Cambodia

Well, it has been a while since we wrote some stuff and posted pictures. So, we made it to Hoi An. It is a very nice city, very french looking. This is the place to get things tailored for you, there are literally hundreds of tailor shops. Basically the town consists of tailor shops, art shops and restaurants. So we bought some clothes, and paintings here.

 

After Hoi An we took a night bus to Nha Trang and were left on the side of the road at 5:00 in the morning. It was super nice to finally be somewhere warm again, so we hit the beach. The waves were super big and super fun to swim in. We rented some bikes here, explored the city, and got sweet sunburns.

 

a typical tourist pose

Next we went to Dalat, which is up in the central highlands of Vietnam. We rented a motorbike for the two days we were here, which was really fun / a bit scary. We spent alot of time driving around trying to find this coffee plantation that we had been told about, but is was off the edge of our map and the locals were never too much help. That was okay though, it was just fun cruising around the mountain roads. We did eventually find a coffee plantation (not the one we were looking for though) and ate a green coffee bean - not so tasty. We also hiked up a really touristy mountain called Lang Biang mountain; most people pay to take a jeep up though.

After some time away from the ocean, we felt it was time to get back, so we went to Mui Ne. The Lonely Planet spoke very highly of Mui Ne, so we were pretty excited. It is kind of a strange town though, there is only the one street that runs along the ocean for something like 10km. The ocean side is all owned by super expensive hotels, so it is tough to get to the beach, we always snuck through some restaurant. The day we spent on the beach was ultra windy, so lying on our towels we were just getting plastered with sand. We tried sitting on some of the many beach chairs, but got kicked off because they belonged to the expensive hotels. So we spent the day buying overpriced drinks at a restaurant so we could use their beach chairs. Mui Ne is the place to go if you want to kite surf; there were like a hundred of them sailing around the beach, somehow managing not to get tangled.

 

a chain of fishermen in their little saucer boats

After all this, it was time for the big city again. Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon has 7 million people and is pretty crazy. We saw the War reminence museum, which was pretty depressing. We were hoping to figure out what the war was all about, but it never really explained, so we are still kinda confused. We also saw a water puppet show which is a really strange puppet show where the puppets come out of the water. It was pretty cool, but weird and the music was really loud and a bit annoying. Rush hour traffic is completely nuts here! The streets are too full so the motorbikes take over the sidewalk - so scary! All in all Vietnam was pretty cool; the only thing was that everything was twice as expensive because of New Years. In Vietnam they celebrate chinese new year for two weeks after and that was the exact time we were there. Oh well.

We got to Phnom Penh, Cambodia a few days ago. We were hoping to have about a week and a half here, but the way things went, we will only have about a week. We visited the killing fields and the S-21 prison museum here. They are places where people were tortured and killed under the Khmer Rouge in the 70's. Again it was a pretty depressing afternoon, though it was good to learn some of their history.

So that was a long post, but we have done so much, and we totally could have written more.