The trip to Cambodia was sort of an extra addition to our trip while we were planning it a few months ago. We wanted to see all of Southeast Asia while we were there but its almost impossible to in 18 days. We decided to just plan an excursion to neighboring Cambodia, home of the beautiful, ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat. Before going to Cambodia I only knew a few things about the country: Angkor Wat is there, they have those dancers and the roofs of temples look cool. Other than that, it was like stepping back in time as we crossed the Cambodian border the next morning.

Vietnam and Cambodia are right next to each other but have very distinct differences in its people, culture and history. When we crossed the border, you could feel you were in Cambodia. It's a country with wood houses set two meters above the ground on stilts to prevent water and tigers from getting in, petrol sold in Pepsi bottles every hundred meters along the side of the road, kids selling books and gifts to tourists, adults selling fried spiders and crickets from plates balanced on their heads, men riding on the roof of a van because there's no more room inside, hundreds of chicken trussed up on the back of a single moto, cows wandering the marketplaces among fruit and open-air meat butchers, ornate gold-flecked temples with large Buddha statues, uniformed school children walking home in flocks, flat, rolling marshland with palm trees that reach storeys into the air and finally the slightly darker skinned people with their smiling eyes and an unfortunate past.

In case many of you didn't know, less than 40 years ago well over two millions Cambodians died from Genocide. It's a sad story and one you should look into. A good book to read is "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung. It was the book Callie and I were reading while we were in Cambodia and it makes you realize what the people went through and how they too, just like Vietnam, are rebuilding their country.

Anyways, on a less depressing note, I was able to see Cambodia and it's people first-hand on the 10-hour bus ride from Saigon to Siem Reap. We drove almost across the entire country, through villages, cities and the countryside. We stayed for three nights in Siem Reap and spent two full days exploring Angkor Wat. The name can be confusing as Angkor Wat (the temple complex) contains many other temples than just the famous picture of Angkor Wat (the main temple). For our first day exploring the temples we hired a tuk-tuk (like a moto with a passenger cabin) driver and a tour guide, which we highly recommend getting for your first day there. He brought us to all the main temples and explained a lot of the history and carvings of the temple. His english was fluent and I was amazed at all the other tour guides around us speaking fluent German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese! The Cambodians have a knack for languages. We explored Bayon and Baphoun with its endless corridors, carvings, and Buddha faces staring out from every corner. Then he took us to some other temples like Phimeanakas, "The palace of Heaven", Preah Palilay with its famous trees that were cut down a week earlier, the Terrace of the Leper King dedicated to Yamu, the God of Death, and the Terrace of Elephants which is where the Cambodian king would sit to watch horse-racing and elephant fighting. The last temple we went to was the biggest one, Angkor Wat with its hundreds and hundreds of meters of bas-relief carvings. We were glad to have our guide then so he could explain the epic stories in all the carvings, like how the monkey-king Hanuman raised his army and went to hell to kill all the demons and save Vishnu's wife. Hindu mythology is cool!

The second day we hired just the tuk-tuk driver and went exploring ourselves. We went to some further-flung temples like Banteay Srei with it's intricately detailed carving that took an hour to get to. One the way back we visited my 2nd favorite temple, the red-stoned Pre Rup with it's lofty, moss-ridden towers. After a quick lunch we went to my most favorite temple in Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm. It's the only temple left in its natural state and its where Tomb Raider was filmed. It lies in ruins with gigantic 400 year old silk cotton tree roots strangling the stone. It had an air of timelessness being in it and it was the one I enjoyed the most. We continued on to Ta Keo, the steepest temple which you had to climb on all fours to reach the top, and then to Preah Kahn, the second largest temple after Angkor Wat that used to be a large city. Our last stop was the water temple, Neak Pean which was commemorated to Budda achieving Nirvana.
Before leaving Siem Reap we had time to check out the amazing central and night markets where we picked up a few things. The backpackers motto, "Same same but different" definitely applies in these markets. Every single stall was selling the exact same thing at the "same" price (depending on how good you haggle) so it was frustrating trying to find something original. I still bought a few shirts and gifts for dirt cheap. The strange thing in Cambodia is that it's currency, the Riel, and the American dollar are both used. They're very interchangeable with $1 USD fixed at 4000 Riel. No coins are used so a 100 Riel bill is technically 2.5 cents.

After our three-day stay in Siem Reap we headed back to Phnom Penh to stay a night. We explored the markets there, the National museum, and randomly ran into Callie's friend from Kenya before heading to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum all together. It's a high school that was turned into a torture facility and it showed all the original rooms and torture instruments. It also gave a timeline of Pol Pot's regime and explained how it started and ended. We wanted to visit the Cambodian killing fields too but we had enough depression for one day. That night, we fought off the street kids in order to sit and chill on an outdoor patio and then, after a brief episode of losing my VISA card (I got it back the next morning) headed to bed for an early start. The next morning we took a bus back to Saigon, ending our short tour of Cambodia. I had come into the country four days earlier knowing nothing and left four days later grateful for the things I had seen, experienced and learned.

For more pictures, go to Callie's photos.

Christmas this year was definitely not like all the other years I've had back in Canada. It's usually the family all gathered together to have a home-cooked meal with the Christmas tree set up and snow falling outside (the typical Hallmark card). I certainly wasn't expecting to be riding on the back of a moto for one and a half hours through crazy Saigon traffic and then heading to a crazy theme park with extended family I had met a week earlier!

We got into Saigon on the morning of Christmas Day and hired (more like haggled) a taxi to my grandma's place. We were leaving for Cambodia early the next morning so we decided to stay in a hotel that night, right next to where the bus was leaving. After a quick lunch and time to swap Christmas gifts, my uncle and cousins loaded our packs on their motos and we all headed off to the hotel in downtown Saigon. It was crazy enough watching Saigon traffic from a car but it's even crazier on a moto! My mom and Callie were on the back of my cousins' motos and I was on the back of my uncle's, and it was clear he knew how to deal with the traffic. I was passing semi-trucks at 50km/hr close enough that I could reach out and touch them!

Navigating downtown Saigon is like being in a Labyrinth. None of the streets run at right-angles and there are even some traffic circles that have six or seven streets feeding into it! What normally takes an hour to get to the hotel took us an hour and a half. We were cruising through alleyways, down side streets and across traffic circles, all in the midst of afternoon traffic. My uncle was doing his best to find our hotel but he was starting to get frustrated. He asked a few strangers at stop lights if they knew where it was and a few pointed him in the right direction. Once we knew where we were going, my uncle sped up and the others had a tough time trying to catch up to him. It was a few minutes later we realized my cousin and Callie weren't behind us anymore! They had been caught by a red light and had to stop but we didn't notice and kept going. We waited on the side of the road to look for them in all the traffic, but after five minutes it was apparent we had been split up. We decided to continue on and luckily when we finally found the hotel, Callie was only a few minutes behind.

We took a few minutes to drop off our bags and then immediately headed to a place called the Dam Sen amusement park. It's in the lonely planet as "quirkiest" park in Vietnam. I would call it.. more.. random! With our train conductor dressed as a Mrs. Santa Claus, we spent a few hours looking at alligators, snakes and elephants, plastic dinosaurs, 101 (plastic) dalmatians, golden dragons, five-foot fish, cat and mouse mascots, a communist-egyptian monument, Buddhist pagodas, ferris wheels, rollercoasters, a Disney-themed children's area, a zen garden, mirror mazes, swan paddle boats and Che Guevara statues. It was a pretty awesome (and different!) way to spend Christmas with relatives.

Once it started getting dark out, we decided to go and said our goodbyes to my mom and cousins. We weren't meeting up with them again so this was the last time I was going to see them. My mom helped us get a taxi (without haggling) and we took a taxi back to our hotel. We had left at the perfect time because it started pouring rain on our way back to the hotel, like it had been building for days and finally decided to open up. It was the first rain we'd had since being in Vietnam but fortunately we were heading to Cambodia the next morning and leaving the rain behind. We learned later that the rain that started that evening didn't stop for the next four days.

My friend from Canada told me a while ago she was sending me a care package and asked if there was anything I wanted. Back home I used to make the tasty Canadian cuisine of poutine - french fries, cheese and gravy - on a regular basis so I asked her to send over some gravy packets. After all my searching, I'm fairly certain they don't exist in Japan. Well, when I received the package a few weeks later there were at least eight different packets of all different types. Thanks Alyssa! I caught the flu this weekend and missed two days of snowboarding :( so I decided to treat myself to my first poutine in Japan. It was deeelicious!

From Rach Gia we took a 3-hour speedboat to Phu Quoc island, Vietnam's largest island. We had gotten our tickets the day before so we were pushed to the back of the boat into a small, cramped cabin. At first it was like being in an airplane, but 2.5 hours later over choppy waters and it certainly didn't feel as smooth as one. Once we got to the island though, I immediately forgot about the boat ride. The island was beautiful! To kick off our stay, just as Callie was standing on the plank (of wood) to get off, the boat started to pull away! Luckily there were a crowd of mototaxi men ready there to catch her before she fell in the waterwwith her pack still on! After that episode, we caught a 30 minute shuttle to Duong Dong town and walked 15 minutes from the bus stop to our hotel. We stopped for lunch on the way and that's when I got my first glimpse of the palm trees and the beach. I literally was in paradise! All the stress fell away once I realized the travel we had been doing the past three days were over. We'd finally arrived somewhere to relax!

To be honest, I don't really remember how we filled our days on the island. It was mainly sleeping in, reading on the beach, walking along the shore, going for swims or going into town for supper. We stayed at a beach-side resort that was a ten second walk from the beach and the weather stayed a perfect 30 degrees the entire time. Phu Quoc is also the only place in Vietnam where the sun sets on the ocean. There was a night market in town so we also went there to explore and had fresh Red Snapper for Christmas Eve dinner. That night some of the resorts had beach parties with dance-remix Christmas songs and were lighting paper, candle, hot-air balloons over the ocean.

On our 2nd last day we decided to go snorkeling. We took a boat out to the An Thoi islands and spent the morning snorkeling and relaxing on the boat with the few other tourists there. The water wasn't very clear and there was garbage from the shrimp boats (I got freaked out by a plastic bag that I thought was a jellyfish) but I still enjoyed my first time snorkeling. Although it was like the time I went surfing in the ocean and accidentally swallowed salt water... yechh.

The morning of our last day on the island, Christmas Day, we packed our things and got a taxi to the airport all relaxed and slightly tanner. We were flying back to Saigon on $55 tickets! A two day boat ride down the Mekong would be equivalent to an hour flight back. It was sad to say goodbye to the beach, but it was only the first part of our Vietnam adventure..

Here are Callie's photos of Phu Quoc.

After a full day in Saigon meeting more relatives (including a Buddhist uncle) and spending a few hours at a safari-themed park with my cousins (check out Callie's blog), we woke up early the next morning to catch a tour bus to start our two-day journey exploring the Mekong Delta. Two hours on the air-conditioned bus brought us to a small fishing village called My Tho where we boarded a motorboat and set off.

From the boat we watched the daily life of the people who live along the Mekong and the floating markets where they go to buy, sell and exchange goods. Just like Saigon, the motorboat is the Mekong Delta's "moto", with the water being their roadways. The numerous rivers and tributaries of the Mekong are much easier to navigate than the thick, surrounding jungles so people have settled along its banks.

Our first stop was in Ben Tre where we watched them make rice paper, coconut candies, banana paper (?) and stuff that looked like rice crispy cereal (like puffed wheat.. except.. puffed rice). It was a small island with a market and filled with boatloads of tourists. After another hour down the river we stopped and had lunch at a riverside restaurant (with alligators) which included a traditional Vietnamese music performance. From there it was onto Vinh Long where wedisembarked at the docks and were allowed to wander its famous street markets for the afternoon. From there we boarded a bus for a two hour drive and a ferry ride to Can Tho (the biggest city in the Mekong Delta and where my mum is from) where we stayed the night. All of the people in our tour group got dropped off at a hotel, but somehow we had been upgraded to a classy, river-side, 3-star hotel for free! We caught a cab to the hotel (that our tour guide paid for) and spent the night exploring Can Tho.

The next morning we got up early to see the Cai Be floating market. Each boat would have a long pole with the fruit or veggie hanging off it to tell others what they were selling. Families would come out on their boats and spend the morning buying groceries with their dogs and children playing on the decks. After an hour we moved to a quieter part of the Mekong to cruise down narrow rivers and streams. The local kids, hearing our boat engine, would come to the banks and wave at us as we passed. A few, less sympathetic children pretended to shoot at us. For a light lunch we stopped for at a fruit garden and ended up chatting with a Swiss and German couple for a while. After a visit to a rice husking mill, we heading back to Can Tho to have a (real) lunch of fried crisp field mouse! It was like small, delicious chicken.

Once the tour ended after lunch, the entire group boarded the bus to return to Saigon. We had changed our itinerary to go to Phu Quoc so we split off from the group and went our own way. A Swiss couple we met (who were also going to Phu Quoc) took a cab with us to the bus station where we caught a three hour bus ride (for $3.50) to the coastal town of Rach Gia. The "bus" was actually a mini-van crammed with 14 people and luggage. I attempted, unsuccessfully, to take a nap while our driver (who liked to speed) was swerving around cars and motos over the rough and uneven road. Once we made it to Rach Gia, the driver didn't drop us off at our hotel and went to the bus station instead. The four of us were staying at the same hotel so, while being bombarded by mototaxis, we managed to navigate the 15 minute walk through Rach Gia to the hotel. Not surprisingly, being loaded down with all our packs, we got quite a few stares walking down the street. The hotel we checked into wasn't the greatest I've ever stayed in, even though it did have sexy tiles in the bathroom, phantom cockroaches and MTV on every channel. We ventured out to eat Hot Pot for dinner before succumbing to exhaustion and falling asleep at 10 o'clock, ending our two-day adventure down the Mekong.

Here's Callie's post with a link to her pictures.

Callie and I touched down in Ho Chi Minh City on the night of December 18th after a comfortable, five-hour flight from Seoul. Stepping off the plane into the 30-degree humidity was like walking into a sauna, reminding me of the time I landed in Tokyo in the middle of the summer. It was 11 o’clock at night but it felt like noon... and this was their winter. I couldn’t begin to imagine what summer was like.

My mom and grandma were at the entrance to the airport waiting for us as we landed. I hadn't seen my mom in five months but she was easy to pick out from the crowd of hundreds. We hugged for a brief reunion before I was introduced to my small and feisty grandma, whom I was meeting for the first time. She looked happy to see me but couldn't speak any English so my mom had to act as translator. A few weeks earlier my brother, sister, brother-in-law and niece moved to Vietnam from Canada but weren't there at the airport to meet us. I learned they had left the city before I arrived to spend time on the beach and I was to meet up with them a few weeks later. They wanted some peace and quiet after the shock of moving to a busy city in a new country and surrounded by extended family, so they escaped to Nha Trang.

I was unprepared for the sights and sounds of Saigon (as the locals still call it). Riding to my grandma's on the way from the airport, even at close to midnight, the city was still alive with people. It truly is the moto capital of the world. You looked everywhere and saw an endless sea of motos (not quite motorbikes) on the streets and parked on sidewalks. Motos are small, cheaper than cars and over four million people own one, just under half the city's population. They’re used for everything from getting groceries to moving furniture, even panes of glass! They’re used like minivans with babies in the arms of a parent and the other children tucked between them, all piled on a single moto. The traffic was like watching a school of fish. The larger vehicles moved like slow whales with the small motos simply flowing around them. Drivers and motorists alike honked constantly to let others know they're there, filling the city with noise. Only in the downtown area were there traffic lights at intersections. Everywhere else had four-way stops... without the stopping. Crossing the road was like playing Frogger - you had to stop for them, not the other way around. It was sheer chaos, but somehow it all worked.

Watching the city pass me by, it was easy to see a country rebuilding itself after years of war. A country still healing its wounds. Vietnam seemed to be a large, organized mess, doing its best to catch up with the modern world. Less than 30 years ago the landscape was riddled with land mines and Agent Orange was wreaking havoc on nature. The people in the South were learning how to live under a Communist regime, millions of people fled the country on boats (including my parents) and the ones who stayed behind had to learn how to live in a war-ravaged country. Only 20 years ago did the government adopt a free-market economy and since then, tourism has exploded. With this new flush of income, the country has developed itself into a world-class tourist destination and quality of life has improved, but the majority of Vietnamese still live on dollars a day.

During the war, hundreds of thousands of people left their villages to escape the bombings in the countryside. Many of them moved to urban areas or refugee camps located at the edges of cities, leading to Saigon becoming one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Nowadays, shops, marketplaces and restaurants line the streets selling everything from bike parts, electronics, and art to t-shirts, shoes and knock-off Louie Vutton. Construction is everywhere. Empty lots become apartment buildings, dirt roads become paved and all the available land (even around cemeteries and graveyards) is being used for housing. Street merchants selling goods with nothing to do or nowhere to go squat down on the dusty road, waiting for the occasional customer. Mototaxi's ask every tourist where they're going and if they need a ride. Children and old ladies wearing rice hats walk the sidewalks hawking fruits, used books and sunglasses. Workers have iced coffee in the shade of an outdoor cafe and talk about trivial things like the weather. That's what Vietnam is today. But in spite of it all, being a third-world country with a troubled past, people are happy. Life simply goes on.

Happy New Year!!

I'm back from my vacation now and slowly easing my way back into my normal routine. The first few days back were pretty tough to adjust to from the 30 degree heat of Southeast Asia to snowy Hokkaido. I got back to find over a meter of snow on my car! I didn't have a shovel (or gloves!) so it took me 30 minutes with a window scraper and umbrella to clear off all the snow. It was a cold way to start the year!

I spent the last few days trying to organize my pictures (and myself) to write about my winter vacation with the family in Vietnam and my trip to Cambodia. I don't even know where to start! I haven't been able to sort out my thoughts for long enough to think of what to write so bear with me! In the meantime, you can see all the pics that I put on Facebook from the trip:

Ho Chi Minh City
Mekong Delta
Phu Quoc Island
Nha Trang
Angkor Wat, Cambodia