The rest of Vietnam and into Cambodia

We arrived in Hoi An-the town of paper lanterns. It was a very pretty town, a hippy oasis with a riverfront very very nice restaurants and shops. Here we bought ourselves a large box of paper lanterns to post home. After a couple of days of chilling out we headed on the bus to Dalat (a mountain town in the Central highlands). Dalat was a bit of a surprise as the weather was the coolest we have experienced since arriving in Beijing, just like a British summer complete with rain showers. Here they even grew strawberries and broccoli! The hillsides were pine forests as far as you could see, just like the French Alps complete with French style villas (very unlike the rest of Vietnam). The French obviously loved it here and as they occupied the country for 80 years they built plenty of places to live.

In Dalat we visited a back street hairdresser for Craig to have a trim, but he ended up having a shave and his ears cleaned too with what we can only describe as tools found in a dentist.A good job really as the girl jumped in joy after extracting a lump of wax out of Craig's right ear the size of a peanut-yuck! It must have been the 20 years of Corus that he had collected it from! We also went on an elephant ride, which surprisingly wasn't that high, with the elephant taking us on a walk through a river.

We left Dalat and headed on the bus to find the Cat Tien National Park. The bus to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) dropped us at the end of a dirt track where we had to find our own way to the National Park. The only way was to get a motorbike through the country lanes. The first night in the National Park we went on a night watch which consisted of about 15 people sitting on the back of a truck whilst the warden shone a torch into the fields and jungle to see what animals we could spot. We saw plenty of dear, an owl and a porcupine. There are also elephants and a rare breed of Rhino living in the park, but they are very rare to spot.

The second day we hiked up to the crocodile lake through the jungle for 2 hours. The lake has had crocodiles reintroduced and now has approximately 150. We chilled out for 2 days bird watching (seeing kingfishers, herons, horn bills and loads of different finches). Craig loved it! I slept a lot in the hammock! We went for a row on the lake for 2 hours and heard a female crocodile making breathing noises. We were told that it was to tell us not to come near her as she had babies. We shared the lodge with the resident wardens and 2 Russian ant experts who had come to study ants!!!! The food was very basic, with the wardens collecting leaves and herbs to eat and fishing in the lake. There was even fish gut soup for tea! Unfortunately no one told us that there was no drinks up at the lodge so we had to ration our 2 bottles of water until our return. We also saw loads of monkeys in the wild playing around the lake and swimming from the trees.

Rachel did not find staying at the lodge to be a nice experience and I don't know how she managed to get 9 hours sleep. There were the biggest spiders she has ever encountered including one very large hairy tarantula looking type hiding above the bathroom mirror and another that crawled across her foot in the bedroom! Fortunately there was a mosquito net there which also doubles as a spider net to stop unwanted spiders from entering your bed. Craig had a horrible experience too, his second leech experience!

We left the National Park on the local minibus to Saigon, which stopped at every village in sight to pick people up. The driver tried to charge us double because we were foreigners, but when we realised how much the locals were giving him we tried to give him the same, but he would not accept. The whole bus joined in sticking up for us and one man pointed to a poster on the bus wall telling us to ring the number to complain! We finally came to an agreement much to drivers disgust and Craig offered him a banana as compensation.

We arrived in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), a rather bustling and smelly city. We ended up in the local bus station, not knowing where on earth we were. We caught the local bus to the hotel after having a well deserved burger (the bus ride was rather hair raising!). We stayed in Saigon 3 nights, visiting the War Remnants museum and the Reunification palace. The palace took about 10 minutes to look round but we were in the museum for 3 hours as it was so interesting (all about agent Orange and torture devices-learnt a lot).

From here we caught a 3 day (17 pound bargain trip) to the Mekong Delta. We visited a fish farm, coconut candy factory, rice noodle factory (more like a scraggy hut in the middle of a banana plantation) and a few local villages. We also visited the floating markets on our boat which can't have changed for hundreds of years.

We left the Mekong Delta at a small border town called Chau Doc and caught the boat up the Mekong to Cambodia. Cambodia is a lot poorer than Vietnam and everyone still lives in wooden houses on stilts. There is a lot of poverty and harassment of beggars and street sellers, but Rachel handles them with ease. We arrived in the capital Phonm Phen and stayed in a hotel that looked like it hadn't changed since the 60's. There was not a lot there except a very interesting museum (Pol pots S21 prison, which was converted from a school). It was a very eerie place and practically untouched since the 70's. You can even walk into the prison cells which still have the chains attached. We also visited the Killing Fields were they have dug up thousands of skulls which you can see and where you walked you can see human bones and old clothes that are being washed out of the ground under your feet. We learnt so much about this atrocity that we didn't really comprehend before. The estimated that 3 million people died during Pol Pots reign.

We have now arrived in Siem Reap and have spent the first day visiting Angkor Wat, an absolutely huge area of temples almost 1000 years old. There are so many to see that we have got a 3 day pass and are going back again for the next 2 days. Craig couldn't resist buying everything off all the street selling kids from postcards to pineapples.