Scorpiosail Blog

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We really enjoyed Saigon. Officially Ho Chi Minh City nowadays, but everybody we talked to still call it Saigon.

A nearly mythical place in my imagination thanks to TV news and documentaries of late 60s and 70s, American war movies and series like China Beach. On the surface it looks like any big city, and it is much larger than I had expected.

And it certainly does not look like a communist community, on the contrary. The stores are full of typically capitalistic goods: electronics, furniture, appliances, jewellery, but most of all, as all over SE Asia it is of course about cloths and handicraft.

Vegetables, fruit, meat and fish are plentiful, fresh and displayed very tastefully at the enormous Ben Thanh Market. People socialise outside on the sidewalks, particularly in the evenings, where they bring chairs and tables, and often prepare their food in the open or buy small meals from ubiquitous stalls.

I have never seen as many motorcycles, scooters and mopeds as in Saigon, and they are transporting almost anything, between a family of five and six enormous (dead) pigs or a king sized matress. The traffic is really crazy – makes you think of a giant ant burrow.

Saigon has certainly come a long way since the Vietnam war and I can’t avoid comparing Vietnam with Cuba and feel sorry for the Cubans. If they’ve had had better leaders, life in Cuba would be a lot happier and easier than it has been for the past 50 years and still is.

Prices are very cheap, we had a lunch for two, including a glass of wine and a beer for 4.5 USD total (= 2.25 per person).

We do not think there are many sights worth exploring in Saigon, but we loved walking around or sitting in a cafe, sipping our favorite beverage and just watching people around us. A visit to the War Remnants Museum for a look at the Vietnamese view of the war is probably mandatory.

One evening we went to watch a water-puppetry performance, which was wonderful. This ancient art is more than 1000 years old and was developed by rice farmers, who used waterfloded rice paddies as their stage. Wooden puppets are manipulated by puppeteers under the surface and the performances are accompanied by music played on traditional instruments.

Vietnam is not a democracy of course, but we saw very little evidence, except for the red flags, either with a golden star or the arm and the hammer. If it hadn’t been for the Facebook incident, where the government blocks a non political web site, we would have departed the country with only good memories.

Only two hours after I uploaded the post telling about the blockage of Facebook (March 18), the internet connection at our hotel broke down and didn’t work anymore during our stay. Can this really be a coincidence or am I being paranoid?

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I’m not particularly surprised that there is something fishy about Cambodia. I had kind of been expecting something, but I had no idea what it would turn out to be!

Siem Reap after dark is all rock and roll. The action is concentrated to a few blocks around 8th Street, today usually called Pub Street. The first bar opened only 12 years ago, which is difficult to understand when you experience the area today.

Here are probably hundreds of bars and restaurants. The Khmer food is excellent and cheap (2-3 USD per dish) and you can have a draft beer for 50 cents US.

Pub Street area is also where it gets fishy, and I’m not talking about gastronomic extravaganza. Otside several of the bars and restaurants you will find aquarium-like pools where you can dip your tired feet for a relaxing treatment by, yes, Doctor Fish! (Click photo for larger fish)

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Cambodia has gradually recovered from the Khmer Rouge regime, although the psychological scars remain for survivors and their families. Cambodia now has a very young population, and (already by 2005), 75% of Cambodians were too young to remember the holocaust, which ended in 1979.

For most people of my generation, Cambodia has been a symbol of something dark and horrible. The Red Khmers, led by Pol Pot, committed probably the largest genocide in history – killing more than 20% of their fellow contrymen. The enormity of this terrible crime is simply impossible for most of us to understand.

Sofar on our journey there has been little evidence of the horrific Khmere Rouge era, except for the present undeveloped state of all infrastructure and the apparent poverty, particularly on the countryside. (Click on any photo of this post for a larger image)

Today, when we had a walk in the Old Market area of downtown Siem Reap, we got our first worrying encounters with people who are still suffering because of the old regime. During a couple of hours we were approach by a dozen of crippled persons, who had lost either a leg, or both legs or an arm – either during the civil war, or for stepping on land mines afterwards. We were touched by the dignity that most of these unfortunate souls showed. They try desperately not to appear as beggars and instead try to give us visitors a chance to pretend that we are paying for a service or a souvenier.

The man with Malla and me on the photo above is Phung, he is 46 years old and lost his leg on a land mine in 1989 – and he tells us that he has five children to support. I can’t help wondering why he made five children despite his condition. If you would like to see how he presents himself on the sign shown in the photo, please click HERE.

An other type of encounter, familiar from many other parts of the world, is the mother carrying a nearly newborn child and asking for money. They are here too. I tried to do the right thing by bringing the couple with me in to a store and buing her a tin of milk powder. But I hate myself for suspecting that she will sell the can and get money for something else that the child might not benefit from at all.

However, this blog post is not intended to be a negative one, actually I think that the Kingdom of Cambodia (yes the King is back!) will be developing very quickly. Because: the tourists are arriving and this is probably a good thing as it is the fastest way for a better living for the common people.

I include the following photos of wedding couples, which we encountered at Angkor Wat. I think they look very happy concerning their future!

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Actually it’s name is Angkor Wat, but the brain of a cruiser immediately made a connection.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Angkor Archeological Park encompasses an amazing number of millennium-old ruins of the Angkorian-era Khmer Empire (9th to 12th centuries AD). As a whole, this area is in a class with the Pyramids, Machu Pichu and the Taj Mahal.

For us, it became a long day, waking up at 4:00 in Kuala Lumpur for an early flight to Cambodia, and more specificially to Siem Reap, the gateway to the ruins. Long before noon, after having been first taken to the wrong hotel, we were already on our way to Angkor Wat, the most famous of the sites. We were riding a tuk-tuk, the local moped version of a motorized rickshaw – actually it is a two-wheel trailer hooked to a moped.

The rest of the day we explored several of the temple sites, including Bayon, Ta Phrom and of course Angkor Wat. This massive temple covers more than 1 km square and the lotus-like towers rise 65 metres from the ground (almost one Helsinki Stadium tower – see earlier blog: The real measure of hights). The walls of the temples are covered inside and out with thousands of bas-reliefs and carvings.

The giant stone faces of Bayon have become one of the most recogizable images connected to classic Khmer art and architecture (photo above – click on it), but we were particularly amazed by the jungle overgrowth at Ta Phrom, where massive fig and silk-cotton trees are taking over the temple. I’ve been told that this temple was used in the film Toomb Raider. Look at the photo (below), it’s almost as if that tree was a giant octopus, sliding down from above (click on it).