Phu Quoc

The Lonely Planet Guide - and Lianne, who came here as part of her travels last year - were right - Phu Quoc is everything a tropical island is supposed to be. It's lined with exquisite white-sand beaches fringed with swaying palm-trees and gently lapping turquoise waters. Around the shores, the harbours and fishing villages are dotted with hundreds of green-and-turquoise painted fishing boats, all flying the red-and-yellow-starred Vietnamese flag. Very colourful indeed! Further inland, dense tropical jungle - some of it a protected National Park - provides an exotic backdrop. This tear-shaped Vietnamese-owned island (ownership disputed by Cambodia*) lies in the Gulf of Thailand, about 15km south of the Cambodian coast. So far, too, Phu Quoc is delightfully under-developed - though, like much of the East Coast of Vietnam that we saw last year, this surely won't last.

[* Over the past few weeks, UN-chaired meetings about disputed terroritory have been taking place in Phnom Penh, with some agreement already reached between Cambodia and Thailand about removing troops from the troubled Preah Vihear area on their shared border. Not sure if the ownership of Phu Quoc is also on the agenda, though. Oh, and while we're doing the local current affairs bit, we've also learned that the UK and Vietnam have recently signed a Strategic Parnership agreement, to increase trade and business between the two countries, which includes agreement for the first direct flights to Vietnam from the UK by the end of this year (2011). The same article also pointed out that Bradford College is hosting the Vietnamese Olympic Team for its pre-Games training, and that the British-owned 'Man from the Pru' is the single biggest foreign employer in Vietnam.]

Anyway, back to Phu Quoc .... We've spent the past 12 days, including Christmas and Boxing Day, just chilling out here, doing proper 'holiday' stuff. Apart from lazing on sun-loungers on the beach, slipping into the calm waters for a cooling swim now and then, we've been on a couple of snorkling/fishing boat trips. One of these took us to the An Thoi archipelago to the south of the island, where we sailed around several small islands/islets, including Thom (Pineapple) Island, stopping to eat a BBQ fish-lunch, including, a first for us: barbecued sea urchin, which, disappointingly, tasted more of the satay (peanut) sauce than anything. We also took a similar boat-trip to to swim/snorkle around Fingernail Islet, just off the north-west coast, from where it's possible to look over the neighbouring, Cambodian-owned Islands only 4Km away.

As part of these trips, we've also visited a pearl farm (strangely, I had never even thought about the meaning of 'mother-of-pearl' until we learned about the way the farm 'nucleates' the oyster using a 'bead' prepared from mother-of-pearl (the shiny inside of an oyster shell), by taking a small piece of mantle tissue from the 'donor' oyster to implant into the receiving oyster's gonad); we've trekked through the National Park for an hour or so, unsuccessfully looking for wildlife such as deer and monkeys (though we HAVE seen sea-eagles soaring over the nearby harbour). In the National Park, we visited a small pepper farm run by a Vietnamese woman living alone, save for several dogs, in the Park's only dwelling place - itself reminiscent of a Greenham Common encampment (did we call them 'bender' tents - I can't remember? Geoff may, though!). Here, we were offered, but declined, Vietnamese 'whisky' from two large glass containers - one with the pickled bodies of several snakes, seahorses and lizards, the other with a variety of pickled insects and wildlife - including the whole skeleton of a baby monkey!

We also visited a fish-sauce factory, where Andy tried his best to assist the men loading a boat with containers of fish-sauce, as part of a human chain, each man carrying two 20-litre plastic containers on the ends of a bamboo pole strung, Vietnamese-style, over his shoulder. The strange little bobbing up and down 'dance', rather than walk, that people carrying all kinds of goods this way learn to acquire, is to prevent the containers (of whatever kind) from starting to swing, which, given the weight they thereby manage to carry, would otherwise make the whole caboodle completely uncontrollable.

Our hotel, the Coi Nuong, is very comfortable, but also very 'quirky' in many ways. From the inside, our room itself is great - very large, with two huge double beds, a small ante-room with table and chairs, a fridge, and a fairly sizeable bathroom (well, shower-room, actually). But there's something about the set-up which reminds me a lot of the Soviet-era sanitoriums (sanitoria?) which I saw in and around Yalta, in the Crimea, several years ago. There's a pleasant, but slightly abandoned-looking garden with several empty concrete-lined ponds, beside which the rendered terraces of 'Butlins'-like chalet-rooms are located, each chalet having the really thin aluminium-framed doors and windows so popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. There's a large three-storey building where the Hotel Reception, and a huge pearl retail outlet, are housed on the ground floor, but it's not at all clear what the first and second floors contain - have certainly not seen any hotel guests coming and going there. The staff, though, are very pleasant, and one or two of them have a bit of English, which they enjoy trying out on us. One of our waitresses asked me the English for the spoon on our table. After writing it out for her, and pronouncing it as clearly as I could, we went on to the rest of the items on our table. However, despite my best, but fruitless, endeavours, I couldn't dissuade her from assuming that EVERY item began with an 's' sound. So, we now have a sfork, a splate, a sbowl, a sglass, and a snapkin! Good job I'm retired from teaching/training!

As for food, we've had some really wonderful - and inexpensive - seafood meals here, in ln some of the half-dozen or so beach-side restaurants about 5 minutes'walk from the hotel. We've particularly enjoyed a couple of lovely lantern-strewn beach restaurants where we've sat and eaten less than 2 feet from where the lapping waves reach. It's quite exciting, sometimes, just wondering if the occasional audacious wave might JUST reach far enough to tickle our toes under the table! We've also been several times to a very lively Australian-owned, but Mexican-themed bar, Amigos, where we've spent a few nights over a beer or two (or occasionally, a Cointreau or two) listening to some live music, and from where we managed to make a few Skype calls to our families on Christmas Day.

Actually, it was in Amigos on the day we arrived here that I was - perhaps paradoxically - reminded of our Christmas in Vietnam last year. I overheard a crowd of young Aussies whooping, cheering and hugging each other with delight at the news that a good friend would, after all, be flying out to join them in time for Christmas. Their joy immediately brought back the almost exactly opposite feelings we had experienced last year when we learned, with only a week to go, that our good friend, Cynthia, would NOT after all be joining us for Christmas, snowed in as she then was in Bridport! Hope you're faring better this year, on your walking tour of the Yorkshire Dales, Cynth.

And, while we're about it, hope you've all had a really good time over the Christmas festivities, and we wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous (despite the Coalition Government's best efforts!) 2012.

This is Us - Taking-off for KL!

The Mekong Delta

It's more than a week now since we left Cambodia to explore the Mekong Delta, the 'rice bowl' of Vietnam, where, after finding its way from its northernmost source in Tibet, the river meets its southern most point in Vietnam. Once part of the Khmer Kingdom, the Delta is the last part of modern-day Vietnam to be annexed (much to the chagrin of the Cambodians, still disputing its ownership). The alluvial soil from this huge journey means that this is the most fertile rice-growing area in Indo-China, with the soil capable of yielding 4 crops a year, and making its the world's no. 1 regional exporter of rice.
 


Buffaloes on Mekong River

 

Unique Boat Steering?



We decided to book ourselves onto a 4-day organised tour for a change, so that someone else could take care of things for a while. The brochure stated that we would begin with a slowboat trip from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc and, since the boat dock in Phnom Penh was only 150 metres up the road from our hotel, this seemed very convenient indeed. We were duly picked up from our hotel in Phnom Penh at 7.30 am last Monday morning, as promised, expecting the short journey to the boat dock to take around 5 minutes. Oh no! Instead, we spent a full hour in the mini-bus, haphazardly criss-crossing the city, picking up passengers from various hotels, in a bizarrely random way - to the point that we found ourselves back just across from our hotel at 8.30 am, to collect the last passengers! With just a little logistical planning (but then, this IS Cambodia!) we could have had another hour's sleep! Our mini-bus then, to ours and our companions' surprise, set off out of the city in a southerly direction, and it was a further two hours by road - even though we travelled tantalizingly close to the river for most of the journey - before we finally transferred to a rickety-rackety wooden boat, moored in a little muddy creek just a few yards away from the main flow of the river. Our mini-bus driver spoke no English, and so that part of the trip still remains a mystery to us, and to our travelling companions -(mainly Aussies, but also one American and a young Austrian who seems to spend much of his time over here trying to explain to local people that he is NOT an Australian: indeed, he sometimes resorts to wearing a T-shirt, popular amongst his countrymen, simply saying 'Austria - NO KANGAROOS!'.

Once we finally got onto our boat, though, any potential thoughts of mutiny amongst us soon melted away, as we came under the spell of the majestic Mekong and its magical, meandering pace. It was, nevertheless, still a bit of a shock that we reached the Cambodian border after only 30 minutes on the river. (We'd obviously travelled so far south by minibus, that, had we known, we needn't have travelled back up to Phnom Penh from Takeo after all! Oh well...) At the border, we all had to disembark at a kind of ramshackle shanty town which is the Cambodian customs and passport control station and, again, a further 10 minutes down-river, for the Vietnamese equivalent, where we stopped for lunch while the tour guide "cared for the stamping", as it was put to us (sorted out the entry visa authorisations, in other words). Here, we transferred to a much larger and more comfortable boat for a fascinating and enjoyable two-and-a-half hour journey to Chau Doc, where we had a hotel room booked for the night

Entrance to Cambodian Border Post

Ditto Vietnamese


  
 


Entrance to Chau Doc

That evening, the two of us took a couple of motor-bikes, with drivers, to witness a spectacular sunset from the top of Sam Mountain (also known locally as 2-million-dollar-hill, that being the estimated cost of US bombs dropped on that particular landmark alone during the Vietnam War).  



Sam Mountain Sunset



Delta Dancing Queen

After this enjoyable little trip, we were driven back to our hotel for what promised to be a relaxing evening exploring Chau Doc, an interesting, if not particularly attractive border town, and hopefully searching out some interesting street-food. We were therefore a little put out to discover, on returning to our hotel room after the trip, that it was ankle-deep in water! Seems the air-conditioning unit had gone seriously wrong, and, as the hotel was already full, we had to fish out our suitcases (largely, though not completely unscathed), and several bits of sodden clothing and shoes, to put onto a cyclo which transferred our luggage, while we walked alongside, to another hotel a couple of blocks away. By the time we'd sorted ourselves out again, and the original hotel had taken our wet clothes away for drying, almost the whole town was asleep - though we did manage to find one small restaurant still open for business.

Over the next 3 days, we were taken on several boat trips to explore various parts of the Delta - a water-world where boats, houses, fish-farms, factories, timber yards and huge markets float upon the endless rivers, canals and creeks that flow like arteries through this region. By boat, we visited a Cham village (one of many ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, this one Muslim - though, apart from the presence of a Mosque, there was little, to our eyes anyway, obviously different from any other riverside village). We also visited several vast floating markets; a coconut-candy-making factory; a fruit farm where we listened to local folk singing; a fish-farm; and both a rice processing factory and a rice-noodle-making plant - both of which, with their dirt floors, several decades' worth of dust-covered cobwebs over everything, and the dogs, ducks and chickens roaming free, left us a little queasy about our next steamed rice or noodle soup dish! (But it was really delicious! - Ed).



Floating Villages

   

Cham Village



Floating Markets

 

Angry Bird Boat?







 

Vermeer Interior? (Rice Noodle Factory)



Coming to the Six Bells Folk Club - Soon!

At the end of the 4-day tour, we travelled on a very comfortsable coach to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly and still occasionally aka Saigon), about 3 hours' drive away. And all this for just £52 each - including the 3 nights' accommodation, the services of English-speaking guides, all boat and mini-bus trips, 2 breakfasts and 1 lunch! Can't imagine how we'll manage our finances when we get back home in February to UK prices!

On our journey to HCMC, we finally saw the 'idyllic landscape of paddy fields carpeted in dizzying varieties of green' which the Lonely Plant Guide had promised us - until then, it had been mainly fishing-related industries and corrugated-iron shanty town housing along the riverbanks. Shortly before arriving in HCMC, we passed a vast landscaping/construction site, where Michael Jackson's father - obviously still distraught by his son's untimely death - is developing a massive 16-hectare golfing resort, having presumably turfed out lots of local villagers to 'pastures' new. Oh, and when we alighted from our coach in the middle of the City, it was only 50 metres along the road from the pavement restaurant/nightclub where I'd had a little run-in with an over-aggressive bouncer towards the end of last year's trip - not a memory I particularly wanted to invoke!

After a pleasant evening in a really nice (and cheap!) hotel in Saigon, and a comfortable flight therefrom, we're now on the idyllic island of Phu Quoc, where we'll spend Christmas - about which more anon.

Hot Diggedy Dawg!

Sorry to start with such a cliche, but it really IS a very small world! There we were on Wednesday (14 December), on a small boat touring some the tributaries of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam as part of an organised 4-day trip - and we discovered that the young couple, Martha and Jake, with whom we've been chatting for the previous two days, not only live in Sussex, but also know 'The Cajun Dawgs' - one of our favourite local bands, featuring, amongst others, our friends, Jim and Darren. The Dawgs play fairly often at venues around East Sussex, including The 6 Bells - indeed, are playing for the Christmas Party night at the Folk 'n' Blues Club on the 20th - but apparently also played for Martha's 18th birthday party three or four years ago in Rye. How's about that then? (Sorry, do I sound like Jimmy Saville?)

Our last weekend in Phnom Penh, just before catching the boat down to Chau Doc in Vietnam, was very relaxing after the work at the orphanage. On Saturday evening, we sat at an outdoor table in a really good Cambodian restaurant overlooking the riverside promenade, eating a fabulous Fish Amok (the national dish) and enjoying a spectacularly clear view of the lunar eclipse. Most of the staff and customers of the many riverside restaurants came out to watch the final few minutes of the eclipse as the sky went black, and there was a truly festive occasion all round.

Watching the Eclipse

The Eclipse Itself

On our walk back to the hotel later, in the gradually increasing moonlight, we noticed a new installation of dozens of pieces of fun/exercise equipment - rather like, for those Bromsgrovians amongst us, the 'trim-trail' equipment which the District Council installed many years go in Sanders Park, some of it right outside our house (though we understand they've now removed it all on the grounds of, yes, 'elf and safety'!). Anyway, these new installations in Phnom Penh are clearly a great hit. I think we've mentioned before about the wonderful atmosphere along the promenade every evening when hoards of Cambodian families - often 3 generations at a time - come out to sit, walk, play, do Tai Chi, aerobics, or what seems to be a kind of Cambodian line dance, together. On this lunar eclipse evening, dozens and dozens of them were queuing up to have a go on this new equipment, all laughing and talking about this new-fangled idea, and encouraging us to join in the fun. Further on, we also stopped to watch what seemed to be a 25-a-side football match, in which a rattan football was used by bare-foot teenage lads, with several dozens more queuing up on the edges to take part. Just wonderful!

Part of the 'Trim Trail'

Another Part!

The next day, we went back along the promenade to see, in daylight, a huge photographic exhibition we'd spotted the previous evening. This exhibition turned out to be a beautifully-displayed, almost romantically-photographed, often deliberately softly-focused, series of pictures of a variety of anti-personnel mines (APLs). The juxtaposition of the beautiful images and the description of the grotesquely sophisticated ways in which these anti-personnel mines continue to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people every year all over the world, was truly heart-stopping. The exhibition had been timed deliberately to coincide with the 11th meeting, here in Phnom Penh for the first time, of the Members of the Ottowa Convention (also referred to as the Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of APLs - a treaty which the USA, still clearly dominated by its military-industrial complex, has still not become a signatory to). Both the Ottowa Convention meeting and the exhibition also coincided with celebrations for the 63rd anniversary of the UN Convention on Human Rights, and there were many banners all over the city, bearing truly heart-warming slogans about the rights of women, of trade unionists, of children, of ethnic minorities, of political activists, etc, (including public sector workers, Mr Miliband? - Ed.).

The Photographic Exhibition

Heart-warming, yes, but ironic too, given that Cambodia has just been placed 165th out of 183 countries monitored by Transparency International in its annual Corruption Index, and that a UN envoy here has recently pronounced that the relationship between the ruling CPP (Cambodian People's Party), and its main opposition party, Sam Rainsy, is damaging to the point of being anti-democratic. We've actually counted 5 different political parties on political banners around Cambodia, but Sam Rainsy himself is in self-imposed exile, having been charged with some fairly dubious 'crimes', including one of removing a government notice, for which, if found guilty, he could face a 12 year jail sentence! (Oh, and here's some homework for you, Cameron or Dylan: can you find out for us where the UK ranks in the Transparency International Corruption Index? The newspaper article we saw only mentioned the top 5, and the UK was not one of those).

Well, we have one more day left of our Mekong Delta tour before we fly from Ho Chi Min City to the Vietnamese (once Cambodian) island of Phu Quoc in the Gulf of Thailand, where we'll spend 10 days over the Christmas period. Then, off to Kuala Lumpur for the New Year celebrations. But we'll undoubtedly fit in one more blog before then, so we can capture our experiences of this part of Vietnam before we head to pastures new. A bientot.

A View From the Roof-top Bar

Phnom Penh Riverfront

 

'Bye for Now!



Farewell to NFO ...

... and to Takeo town, where we've had yet another really busy, enjoyable and productive week since arriving back from our break in Sihanoukville.

Having finished the fence project, we've been working on two other projects over the past week or so. Andy has been making and varnishing new table-tops for 8 of the classroom/dining room tables, most of which were falling apart.

Guess Who's Gone Back to School?

He's been assisted by a number of volunteers, but particularly by Roy, a 24-year-old Yorkshire lad whose obsession with his mainly 60s classic rock music collection is on a par with Andy's music collection obsession - and whose fear of anything creepy crawlie, including geckos, has given us all many laughs at his expense, poor thing. But best of all was on Friday morning, when Andy was working with a long piece of hollow tubular steel, out of which, just at the point when Andy reached where Roy was working, jumped the largest gecko any of us has seen so far! Roy's shriek echoed all around the orphanage, and kept everyone - volunteers and kids - in absolute stitches for several minutes. Sorry, Roy!


Finished!!


I, meanwhile, have been working with some other volunteers on a project led by James and Anna - a mid-to-late 20s couple, he an Aussie carpenter and cabinet-maker, she a Londoner, now living together in Clapham - making and painting large metal-and-wooden gates for the playground adjacent to the orphanage. As with the earlier fence-building project, it's been all the more satisfying that Andy has been able to accompany Bun Seng by tuk-tuk to pay for all or most of the materials for both of these projects from the money donated by some of you, including the 6 Bells Folk 'n' Blues Club.

This past week, it's also been interesting to watch the children's response to Bun Seng's new-born daughter (only 9 days old by the time we left yesterday). Most of them were absolutely astonished at the sight of such a small baby, and all of them gathered round mother (Srei Pov) and daughter (the baby with no name*) every time they made an appearance, looking on in absolutely hushed reverence and awe. I did try to make use of this happy event as part of one of our English classes last week, attempting to elicit vocabulary related to 'baby equipment' and any rituals surrounding a birth and any celebrations or naming ceremonies. This drew almost a complete blank, however: not one of the teenage boys or girls could think of a single baby-specific item or term, even though many have younger siblings, and none knew anything about naming or Buddhist ceremonies.

Bun Seng and Baby With No Name

Baby With Three-Year Old Big Sister Srei Pov

(*I had learned from Bun Seng, however, that most babies only get given a name by their own family when it is a month old - though a 'temporary' name might be given either by hospital staff when, as in Srei Pov's case, a woman who's given birth in hospital is discharged, or, in a very religious family, by a Buddhist monk from the local pagoda. Bun Seng's English was not up to explaining the reasons for this one-month deferral - though he did say the naming ceremony is usually marked by the lighting of a small bonfire by the family, to smoke out evil spirits from the home, and that in some more traditional families, but not his, the paternal grandfather has the right to decide the baby's name. I can't help wondering if this one- month delay is related in any way to the infant mortality rates here, which I understand to be fairly high - not that I have the statistics to hand.

Despite my failed attempts in the English class, we have, however, made some real progress in our French class, with 2 of the girls, Pu-thy and Vishara, coming back from their school on Wednesday proudly announcing how amazed their teacher was that they could already count to 100 in French, respond correctly to "comment t'appele tu?", and name the months of the year and days of the week. Just hope this early success doesn't make the girls too unpopular with their classmates! The girls are both 13 years old, and Pu-thy in particular has really latched onto me as a kind of surrogate grandmother figure in these last 10 days, barely leaving my side for a moment, draping herself hotly all over my sweaty body and paint-covered clothes and hands at every opportunity, and welling up with tears every time somebody comments about our imminent departure.

Pu-thy is a sensible but sensitive girl, unusually tall and mature for her age (most of the other children here look a good 5 years younger and smaller than their actual years) and I imagine that, since she's thereby a lot less 'cute' than some of the others, she's perhaps not received as much attention from volunteers as some of the other children have. Thankfully, one or two of the volunteers who've recognised this possibility, particularly Sarah and Jo (thanks to you both), have agreed to pay her a bit more attention after our departure, to help cheer her up. That's certainly made me feel a lot better. It was hard enough, as it was, for us to say our goodbyes yesterday afternoon to all of the children - many of whom had once again made us each several 'friendship bracelets', and most of whom came running out of the gate and down the track shouting their goodbyes and "goo luck for you"s until we were well out of earshot (though we were distressed to see that, at this point, Pu-thy purloined a push-bike from one of the smaller girls, and started to pedal down the road towards us until we finally persuaded her to go back to the orphanage!).

On our last evening at the volunteer centre on Friday, James and Anna took the initiative once again - this time by organising a brilliant farewell barbecue party at the volunteer centre. Anna had gone out early in the morning to the local market, accompanied by two of the centre's Cambodian staff, who helped her to buy shed-loads of fresh prawns, several whole fish, heaps of pork, chicken, salads, etc. She then spent a good part of the day (apart from adding the finishing touches to the gates) assisted by some of the others, preparing marinades, dips, salad dressings, kebabs, etc. In the evening, James, as a good Aussie man obviously to the manor born, set about taking charge of the barbequing itself, 'christening' the centre's recently-made oil-drum barbecue in a truly spectacular fashion, whilst the rest of us moved tables and benches outdoors, drank beer and, later, danced to the music which Roy had provided - what a fabulous send-off!

(Oh, and James and Anna have manage to go one better than the strangely translsted menu we'd seen in Pursat. Whilst they were in Malaysia recently, they'd found a dish which was translated not as a Cordon Blue recipe, but as Blue Condom! - cue your attempts now to top Andy's comment about it at least being safe eating.....!)

For the icing on the cake of our departure, we were treated to a journey back to Phnom Penh on Saturday morning (10 December) in the chauffeur-driven, top-of-the-range, gold-painted Lexus 4x4, of our glamorous guest-house owner, Sotheavy.

Earlier in the week, she'd very kindly invited us up to her penthouse suite in Sotheavy 1 guest-house for a coffee at the end of a day's work at the orphanage. She's an amazingly sociable, intelligent, and generous woman, with a whole wealth of experiences from her many years in the diplomatic service (her Czech husband, now working in the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was First Secretary to the Czech Ambassador to Beijing, and then Vietnam, both for many years). We'd sat in the plush sitting area of Sotheavy's pent-house gym swapping anecdotes and drinking coffee for an hour or so, before being taken downstairs to her living room where we toasted each other with several large glasses of Cointreau from her drinks cabinet (but, sadly, no Ferrero-Rocher, despite the Ambassadorial connections!), and later that evening had dinner with her in Sotheavy 2 guest-house, accompanied by her equally glamorous sister, and an American business acquaintance. So, when she learned of our trip back to Phnom Penh (from where we catch a boat down-river into Vietnam on Monday), she made us this very generous offer of accompanying her to Phnom Penh in her car. Beats the public bus any day!!

So, the Cambodian leg of our travels is all but over, and our next blog will come from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Our plan is to spend a few days exploring the Delta before moving on to Phu Quoc island in time for Christmas, and then to fly to Kuala Lumpur for the New Year celebrations. Bye for now, from us and them........