Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The last couple of days have been spent in Saigon, and then in transit to Phnom Penh. Met up with Raw, who is now known as The Boss by his bunch of merry fellow Gecko travellers. A veritable salad bowl of characters - from spoilt daddy's girl Gap year students, to people just trying to find themselves abroad. We spent Monday wandering around Saigon and seeing the war museums. More enlightening stories about American war crimes. We then went out in Saigon for the night, with 3 Gap year students. Two of them were depressingly immature spoilt unworldly twits, which made the evening an interesting departure from the normal Raw style drunken debaucherous decadence (such as the night of disgrace in Prague)
The next day, I departed for Phnom Penh via Chau Doc, along the Mekong river. A party of about 6 travellers, we took a bus for the South of Vietnam, and then stayed overnight in Chau Doc (border town). It rained, and we lacked scenery. We even had to trudge around in the along the mucky banks of the river for about 10minutes in the rain to get to the boat, and one of the girls managed to slip. Ewww messy. The boat passed by some floating markets, which are dudes on boats selling vegetables. Nothing impressive in an overcast sky.
The next day (today) we took a row boat, then slow boat, then fast boat along the Mekong for about 6 hours in total, until reaching the Cambodian border. However, today was superb - cruising along the Mekong, sleeping on the boat in the baking sun. The 2 day boat trip was a sure winner over the 8 hour bus journey. Bus journey's are scabby, and I have to take 2 more big bus journey's before i get to Bangkok.
One of the travellers in the group is an ethnic Vietnamese American, and consequently gets marriage offers from all the Vietnamese girls we meet on the tour. As these are more pure hearted offers, it is a welcome relief to the kind of offers that the last group of travellers I was with were blighted by.
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