleet of kayaks came and went.  The dolphins swam back and forth across it several times, because of the shape of their heads looking a lot like small Beluga whales.  They seemed to swim in pairs, though once when a pair came up to breathe they were circled by a third dolphin swimming on its side.
     When the motor was turned back on it took less than fifteen minutes to get back to where we left from.  I can officially now sleep through anything, after sleeping through an hour and a half on a tuk-tuk on dirt roads and waking up with a bruise on my temple where I rested my head.
     After a quick stop at the Bird Lodge to grab our bags the tuk-tuk took us to a hotel in town, attractive for its closeness to other restaurants and lack of giant spiders.  The air con was nice, too.
     Only a little over a block away from our hotel was a restaurant called Ponika's Place where we ate dinner.  They served both Cambodian and Western foods, and while my parents enjoyed veggie amoks I gloried in a pepper pasta.  Being back in a place with wifi I started working on my last blog but was burnt out before it was finished.  Kung Fu Panda was on (in English) and we caught the end before retiring.
     The bus (assume it's a mini van unless otherwise named) came at eleven and we had a leisurely morning, going pack to Ponika's Place for breakfast.  For whatever reason nobody else sat in our row and it was only three ours to Kratie.  Kratie is another nice Mekong-front town and we had a late lunch at the Balcony Hotel.  Everything on the menu looked good but I figure that I should eat veggie burgers when they are on offer.  It was inedible, but the restaurant overlooked the river.
     That night we went out searching for ice cream but all the restaurants either were closed or didn't serve it. Disappointed, we instead ate fruit we found in the market.   The boardwalk was emptying out and there was a perfect orange crescent moon above the river.  
 
      The bus to Kompung Cham was a tourist bus!  That means rows of four big, obviously divided airplane-esque seats divided by an aisle.  For that trip it also meant 'almost empty'.  Some passengers were picked up on the way, but even at its fullest each passenger could have had their own pair of seats.
     About twenty kilometers away from Kompung Cham the bus overheated and we pulled over to let it cool down.  Since in the heat that could easily have taken until well after sundown we nabbed a passing van with room for three more.  Unsurprisingly we were smooshed in but after a false scare where we unloaded our luggage and everything we arrived nead the town's center.  Immediately we were swarmed by motorbike drivers but then one of them went and found a tuk-tuk for us.  Both the hotels in town were on the river and during our time there that was the street we stayed on.  Next door to our hotel was the Smile Restaurant, a non-profit organization with mediocre food.  
    Through our hotel we organized  a tuk-tuk to take us to the nearby weaving village.  There we made stops at a few houses, the first wear a woman wove the traditional red-and-white checked scarves on a large wooden loom, the second at the house where the threads were dyed using plant dyes and then wound into huge spools, and the third at a silk-weaver's house.  The house we made our second stop at dates from before the Khmer Rouge, and is a really nice house with bamboo floors.  To look at their cloths we were invited in and sat on the floor of the main room.  
 
                               
  
    
  At the third house the silk was beautiful but felt almost like a cheat, since the pattern was pre-dyed onto the thread and the weaver had nothing to do with it.  There was some banter about ages while we were there and at one point the weaver asked my mother to guess hers.  People age so differently here and she looked about seventy, but my mom was sweet and guessed 'thirty eight'.  She felt really bad when the woman was thirty two, but she didn't take offense.
     Our last stop in the village was for sugar cane juice.
     From there we were taken to Wat Nokor, a modern Buddhist pagoda squeezed into the walls of an eleventh-century sandstone temple.  The roofs looked almost like they were held up with a keystone but weren't, and we walked under them very quickly.  Cats lounged on the floor of the temple and bats on the ceiling.
                                 The tuk-tuk left us at the bridge to an island.  For years the bamboo bridge has been rebuilt at the start of the dry season but they are building a permanent one this year.  Motorcycles and bikes whizzed back and forth and the mats rattles noisily.  The bamboo sank, a bit like a trampoline but without so much spring, beneath them and when it was dark the make-shift powerline turned lamps on.   
                              
     It's confusing converting into and out of the metric system.  When we walked back to our hotel from there we thought that eight hundred meters was nothing but though it isn't far it's almost a kilometer.  My parents went out to dinner without me while I blogged and, finally, got a post done and, in case you were wondering, I was able to persuade them about the ice cream.
      The next morning we took a taxi at ten thirty to Phnom Penh.  At the suggestion of the hotel we bought the entire back seat of the Toyota Corolla and were so glad we did because it turns out they normally cram nine people into those things.  As it was two women shared the passenger's seat, a man sat in the driver's seat, and the driver sat half on the driver's seat and half off, braking and accelerating with his left food.  They talked constantly, often speaking over eachother and always at the top of their lungs all three hours to the city.
     It turned out we were able to charge the keyboard so I'm back out of the land of unwanted autocorrect.  Sorry if some of those sentences last time made less sense than usual.

Hiking in That Forest Near Ban/Van Lung/Long

     So, bright and early, we hiked the block or so to the Parrot travel agency to leave for our Expedition.  Because of the around of typos I've had to correct in the last few lines I should mention that the keyboard is out of batteries so I'm typing on the screen of the iPad and not used to it.
     Anyhoo, when we get there we have the happy surprise of having not motorcycles to take us the hour or so to where we start hiking but a trek.  Our group as large, us and four Germans as well as our guide and two rangers.  Three of the Germans--Nadine, Ben, and Johan--are traveling in a group and the fourth, Matthias, sat in the bed of the truck with us on our way to the village where we crossed the La Li river.  I felt pretty covered up with long pants, long sleeves, a cap, a surgical mask, and sunglasses but by the time we arrived my face and hands were caked with red dust.  My eyebrows only changed back to their natural color after intensive scrubbing a few days later.
     While we were waiting for the ferry my mom and I walked up to the market and bought some chili peppers in case the food was bland or inedible and a fruit that was about the size and shape of grapes and had a stiff brown skin that we peeled to eat the eyeball-like (unappetizing but realistic) fruit.  The pit to fruit ratio was such that after a few I deemed it not worth the effort but my parents snacked for some time.
     The boat was a large wooden platform with a shade and motor on one side and motorbikes and other vehicles on the other.  The river wasn't wide but the boat moved so painfully slowly it would have taken at least half as much time to swim it.  It was only nine in the morning but already hot enough to long for that icy lemonade we had in Lima and dread the hike to come.
     So far there have been no regrets about the decision to ditch backpacks in favor of rolling bags but that meant our bags were daybags now and we had to carry waterbottles in our hands when they were distributed a couple of hours later.
    Almost immediately after we got off the boat Nadine was on a bike and gone, shrugging at us to indicate that she had no idea where she was going either.  Before the rest of us left on the fleet of motorbikes waiting for us my dad scrounged up a helmet for  me and made our guide tell my driver to drive safely and slowly.  I think he did--I didn't fall off--but the dirt road we were driving on was so filled with potholes and bumps that is was a fairly brain-rattling ride. The one hill and two bridges we went over were nervewracking.  The first was steep and bouncy and the second rickety and narrow but both were survived by all of us.
     Our ride deposited us in a shelter with a roof, two walls, and a raised platform on either side where we dropped our bags.  The motorbikes went in with hammocks and water and we waited a long time for something I'm not quite clear on.  We made the decision to go with a Cambodian agency but at this point we regretting it a but because they didn't seem clear on how much water they had or that we needed or what to do with it.  Everything ended up alright, though, and we were glad for our desicion in the end.
     When everything was finally organized we trudged up a dirt road for a few hundred meters before turning onto a dust path.  We were walking by fields that had been burnt to stubble and completely dried out in the sun so there was at best little relief from baking.  Our guide told us a story about a cannibal tribe that lived in the hills near where we hiked but though there are (or were, I'm not sure) his story was embellished.
     The Ban Lung area is fairly filled with Germans.  We met two more returning from a similar hike when we were starting out.  Apparently they had opted out of rafting the last day in favor of getting back to town earlier but looked about as hot as we felt and we started to worry that we wouldn't be able to raft at all.  It wasn't a pleasant thought.  Hiking that way once was bad enough.
     After about an hour and a half we stopped in a place with a couple intact trees and ate veggie takeout.  I was too hot to eat anything but everybody else added liberal amounts of soy sauce and enjoyed. Johan was a vegetarian too so while Ben and Nadine travelled with him they conformed and Matthias ate the same for lunch because no meat was on offer.
     When everyone was done our guide and the dubious rangers (dubious because they weren't hired by the national park and had to be dissuaded out of taking crossbows) look for spiders to show us.  Their method was to poke sticks down their nests in hopes of making them angry enough to come out but none surfaced.
     Nadine started telling us about their trip.  She told us a little about some of the cities on our list; apparently Vientiane is a lot like a large version of Hoi An and Chang Mai is touristy.   They only have four weeks as a break from school and couldn't tell us about everything on our list but what they could was useful.
    No spiders were found and we hiked on.   We had yet to walk through jungle and the decimated and sizzling land was depressing.  Not to mention hot.   After another hour or so of walking through that (Matthias somehow found the energy to talk constantly the whole way... Luckily in German) we arrived at a house where the motorbikes had left the extra supplies.  It was amazing to sit down in the shade for a little while even if there was motor oil on the bench, and we drank a ton of water and finally were able to try the melon-sized, green, spiky jackfruits.  I have a picture later because we bought one in Stung Treng.
     With our packs considerably more weighed down we set off again and were finally able to see a bit of jungle.  The creepers, bamboo, and innocent but thorny vines covering the path were a cue for Matthias to take the machete begged off one of the guides and hack ineffectually away at anything within arm's length.  That put an end to the talking for some time but because our marching order had changed so I walked behind him it terrorized my parents and we fell some ways behind the group.
     There was only one river to cross and it didn't get much above knee-high.  The water felt amazing and though Nadine crossed with her socks pulled up to her knees no leeches made an appearance.  My dad wished for his good camera when we saw a magenta dragonfly in a rock near us but we have until Phnom Penh to get a replacement charger.
     From the river it was only a fifteen minute hike to where we stopped by a waterfall.  The pool made by it was deep and it was a novel sensation to be cold again.  My mom and I brought our shirts in in an effort to wash them from dusty red back to their original colors but did nothing but ensure that they were damp in the morning.  At least it was clean dirt!
                           
      Dinner was more rice and vegetables and after the headlamps were dug out and all questionable items gifted to my parents it was warm and satisfying.  The rangers cut down bamboo to make a structure to hang the army surplus hammocks from while we ate and after most of us went on a night 
    Once we tripped up a hill and down another we came to a stream with fish and frogs in it.  A ranger caught one and wanted to eat it but we vegetarians banded together in protest and he waited until we weren't there to find it again.  On our way back we were lucky enough to see the eyes and vague silhouette of something called a badger but that lived in trees.  Possibly it was a mistranslation.
    The hammocks had a built-in mosquito net but bugs were in scarce supply.  It was a bit tricky adjusting to the hammock but proved comfortable once I was used to it.
 
     All the bugs started buzzing at about the same time so we woke up bright and early.  Breakfast was more rice and boiled vegetables, but it was subsistence food and we were alright.
 
     We we packed and ready to go before the Germans sat talking to our guide-who-shall-not-be-named for some time.  Unlike Vietnam where peopke laugh at you, in Cambodia they laugh at everything.  He laughed after telling us that a few years ago his family had been evicted from their seven hectare farm by a company and given only a fraction of its worth in return, despite a law saying that if somebody lives in a place for five years they own it.  After saying that since the Vietnamese are taking the country's resources and influencing the government things will come to a head in the next five years and turn into war.  He plans on leaving the country if that happens, maybe to join one of the tourists whose contact information he asks for.  In a few years he hopes to have enough money to buy a couple of acres for a farm and maybe get married, but his parents don't want to farm again because the worry that they will just be evicted.  
     It was a shorter day of walking but a lot hillier and in jungle that was very dense and gloried in producing plenty of tripwires and nice sharp poky things at eye level.  In a clearing there was a vine that people swung on for a few minutes and, in another, our guide found a vine that holds water.  When tilted a stream of cool, fresh (if tree-tasting) ran out of it.  It wasn't hollow but held a surprising amount of liquid.
     We were done walking by lunch and the climax was a thirty minute scramble down almost sheer bamboo forest, covered with the sandy soil that comes from slash and burn and filled with bamboo that looked deceptively sturdy.  Rather than slide and slither short distances before running into bamboo it would have been more effective to slide the whole way but turns and spiky things impeded our progress.
      More rice and boiled vegetables for lunch and we were finally out of soy sauce.  Fortunately, thanks to the heat, I was much more thirsty than hungry and didn't have to choke all of it down.
     The river had a strongish current but was cool and deep and I waded while others swam.  We were done walking for the day but still had to make the rafts to take us to the homestay.  Our guide and rangers chopped twenty-some thirty-five-foot poles that we teamed up to carry them the two hundred fifty meters down to the water.  It turned out we weren't even dropping them in the right place so after an hour and a half of dreaming about cold beverages and Olympic weather we had to delay our second river dip again to move them.
     Our guide swam with us while the rangers expertly put three long, thin rafts together.  He (and, it seems, Cambodians in general) laughed at everything and had a blast splashing everybody and playing a version of tag with Johan.  Johan cheated; he didn't allow himself to be caught.
     All the backpacks were placed in plastic bags and those in a tarpaulin it was loaded onto the longest raft and Nadine and I, as the lightest, joined it.  With the addition of our guide and a ranger our raft was by far lowest in the water.
 
     As it is the dry season the river is almost at it's lowest and we scraped along the bottom a few times before reaching an unpassable point.   Naturally I fell getting out but everyone else disembarked smoothly and it wasn't more than ten minutes to the rock plateau where the rafts were anchored and dinner was cooked.  The homestay was only a few minutes further away and a puppy came over to join us.  Around it I was reminded (as if I needed it) how glad I was that we had Lillie and particularly a five-year-old Lillie who no longer feels the need to shred my hands whenever I pet her.
 
     For dinner we were treated to rice and boiled vegetables.
      It was dark by the time we got to the homestay and it was awkward not having any language in common with anybody and invading their space.  Probably because they weren't accustomed to groups as large as ours there were problems finding space for all the hammocks but eventually it was agreed that my mom and I would sleep outside.  A big jug of rice wine was brought out but to late for any of the tourists to want to do anything but go to bed.  It was an excuse for the family to party, and they stayed up all night long talking and laughing loudly around the fire.  
 
     Between that and the rooster that began crowing every five minutes starting at three in the morning none of us slept very well and there was no problem getting up in time to hike up a hill to see the sunrise.
     It was a steep climb up to a huge chopped-down tree where we sat in a row for thirty minutes or so.  Eventually Matthias' constant chattering got on out nerves and since we weren't facing the right way to see the sun anyways my parents and I hiked first back to the homestay to collect our packs and then to the exposed rocky riverbed where breakfast was being cooked and the rafts were still anchored from the night before.  Breakfast was a treat of ramen noodles with boiled vegetables.  
      At a quarter to nine we loaded up the rafts again and set off.  There were more shallow and narrow parts and Nadine and I had to get out a couple of times to make the raft light enough to clear a spot but the three hours passed smoothly.  Our raft fell behind at one point when the guide and the ranger stopped in a deep spot to do backflips off the raft but we caught up with all four of us paddling or poling.
     Despite being told that there was no hiking on the third and last day it was more than an hour from where we left the rafts back to where we ate lunch, a few hundred meters beyond where we set out from (after getting off the bikes).  It was the terrain of the first day again only the dust/sand was much deeper and our line spread out to avoid breathing in the gunk kicked up. 
     While we were walking our guide was telling us about Buddhism for a little while.  He said that meditation is very uncommon, as while you are meditating there are nine paths your soul can go down and only one is the right one.  If you choose the wrong path you won't be able to find your way back.
     Since we back in civilization we had a new cook for lunch and he made us rice with tofu and boiled vegetables.  Soy sauce was available from a small store and the vegetables were among the easiest to dislodge and remove.  I'm a vegetarian, of course I don't hate all vegetables, but when leafy green things are boiled they get the same slimy consistency and the same bitter taste whether they are spinach, kale, collards, or bok choi and they get passed along when they land on my plate. 
 
Most people were out working in the fields and it was hard to scrounge up six people with motorbikes who could take us back to town and, as it was, we couldn't find the seventh.  Nadine and Ben shared. 
     The helmet my dad found for me was way too big and the visor caked with dust and wouldn't stay up but it was a moot point because I neither crashed nor fell.
     It was some time before the ferry arrived and we all bought semi-cold beverages.  Our guide had to go right back out with another group and he left almost before we knew it.  Luckily the truck was waiting on the other side, and this time Matthias, Nadine, my mom, and I sat inside.  Unfortunately the back seat was not a bench seat so while there was room for me between my mom and Nadine there was a five-inch-wide gap between the seats and I had nowhere to put my feet (which fell asleep something awful a by the time we stopped once more in front of Parrot Tours). 
     Back to the Eco Lodge again, but this time we went to the a cafe serving western food.  Their founding philosophy was based on not being able to stomach another baguette or cup of Cambodian coffee.  And they had salad!  And lasagna! And bagels!!!!!!!!!
     Because of a combination of the waiters not really speaking English and nobody except me eating bagels with an equal bagel to cream cheese to vinegar ratio the owner (I'm not sure what country he was from... Maybe England or Sweden but I might be making that us) had to come out and help translate.  He was appropriately apalled at a 5-month hiatus from bagels and spoke his agreement  that a bagel must be properly prepared before one can eat it.
     Since then we had bunch of long busrides and stopped in three or four towns and so of course tons of bloggable stuff happened but right now I have a pressing need to convince my parents that we really need to go get some late-night ice cream right now.  It's been on the agenda (though restaurants have thwarted us) for several days now and as they feel a tad guilty about how little sleep I'm getting it shouldn't be too much of a chore.

Ban Lung, CAMBODIA

    Don't get me wrong, we had a great time in Vietnam and loved it, but it's so nice to be in a place where you can here birdsong because not all of them are eaten or in cages, where people don't swarm you and try to get you to buy something, where not everything is clearcut, and where they can make veggie dishes other than pho or the rice with fake meats that we have been living on.
    The border crossing went smoother than could have been hoped given how little we could communicate with the people at our hotel.  A taxi picked us up around seven and took us to the station where the driver directed us to sit down until the bus left.  It was another van-type bus  but since the three of us sat in a row it was crowded but not too bad.  It took us less than three hours to get to the border.  At one point we stopped in a village to pick up two Germans who had been stranded by their border-bus.  By then most of the other passengers we picked up and dropped off along the way were gone.  A few hundred meters away from the border they stopped in a parking lot with two more buses in it and motioned for us to get off but as they spoke no English and the parking lot was deserted we stayed on.  This was probably a mistake.  I think that, had we gotten on one of those buses, it would have taken us all the way to Ban Lung rather than dropping us at the building to exit Vietnam.
     There were only a few other people before us in the line to exit and after about twenty minutes we walked to the border check and to the building to enter Cambodia.  We got our visas fairly quickly but were waiting for almost two hours for a bus to take us to the city.  The Germans were out of US dollars and were afraid that they would be stuck not able to return to Vietnam and not able to change euros to buy visas to enter Cambodia but the offical changed them for them.  Maybe since it's a small and mostly unused by tourists border nobody tried to scam us.  
     After we had been waiting a while a tour bus (non-van-type-bus) filled with more Germans came and after they all got the visas they let the five of us onto the bus.  It was another two hours until Ban Lung but a lot less cramped.  
     The countryside is a bit clearcut but not so much as Vietnam.  The red dust covers almost everything but there is some green around.
     Once in town we borrowed the bus driver's phone to call our hotel and twenty minutes or so later a tuk-tuk came to pick us up.  I had no idea what it would look like until it arrived, but it turned out to be a motorbike harnessed to a vehicle like an open carriage.  Two benches faced eachother in a wall-less but canopied box with a space in between for luggage.
     Our hotel only has wifi in the half-outside communal area that is used as the lobby, the hotel restaurant, and a place to read or email.  A half dozen wood tables of various sizes are set up on a large balcony overlooking houses and a sparsely-treed valley.  Town is behing a hill but not a long walk.
     We had lunch and dinner at the hotel yesterday and don't see any reason to eat anywhere else for the rest of our time here.  They have many options, both more traditional foods and sandwiches, all with a choice of tofu-substitute.  I don't think I'll be able to blog for the next couple of days but no fear, we will be hiking (not dead).  

The Road Less Traveled

     On our last full day in Hoi An we rented bikes from the woman across the street from our hotel and biked the four kilometers to the beach.  The bikes were much better than the ones in Hue and the traffic much tamer, so though it was cloudy and drizzling it was a pretty pleasant ride.  The beach was wide, sandy, and deserted and we walked for a long time on it right on the edge of the really warm water.  A group of girls were playing on the beach and they beamed and said 'Hello,' to us before asking for a picture with my dad (the beard, maybe?).
      The next morning we had to wake up before six to catch the bus to Kon Tum.  It was more like a van than a bus and there was the tiniest bit of legroom, so when it turned out that this was it for the day we were alarmed.  Luckily we switched buses at eleven, unluckily we had been going nearly the opposite way we wanted to and had to backtrack.  Unluckily it filled up quickly and was the same kind of bus as before.  Unluckily we sat in the way back and the luggage from the trunk pushed the seat to lean forward.  Unluckily it filled in quickly and since we each took an end seat seat to maximize leg-room we weren't sitting next to eachother.  My dad was fine in his row but, I think it's a cultural thing, the woman who sat next to my mother and the person who sat next to me were practically sitting in our laps despite ample room between them.  I guess they put their bags there, but still.  It was an unpleasant couple of hours, practically leaning forward thanks to the back of the row (these are bench seats) and leaning into the window (and away from companion) as much as was physically possible.  A couple of times he grabbed my iPod and played with it for a little while, showing me his phone, speaking in rapid Vietnamese, and making various unintelligible hand-gestures.  Maybe there were a reason that no other foreigners were on our bus or any of the others that stopped for lunch where we did.
     Around two we stopped for lunch at a roadside collection of stands and had some pho.  The woman sitting next to my mom had gotten off and we had rearranged so I could sit between a different window and her but it was still a huge relief to get off for a little while and stretch my legs.  For the first time I could see the roadsigns but it was disheartening to see that Pleiku was still fifty-some kilometeres away and Kon Tum seventy more beyond that.
     The bus let us off a half dozen blocks from our hotel and we left it pretty soon after for a walk around the city and a vegetarian restaurant we found on the brilliant site Happy Cow.  Both the veggie restaurants in Kon Tum are on the same street and it was a pleasant walk.  The city is not, by Vietnamese standards, very polluted or crowded and it's quite a bit of the beaten trail so while people shout hellos at us they don't follow them up by 'You want to buy something?'-s.
    For no real reason after peeking into both restaurants we went with the first.  There was one dish offered and it, various faux meats (so tasty... I wish we could get these back home) and vegetables on a bed of rice, was very similar to the place in Hoi An.  We think that it might be some sort of religious thing but when we returned and there was an English-speaker there we forgot to ask.
     After trekking over to the travel agency to find that nobody spoke any English it was decided that we would take motorbike taxis with two people from the UK and a guide around to some of the nearby ethnic minority villages.  I would like interrupt the narrative here to assure my various relatives that, yes, I did sit on the back of a motorbike no, it wasn't at all irresponsible of my parents because I wore a helmet, we were on back roads, and the driver wasn't at all reckless.  Would this be a good time to break the news that we might be doing a motorbike loop in Laos in which case I would be driving my own bike?  Exciting.
     The gravel kicked up by the bike stung my legs and dust got in my eyes but it was nice to travel slower and get to take in the countryside.  Away from the sprawl there actually is countryside, contrary to what I feared after the ride to Ninh Binh.
     The first stop we made was at a corrugate tin Rong (meeting house) and soon after at a traditional graveyard.  Once a week people bring rice wine to the dead people and leave them TVs and bicycles. Graves are reused so the graveyard wasn't huge.  Each grave had a tin roof over a small area where gifts were left, surrounded by chickenwire.  There were ceramic pots in many graves but apparently they have the bottoms broken out of them so nobody steals them.  Our guide for this expedition was really great, speaking fluent English and obviously interested in what he was telling us.
     Our group of motorbikes was joined here by some kids touring the villages too but they seemed more interesting in taking pictures and video of the Foreigners.  They didn't even try to be disrete!  Or ask!  I guess I'm getting used to it, but when they follow you around for a couple of hours how many pictures do you really need?  Apparently you have to take them constantly for over an hour to get enough.
     Most of the houses in the villages are cement Vietnamese houses now but we stopped at one that was a cement traditional house--raised off the ground.  It felt  bad to be standing in somebody's yard and I'm not sure they were thrilled with it either but we didn't leave soon enough.
     Along the road there were rows of trees on a rubber plantation.  They take a long time to grow and there were a ton of them, each wrapped with a plastic cone a few feet of the ground to deflect water.   
___At two we regrouped to go to three other villages.  The first was right in the city and unimpressive, the second out a ways.  At the third village there was a funeral at the Rong and we skirted it not to intrude.  The dirt roads between the houses on stilts were filled with pigs, cows, piglets, dogs, and of course puppies.  Unsocial ones, but I got some pictures.           
                                                               ____Our last stop before lunch was at a place by a lake where we were shown manioc roots and walked around for a few minutes.  It was the heat of the day and quite dry so we were dropped back at the hotel and walked back to the street of veggie restaurants.  We tried the second one but were less impressed than with the first.  I'm getting a little sick of these fake-meat-rice combinations, though the meat at this one was realistic-looking and we had a moment of not really wanting to try it.  Afterwards we stopped for che at a stand on the road.


 

Manioc roots

          The river had a muddy and rocky bottom but the brits swam and we waded.  There were cows on a sandbank on the opposite side of the river and they decided to swim home while we were still there.  The waded most of the way but at one point it was too deep and now I think I see why they are land animals.
     We got snacks for dinner and treats from a bakery.  I was tempted by a green thing because it was green and it was a cake-like thing covered in a stretchy green thing.  It tasted really good but the pictures came out unappetizingly so I won't include them.
     For breakfast this morning we went back to the first veggie restaurant for pho and afterwards looked for a well-reviewed cafe called Eva Cafe for some real coffee for my parents.  It was a hike to get there but a lovely place, not really set back from the road but seeming to be out of the city.  The owner, Mr. An, was very nice and talked to us about a tour he runs.
      In South America people were so delighted I had a name they could pronounce that I went by Anita most of the time, here I am apparently 'An', which is apparently a boy's name.  Don't any of you dare call me anything but Anna when I get home.
     The bus to Pleiku comes every hour and leaves when it's full but it didn't take too long to fill up after we schlepped over to where they picked people up.  Everybody was really nice, helping us pack our luggage in, figure out where to get off, and get a taxi despite the absolute language barrier.
     For lunch we went to a hotel that was in the process of a major remodel and, judging by the chunks of cement and layer of dust carpeting it, was not open.  We found a second cab and went to a different hotel for indifferent food and this evening for our last night in Vietnam we are celebrating by not going anywhere and eating cashews and fruit.  Cambodia tomorrow!