Rivers

Hi all,
Sorry I’ve been so slow to post. After leaving HCMC, we spent three days (with limited internet access) wandering through the Mekong Delta in the general direction of Chau Doc on the Cambodian border. From there we spent two nights in Phnom Penh (also with limited e-mail access) and two nights on a boat with a lot of French people heading up the Tonle Sap (a Mekong like river) toward Siem Reap and Angkor Wat (and with no internet access at all). We spent three nights in Siem Reap and are now on the beach in Thailand looking out over a magnificent seascape.
I’ll post something about Phnom Penh later (general theme: Cambodia is a candidate for the title of most screwed over country of the last century) and something about Angkor Wat after that.
1. After a bit too much time looking at floating markets and floating villages, after a bit too much time hearing about how to make rice cakes, we spent one great afternoon bike riding through the Mekong delta near Can Tho. The population density felt not much different from that of an American suburb, with lots of people wandering around (it was just before Tet), lots of houses, some little more than thatched huts, others pretty substantial—with a boat in every garage-- and plenty of cows, ducks, chickens, There were paths for bikes and motorcycles, but not for cars. But it was all astonishingly lush, with little streams, patches of dense tress, open rice paddies. The first ten pictures are all from the Mekong, about half from the bike ride.
2. After two nights in Phnom Penh, we got on the Toum Tiew, a ten cabin boat that goes back and forth up and down the Tonle Sap between PP and Siem Reap. Although the food was terrific—lots of fresh fish—this was not a luxury boat. We think that the Captain, dressed always in whites, was sent over from central casting. Serge Prunier--Directeur generale, Commissaire de bord, Commandant a bord du Toum Tiew (I quote his business card)—is a French ex-pat, married to a Cambodian, has been living in Cambodia for 17 years. In a boat filled mostly with French speakers (12 of 18 passengers) he did simultaneous translations of himself, replete with apologies for his poor English. His chain smoking confirmed that he has not been in France for a long time. The trip, like much else we have done, was bizarre. We didn’t go very far: because it’s dry season, we could go up Tonle Sap, the river, but not Tonle Sap, the lake, which makes up about half the distance from PP to Siem Reap. For the rest of the trip we went by speedboat. (Actually, we went by two speedboats since the motor to the first speedboat conked out about half way across the lake and another had to come to get us.) Most of the time we were on board, we were anchored at Kampong Chhnang (the two h’s are not a typo), a dusty little town with absolutely nothing of interest. Even the demonstration of how to dry fish—the town’s biggest business—had to be called off on account of Tet. The highlight/lowlight of the trip was an oxen cart ride—tow oxen and one driver per passenger—from a landing someplace on the Tonle Sap to see a Wat of no particular interest. (You can see Captain Serge on the back of a little red motorcycle herding the oxen drivers. I tried to get a picture of him riding while smoking but it turns out to be hard to take could photos from the back of an oxen cart.) If we were inclined to such things, the experience would have been humiliating. Since we are not, it was kind of amusing, both to us and to the villagers who watched us parade by.
3. Both in the Mekong and on the Tonle Sap, we were in the hands of tour guides. I had arranged the tours in the Mekong both because it’s a hard area to travel in and because I was concerned (probably rightly) about Tet. On the Tonle Sap, it was an unavoidable part of the boat trip. Silly way to travel. The guides told us stuff we were not interested in—like how to make rice cakes—but, despite an anthropological tone to the tours (lacking any real sights talk about how to dry fish?), left out just about everything we would have been interested in. That said, when we came to the border of Viet Nam and Cambodia, we had a problem. Naomi’s visa had been stamped with an exit date of Feb 4 (instead of Feb 14). The border guard on the Vietnamese side wanted to send us back to Saigon to fix the visa. But we had a guide with us—a specialist, no less, in running Westerners across the border on the way from Chau Doc to Phnom Penh. And with a little hard work on his part, plus one hundred dollars from us, we got through. We could not have done it on our own and it was certainly worth listening to another three demonstrations of how to make rice cakes.