Tet’s Up

The holiday season is over for another year and I’m back at work.  The university is full of noisy students wondering what they’ve let themselves in for and depressed teachers back after a longish break.  ( Only 3 weeks, most universities would have more but we really work for our living here. )

The roads are full of rush hour motorbikes and that makes my ride home after work a lot more interesting.  I have to be constantly on the alert and practise my 360 degree vision skills if I want to get home in one piece.

Tet, or Vietnamese New Year, is celebrated a bit like we do Christmas.  There’s food, drink, relatives and gift giving. Money in red envelopes is the normal gift so there’s no problem having to take the unwanted present back to the shops the next day.  Instead of Christmas trees people have blossom clad branches, often a whole shrub but, as there is no discernable season here, the branches are stripped of leaves and have bright yellow flowers glued to them.  Yellow seams to be the colour of spring no matter where you live.  And just like Christmas trees, once it’s all over the branches are dumped somewhere and forgotten about. 

I’m back at work for the next 12 week with a new set of students but mercifully there is a short break at the beginning of May when we have a long weekend.  Cambodia gave me a taste for holidaying, relaxing and travelling which has taken a while to shake off.

Cambodia

We are back from our holiday, the girls are back in England and I’m starting to think about my next outing in just over 3 months time.

Although I’m back home I’m too lazy/busy to write a blog entry so pinched this from wikitravel or somewhere like that.  It sums up our holiday pretty well.

Get in

You can get there by plane to Phnom Penh or Siem Reap.  It’s inexpensive and runs frequently, but the bus is cheaper.  It does mean that you arrive late and tired but think of the planet and your bank balance.  You can save a bit of time and money by taking a sleeper bus but these can often be replaced by a regular bus with reclining seats so you don’t actually sleep at all and spend the next day recuperating.  The people in the reclining seat in front of you will try to recline their seat, crushing your knees and make sitting impossible.   If they attempt to do this, brace your legs and defend your space.

Sleep

The Green Garden Home in Siem Reap has a lovely pool.  The Cove Beach has great views but you pay a hefty price for them.  The Chhaya Hotel is a self contained backpacker ghetto and very cheap.

See

The ancient city of Angkor is well worth a few days and is so good they named a beer after it.  The vast Tonle Sap lake and surrounding waterways.  Serendipity Beach, which should be renamed Predictability Beach as every bar sells exactly the same as all the others.

Drink

Angkor beer at any time but especially during happy hour, which usually runs from 5pm to 10pm.  Try to ignore the taste and believe its tag line, “My country, my beer”.  You can also get Mojitos crammed with mint.

Eat

Cheese burgers, a mild creamy curry akin to Thai but different, crunchy salad with a mouth-numbingly volcanic chili dressing and fried eggs every day for breakfast.

Do

Get a massage from trained masseurs who really know what they are doing. The next day your back will feel like it’s had a tough workout.  Swim in a crystal-clear, turquoise-blue, coral-filled tropical sea.  Cycle around and clamber over ancient ruins and marvel at the carvings. Travel by boat through a birdwatchers paradise to Batambang, Cambodia’s second biggest, but quietest, city.

Get

A pedicure on the beach.  A foot massage in a night market.  Various hippy bracelets sold by children everywhere.  Cheap t-shirts that won’t survive the first wash.  Sunburn after swimming too much swimming without sunscreen.

Happy New Year

It's Tet, Vietnam's equivalent of Chinese New Year and  all the indications are that it's best to get away from the transport chaos and inflated hotel prices that come with the holiday period .  I've taken a very long bus ride to Siem Reap in Cambodia this time joined by my daughters Charlotte and Alice.  The bus journey was long, tiring and very, very cold as the driver had the air conditioning turned down to an icy blast for the 15 hours it took us to make the trip. 
Siem Reap and the templates of Ankor are worth the journey and the hotel had a pool.  We had two days looking around Ankor and a day resting in the town. We took a tuk-tuk on the first day and cycled on the second.  It was hot but not too hot and cycling down the shady roads was a pleasure.  You pay a lot for the access but once in you can clamber over everything without anyone stopping you and they are impressive.  The souvenir sellers can be annoying, pushing postcards, guide books and t-shirts at you that you don't want but otherwise it's a very peaceful experience.  The whole area is kept clean by a small army of workers in green uniforms who spend their days sweeping up leaves on the sides of the roads in a vain attempt at  tidying up a tropical forest.  At least some of the $20 a day fee goes into the local economy.

We left Siem Reap by  boat to Battambang crossing the massive Tonle Sap lake and winding through a narrow river to the town.  Eight hours of bird and village life watching along the bank, engine noise and hard wooden seats.  There were scenes of unbelievable poverty along the way where families live in crude wooden shacks and catch the tiny fish that fill the water.  Sadly plastic bags are everywhere marking the high water mark on an otherwise very natural scene.  Perhaps the cleaners of Ankor would be better employed here.

After a long, noisy day we arrived in Battambang and walked the few hundred meters to the hotel area taking pleasure in stretching our legs after sitting so uncomfortably on those narrow benches all day. For a fraction of the price and half the time we could have taken a bus but, as I keep telling the girls, we wouldn't have had the experience.

Battambang is a town for locals with a handful of backpacker hotels and restaurants in contrast to Siem Reap whose sole function is to cater for tourists of all pockets many of them rather deep judging by the number of 'international spas' springing up all over the town.  It's a bit scruffy and dusty but very cheap.  The main street is busy with cars and motorbikes but the side streets are quieter and the restaurant owners are happy to see tourists sitting in their restaurant chairs reading and not buying much throughout the hot afternoons.  We had a ride out into the countryside this morning to a couple of temples on top of small hills with great views of the countryside around them but other wise the day has been lazy, with us not doing much at all.  Tomorrow we leave for Phnom Penh on the 8am bus for a mere 6 hours.