Same same but different: Vietnam & Cambodia

So, when is the best time to write down some reflections about our journey to Vietnam and Cambodia?
The first few days back home in Barcelona were so strange, I didn't feel like remembering the month we spend in south-east Asia. More because I didn't want to realize to be back again, to begin a new year, to start daily life all over, to feel cold again (bloody European winter). In fact I had a "nice" diarrhea and didn't leave our flat for two days - so later it felt like I was in no man's land for a few days - or, as my Tai chi teacher would put it: I was standing beside my shoes.

Well now, 8 days later, my shoes got me back again (thanks to my Tai chi teacher), and I finished uploading fotos from Vietnam and fotos from Cambodia. Am I ready to do some reflections now? Well, yes. But it's hard. When people ask "How was it?!", I don't know what to answer. How can one recapitulate 28 days, where every day brought something new - new feelings, new knowledge, new friends, new thoughts, new surprises, new stories, new images, new sounds, new colors, new smells. You never know what the next day will bring. That's so absolutely different from everyday life! You learn to be prepared, to be flexible, to be open, to react quickly, to absorb everything, to listen, to see, to tell... to live intensely.

So in spite of writing down what we did when and where - which would be rather interesting to reread in a few years (at least for ourselfs) - I would like to communicate the things we remembered on one of our last days in Saigon, writing it down in a brainstorming manner. We were sitting on a small street of Saigon's backpacker area, drinking beer, watching a ten-year-old making his daily money with fire-spitting and frightening unprepared tourists with sticking a still hairless and blind mouse baby right into their faces. The background sound was dominated by a Buddhist monk singing a religious service, accompanied by a constant drum sound. This ruminant effect was later replaced by the perennial appearance of masseurs on their bicycles, announcing their service ringing a little bell. Obviously this bizarre scenery influenced our brainstorming of special moments, phrases, images, customs, behaviors and stories.

But as I reread our brainstorming, I find that nobody could possibly understand what all these stories, customs, moments and phrases mean - unless you were there of course. I could tell that traffic is hell, that you have to force yourself to do the first step onto the street if you want to cross it. Maybe you can imagine crossing this street but you can't possibly experience it. There are pedestrian crossings although neither cars nor motos respect them, nor do they respect sidewalks (I think sidewalks exist to drive or park on them, or to put out some tables and serve food, but definitely not to walk on them). And if I show you a foto of a totally overloaded motorcycle tilting back under its weight, you will laugh but you won't hear the bystanders laughing with you. They overload the motos at any time and with anything you can imagine: with tons of eggs, with cages full of pigs, with fish traps and also with people (we saw up to 5 people riding one motorcycle). We heard that policemen hit people with a stick in order to stop them if they violate the law by having more than 2 people riding a moto.

One out of two persons has a motorcycle in Saigon. And the rest have probably bikes. Mobility is the key in Vietnam! Everything and everybody has to be mobile. "If you don't come to the mountain, the mountain comes to you." I'm sure, this was invented by Asian people. You could sit for weeks on the same spot, not moving a centimeter, and getting everything you need and want. You could beg right their, wait for the mobile Pho kitchen to pass by, get some fresh fruit or dried sepia or, as already mentioned, a massage or a haircut. And afterwards you could use the mobile scale to weight yourself.

Apropos of scale, food is so good and cheap that you gain weight quickly. For a Pho, a main course soup with meat, noodles, sprouts, some vegetables and a lot of herbs, you pay averagely 25.000 Dong (1,10 Euro). Sitting on a tiny plastic seat on a busy street and drinking a cheap bia hoi costs you about 0,15 Euro. The most sociable food they have in Vietnam and Cambodia is Lau or Hot Pot. In the evening you meet your friends in one of the hundred Hot Pot spots and order plenty of meat, vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, eggs and herbs to put in the big pot with soup boiling on a stove right on your table. Or you do your own grill party with a little barbecue right on your table.
Apart from the food Vietnam and Cambodia have in common, there are a lot of regional specialties. Though we were offered to have some snake in Chau Doc and saw fried spiders near Siem Reap, we never had 'strange' food like dog or duck embryo cooked in its eggshell.
If you're interested in Vietnamese cooking, check this website out: Vietworldkitchen, and at Cuisine of Vietnam at Wikipedia you'll find a list with vegetables, fruits and herbs used in vietnamese kitchens.
To conclude the food part (I'm getting hungry!) I have to point out to something I think is a great invention: on the countryside all restaurants offer hammocks to have a nap after eating. Why didn't they have such an idea here?

People are very friendly, they joke around and laugh a lot. But sometimes you get annoyed by their constant will to sell something, mostly at double or triple price. The most horrible experience was getting out of the bus that brought us to Siem Reap near Angkor Wat in Cambodia. At least 15 TucTuc driver wanted to bring us to a hotel. After loosing our nerves we explained them that this is really annoying - they shrugged and said that this was their job... So be prepared to hear a hundreds of times: "Buy from me! Buy from me!", "Only one dollar!", "You want a TucTuc?", "Where are you from?". Most of the times (if its not the TucTuc or moto drivers) the sellers are children. It's really hard to say no, and at least in Vietnam you shouldn't buy from children because then they have to work instead of going to school. In Cambodia, poor families can't afford sending their kids to school, they even beg for food because they're hungry. In our opinion the immense gap between rich and poor in Cambodia is the most obvious difference between this capitalistic country and their communist neighbor Vietnam.
Driving with a boat on the Mekong river towards the cambodian border was one of the most wonderful experiences as all the children living on the waterfront came out to wave to us. At the end we got tired because this went on for hours.

There is one more thing I want to mention: Angkor! If you could choose only one place to go - you should definitely choose Angkor. It's the most fantastic place I've seen in my whole life. We spent 3 days and one sunset in Angkor's cities and temples and it was not enough. It's so amazing that it is hard to describe. Just go there, please, at least once a life! On internet you can find a nice guide: The Angkor Guide, or check out my Google Map.

Well, that's about it... Just want to greet all the nice people we met on our journey - hope you had a great time! Above all there is one person, Larry, whose companionship made our trip even more wonderful and unforgettable. You will find him on a lot of our fotos - we even joked that we could make a game out of our fotos: "Find Larry". Thanks for sharing your time with us.
And to all the people who have never been to Vietnam or Cambodia: we can only encourage you to go there - just to discover that it's not SAME SAME but very DIFFERENT...