Mekong Delta and the Beginnings of our Holiday in Cambodia

 The Mekong Delta was great. There is a definite change of pace compared to the rest of Vietnam, everything seems unrushed and everybody happy. We travelled on so many different types of boat, and the occasional bus during our three days. The rowboat on the last day was my favourite experience as we got expertly navigated by a local woman through a brightly coloured floating village where everybody’s going about their daily lives and their dogs watch you float by from their porches, all in the early morning sunshine. The floating market we visited on the second day went by quickly but seeing all the buying and selling from the big boats stuffed with fruits and vegetables to the small boats was fantastic and the big boats even advertised what they sold by tying a selection to the mast!

As part of the trip we learnt how the people of this area make money from the natural resources of the Delta which was really interesting. We visited a brick factory and saw the thousands of clay bricks they produce and then sell on - 30 for $1! A family business to do with coconut processing where nothing is wasted of the coconut and they make sugary candy, coconut drinks, coconut toffee and the shell of the coconut gets pressed into wooden souvenirs such as salad servers that we bought with some of our left over Vietnamese money. We also visited a fruit farm which grew all the exotic fruits of Vietnam, a fish farm which consisted of a house built over a huge square net that fish swim into to get fed through a hole in the floor and then never leave and of course rice fields that when glimpsed from the boat stretched endlessly into the horizon.

The lunch on the first day of the trip is worth mentioning because we had this HUGE ugly, angry looking Mekong fish presented to us. He tasted so good! We had fresh spring rolls prepared in front of us which consisted of a bit of fish, mint leaf, pineapple, and rice accompanied with a dipping sauce. Mmmmm! We then had about 3 other dishes all delicious but none of them could beat the spectacle of the fish.





The border crossing was no problem at all, we had an hour wait for the visas so we ate something in the border cafe and by the time we were finished they were done! Getting to the border was the most interesting as we took a 3 hour slow boat. All the houses were set back on land with stilts rather than in or very nearby the water as we’d seen previously. Children would run to wave and blow kisses to the boat (one girl even pulled different poses with her fingers making the peace sign – I blame the Japanese!) and people just carried on as they always do crossing from one side of the river to the other in a row boat to visit friends, casting fishing nets from small boats to catch lunch or ferrying huge amounts of vegetables from the fields on the back of a pedal bike over a rickety looking wooden bridge - it was fascinating.

Cambodia so far has been really friendly and everyone always has a smile on their face even if half the people we talk to are tuk-tuk drivers looking for a fare... The Khmer food that we’ve tried has been fantastic and the beer seems good too which is always positive! The money can be a little bit confusing at first because they mainly use US Dollars but you can also use Cambodian Riel mainly for smaller things. This means that a lot of the time we’re using the two currencies together – to pay $4.50 you might put down $4 and 2000 Riel. The temples in Phnom Penh remind us a lot of Bangkok and rest of Thailand’s glitzy and slightly gaudy style. We took a walk around the main sights and the river front on our first full day taking in some more French Colonial architecture combined with monuments, temples, wats and even the national museum! Phnom Penh is certainly a busy city and we’ve found finding certain cafes has not been the easiest as streets and buildings are given a number whenever they are built meaning you might see buildings 14, 36 and 108A all sitting next to each other. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the cafes mentioned in the Lonely Planet have closed making them impossible to find.

Yesterday we went to S-21 and the Killing Fields. S-21 was a school that got turned into a prison and interrogation / torture area by the Khmer Rouge an extreme Marxist style party who took over Cambodia from 1975 – 1978. During their time in power they abolished money and forced everyone from the cities to become slaves in the fields working 12 -15 hour days and receiving nothing but watery rice for food. Naturally the leaders were suspicious of everyone including their own party members thinking KGB or US informants were everywhere so they rounded people up and tortured them until they lied about whatever they wanted to hear. Then truck loads of these self-confessed ‘spies’ and ‘traitors’ were taken to the killing fields 15 km out of Phnom Penh and savagely killed by most often a blunt instrument such as a lead pipe and pushed into a mass grave with hundreds of others. It’s appalling to think that this happened just over 30 years ago and the leaders behind it have still not been punished. S-21 had portrait photos of each of the victims, some photos were also taken after the torture everything is mostly the way it was with tiny cells and barbed wire covering any escape routes. It’s still quite a brightly coloured building and so ordinary looking which makes it all the more chilling for the crimes that were committed there.

Hope everyone who reads this blog is doing well just a quick note to say on Flickr you can browse by 'Sets' (Places we’ve been) as well as 'Collections' (Countries) if you want to look through any of our older photos it’ll be much quicker to find than scrolling through our Photostream.

Love C&K xxx