Missed Saigon

Sorry about the stupid, corny titles of the postings, but I've got into a habit I'm finding it hard to shake....

Well, my last day in Siem Reap involved hiring a bicycle for a day and making a third visit to Angkor Wat (correct spelling). Re-visited the amazing main temple and dropped beads of sweat over the watercolour paper as I tried to make a sketch in the sticky heat.

Then it was a bus ride SE to Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh. It was weird to find myself staying in the middle of the city of 1 million in a rustic wooden 'beach'-hut type of affair built on stilts over the large Boeng Kak Lake with floating islands of hyacinth drifting about. The traffic was inaudible there and you could imagine you were miles away from the city. A storm blew up on the second night and rain sheeted it in thru the quaint lake-fronting restaurant and lightning and thunder did their bit nearby.

I did the obligatory visits to the killing fields (Choeng Ek) 14 km outside town where about 20,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge (skulls on display for photo opps) and a long visit to the S-21 prison in town where the KR imprisoned and interrogated those victims for a few months before their deaths. Mixed feelings about the importance of knowing about history (eg Angkor Wat and then here), but it also felt like a peculiar type of tourist attraction. Nearby to Choeng Ek is a firing range where those tourists so inclined can loose off a few rounds from the kinds of guns used by the Khmer Rouge. Harmless fun.

Then it was leaving PP on a boat down the Mekong river to Chau Doc in Vietnam. On the speed boat, I tried to cut a dash as Martin Sheen looking for Marlon Brandon on the P2 boat out of Apocalypse Now! There were plenty of Americans with me on the boat, but it was all stretching the imagination a bit too far.

Then a very long min-bus ride to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) where I'm slacking on the sightseeing and mostly enjoying my relatively plush hotel room with cable TV and air-con. I wasn't really expecting to find the meaning of life on this trip, but sightseeing in unlimited quantity is certainly not it. 'Helping people' along the way, even if only sharing some moisturising cream with them, has some meaning, I guess. But it doesn't really cut the philosophical mustard, does it?

Anyway, back to discussing the hear and now......

It all seems a bit strange to be in these areas with their dark pasts that don't seem that long agon to me. Most of the backpackers on this well-worn circuit are in their early-twenties though, and to them those dreadful times must seem as remote as the horrors of Germany and WWII does to me.

Well, I think I'll be taking a train up the Viet Nam coast, probably halfway up to someplace I can't remember the name of.

I was sad to part with John-the-guitar, but I have to say that travelling is *so* much easier without him. From being the heaviest-laden passenger, I'm now the lightest with my two modest-sized bags. On that flight from India to Thailand I was on with cabin baggage only!

Enough rambling, I've got cable TV to be watched

G