My Winter Vacation

Well, I've been back for awhile, but pretty busy with class and other, more fun diversions, and as a result am just getting to this now. Even so, it may take a few sessions until I've said all I want to about my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. In a word, it was amazing. Let me elaborate.
So, as I've said before, I went with my friend Linh, a fellow JET living in Shizuoka. Linh was born in Ho Chi Minh City, but moved to Canada when she was two. Only her immediate family left Vietnam, so she still has many relatives living there, some of whom I had a chance to meet.
We left Japan on December 16th, and during our layover in Beijing that day, we completely changed our plans for the trip. Until then, we had planned on going north, but as we had heard stories of the less than perfect weather there at that time of year, we decided instead to stay south, and include Cambodia in our travels.
We spent the first three days in HCMC, and stayed with Linh's aunt, uncle, and 3 male cousins. The only one I could really talk to was Chad, a couple years younger than me, with pretty good English. I felt kinda bad about not being able to communicate with the rest of the family, especially since they were being so kind to me, so I bowed alot (they don't really bow in Vietnam, but it's what I do here when I can't express my thanks, so I hope the meaning got through). The first day was Linh's uncles birthday, so we took them all out for dinner, and then sang happy birthday to him on stage!

The first couple days we hung around the city, going to markets, hanging out on Backpacker's Road (where all the foreigner's hang out), and had a photoshoot!!
On the third day we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels, which are tiny tunnels built during the Vietnam war, that stretch from HCMC to Hanoi in the north. We crawled through a 100m section of the tunnels, which was cool, but it was pitch black, small, and stiflingly hot. Our tour guide for this visit was Mr. Binh, a bitter old man who had worked for the Americans during the war, and thus been cast as a traitor and sent to a "re-education camp". He was also just a little prejudiced against Americans (which he called all the foreigners) and their "fat asses". When I came back I learned that Doug had also had Mr. Binh as his guide. On our way to the tunnels, we stopped at a "handicapped handicraft factory", where they tried to take advantage of our consiences to make us pay 4X the price for crafts that we could get at any market in town. Linh and I didn't fall for it, although we did run into another JET that had been in our group from Ottawa, who we hadn't expected to see. It was cool to catch up with her.
We made our way back to HCMC and went to the War Museum with some people we had met on the tour. Mostly just alot of pictures of people affected by Agent Orange, and of other war atrocities. It was incredibly disturbing, and after seeing the reconstructed "Tiger cages" (prison cells used for torture) we'd had enough and left the rest unexplored.
On the fourth day we went to Mui Ne, about 3 hours east, on the coast. Mui Ne is full of beach resorts, and famous for it's sand dunes. We booked a jeep tour, and our driver Kim, took us to a fishing village, where we saw the round boats they use close to shore, a red canyon, where I broke the only pair of sandals I brought :( , and the sand dunes. The white sand dunes were really cool. Just lots of hills of sand. When you're on them, it looks like you're in Egypt. There was a small boy renting out a sled so that you can slide down the steepest hills. It looked a little scary, so we made another tourist do it first, and then we had a go. The hill was really steep and ended in water, but the sand stops you well before you reach the bottom. I actually wished it had been a little scarier. Oh well. We then went to the yellow sand dunes, which were nice too, to see the sunset.
The next day we headed back to the city for the night, and then it was off to Cambodia on a 2 day boat tour along the Mekong River that we had booked. I now know that $22 for 2 days (including hotel and food) may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. We completely missed all the nice sights of the Mekong that you see in pictures (small tributaries with overhanging vegetation), and were herded like sheep from boat to boat to bus to boat, and so on, for an exhausting 2 days. We ended up in many different tour groups, with many different guides, and at some points didn't even have anyone with us who spoke English. Nobody told us what was happening, and when we got to the border, our guide took all of our passports and the money for our visas, and got off the boat. We were all worried that we wouldn't see him again, but he was there at the border when we arrived, thank God.
We got to Phnom Penh at about 6pm, grabbed a quick supper, and jumped in a "taxi" with a couple english teachers from Osaka that we had met. I use the term taxi loosely here. Our driver was a relative of someone who worked at the guest house that we had been dropped off at. He drove like a madman, swerving past any other cars we came across, and completed the 5-6 hour drive to Siem Reap (according to Lonely Planet) in about 4. When we arrived at the guest house we had called ahead to, they told us that they didn't have rooms for us (even though we called ahead), but then they kicked some people out, and we took their rooms. I think the people they kicked out were probably relatives who were staying there for free, and since we could pay, we had priority. They didn't clean the room before letting us in though, and poor Linh's bed smelled like smelly old man. (She even sprayed her sheets with bug spray for a more pleasant scent.)