Phnom Penh

Back to Phnom Penh, to the maze of alleyways and dark passageways that comprise the old lakeside warren of cheap guesthouses and hotels, bars and cafes. It was thirty eight degrees again yesterday and the asphalt seemed to breath out fire in the evening. Last night I booked into a room with an air conditioner for once - paying a whole eight dollars!!! The air conditioner blew softly onto my face, cooling it, but not altering the temperature of the room by even one degree. But it was enough to lull me to sleep to the sound of pounding disco music, waking up in the night to the sound of pounding rain, like a thousand drummers beating out their rythms on the tin roof.

I dozed off again to wake late. Loud claps of thunder had been added to the pounding rain, and as I entered the lounge area/deck of the hotel, a couple of hippies that I had met the day before came up the stairs looking like drowned rats. "The water is ankle deep out there" they said "and you have to walk through it quite a way to get to a tuktuk". I decided not to go out to breakfast.

Lakeside was once a beautiful place, but developers have dumped a huge pile of earth in the middle of the lake, making it much smaller. They are going to build on the pile of earth. Then in one year they are going to knock down all the little hotels and cafes on this side of the lake and build multistory hotels. I'm glad I got here before that happened.

Flight out of Phnom Penh tonight. Not looking forward to it.
I will put some photos on the blog when I get back to England.

Banteay Srei Temple

This temple, whose name probably meant auspicious city, was built in honour of Shiva, with a lingum.

The walls are exquisitely carved. There are seven headed men waving their multiple arms around, Indra on a three headed elephant, leafy nagas with lion heads, monsters touching the breasts of women, men holding other men by their hair before killing them, beautiful scrolling leafy branches, dragons with leafy branches coming out of their mouths. The bas reliefs are clear, sharp, apparently untouched by the passage of time and weather. This may have been because they were so deeply carved, or it may have had something to do with the quality of the stone which, unlike the usual sandstone used for these temples, is pink.

We arrived at this temple in the middle of the day. Not one of those temples with trees in amongst the ruins, there was no shade. I could feel the sweat trickling down my back all the time that I stood admiring these beautiful carvings.

In the evening, I came upon a gay bar where a cabaret was in full swing. A group of Californian men welcomed me at their table and plied me with cocktails.

Next day I went in search of a place called Aqua. It took me a long time because I walked down the wrong road and ended up walking about five kilometres through a waterside village, where houses on tall stilts backed onto a little river, now reduced to a mere trickle. It might have been very pleasant, if they had not thrown so much rubbish out of the backs of their houses onto the river bank.

Eventually I found Aqua, a beautiful swimming pool owned by an English man called John. The pool is surrounded by lush tropical jungle, shady places, sunny places and a bar that juts right out into the pool. Someone has built bar stools in the pool and a ledge all round the bar, so you can sit with your legs in the water at the bar. A couple of Irish girls serve at the bar. "There's no point in my going back to Ireland" said one  "I have a degree in architecture but there's no work."

Aqua is frequented by a crowd of volunteers, all teaching English to village children around Siem Reap. They come here after work and stand around in the pool, with just their heads poking out of the water, like so many water buffaloes, chatting.

The Roluos Group of Khmer Temples

38 degrees in the shade. And there's no shade around most of these temples!

Preah Ko
Crumbling brick built temples with carved stone lintels and side panels in the morning sun. The carving is almast baroque in its intricacy, multiple nagas covered in leafy apparel, men riding horses emerging at intervals from the nagas backs, dragons spitting out curling leaves and dancing figures. The bricks are crumbling and the stone carvings peeling off.

Preah Ko was dedicated to Indravarman II, the founder of the Angkor empire, in 879 and thus began a tradition of temples dedicated to ancestors which subsequent Angkorian kings had to build, preferably before building a temple dedicated to their chosen religion.

Originally these temples were covered in white finely carved stucco.

Bakong
A collection of brick temples are completely surrounded by a moat with stone walls, at Bakong. The central one was built on top of a stepped stone pyramid. All apart from this one are in a terminal state of disrepair. But there's a nice new monastery here with its own new temple - abandon the old and build the new - twas ever thus in Cambodia. Vestiges of carved stone lintels remain here and there. These too would have been clothed in white stucco, intricately carved.

Only now that Cambodia (and the world) realises what a treasure house they possess do they begin, tentatively, with lots of help from other countries, to preserve what is left of their ancient temples.  Around the temples the trees have also been left in peace (in the rest of Cambodia they have been obliterated.) So visiting temples and walking through these magnificent trees, you can begin to imagine what a beautiful country Cambodia once was.

Lolei
Another crumbling brick temple, with a new temple right bang slap beside it.

Preah Khan

Jayavarman VII dedicated Preah Khan temple to Lokesvara, the saviour of Mahayana Buddhism, who represented his father, in 1191. Preah Khan was a city with a population divided according to function.

Banteay Kdei Temple

Jayavarman VII bult this Buddhist temple to house hundreds of Buddhist statues. After he died it was converted to a Shiva temple. Hundreds of Buddha statues, most of which were broken, were buried. Recent Japanese excavations brought these statues to light

Ta Prohm Temple

Ta Prohm, meaning Old Brahma, was originally called Rajavihara, meaning Royal Monastery. Jayavarman VII consecrated a statue in Ta Prohm temple to Prajnaparamita, the personificaton of wisdom, whom the king identified with his mother. He built it as a Mahayana Buddhist temple, but after the king died the next king converted it to a Hindu temple, removing a lot of the Buddha statues.

The path leading to Ta Prohm goes through a quiet forest with many species of big old trees, all conveniently labled. Crickets make a deafening noise in the tree tops. Before I came to south east Asia, I had no idea that crickets could make so much noise.

Liquid roots of the trees flow over the temple walls, like streams and rivulets, rocking the stone walls until they begin to fall apart. They are repairing this temple, painstakingly putting back the fallen stones, rebuilding the walls. But they haven't removed any of the trees yet. Judging by the swarms of tourists (more even than in Angkor Wat, it seems to me) they will have to leave at least some of the more spectacular trees that the tourists come to see.

Siem Reap

So Many Temples

Khmer temples litter the landscape around Siem Reap - beautiful stone-built temples, with carvings of battles, ancient Brahmanical myth and dancing Apsaras (bare breasted girls wearing beautiful skirts, jewellery and fantastic hairstyles). Millions of tourists come to visit these temples every year and Siem Reap caters for them all. There are those who fly in and stay in five star hotels and are driven to the temples in air conditioned cars. There are those who arrive by bus and hire tuktuks to visit the temples and there are those who arrive on bicycles with tents on the back. Siem Reap has something for everybody: wide tree-lined streets, riverside hotels with beautiful gardens and markets selling street food. It even has a street called Pub Street.

The ancient Khmer Kings of Cambodia, or Fu Nan, as the Chinese called it, were called King of the Mountain. Mountains were sacred to them, so when Indian civilization arrived in the region the Khmer kings incorporated mountain worship into their new Brahminical and Buddhist religions. The best examples of this can be seen at Wat Phu (Champassak) and at Motan Mountain in Ba Phnom district, where Khmer kings erected linga as symbols of Shiva. Linga symbolised the sun for the ancient Khmers, while the yoni (female genitalia) symbolised the earth. Their ancient myth spoke of the union of the sun with the earth, out of which the universe was created.

Brahmanism was an ancient Indian religion, based on the Vedas (ancient Sanscrit texts). The Vedas were revealed to a Rishi (a Hindu ascetic or hermit) , who then had to write them down as fast as they were dictated to him (by the gods).
The three gods central to Brahmanism are:
Brahma, the god of creation
Vishnu, the god of preservation
Shiva, the god of dissolution and the god of the mountain

Shiva, who rides on the bull, Nandi, is represented by a lingum, a trident, footprints, the third eye, the sound OM, the crescent moon and a snake-shaped necklace.

King Jayavarman II was the founder of the Angkor monarchy. During his reign Angkor civilization flourished. He built numerous temples and shrines on Phnom Kulen, to house stone and precious metal linga.

King Indravarman had his throne in Roluos, but he abandoned the city and founded a new capital at Yasodharapura (Angkor). At the centre of the city there is a hill called Bakheng. This was the nearest thing to a mountain so the king built a temple there with one hundred and nine towers. This temple is now crumbling away. Parts of it can still be visited but other parts have been cordoned off.

King Jayavarman IV moved the capital from Angkor to Kohker and built temples there.
The next king, Rajendravarman, started off in Kohker, but then decided to move back to Angkor, where he built the East Mebon temple in 952 and the temple of Pre Rup in 961.

Then along came king Jayavarman V (968-1000) and Suryavarman I (1002-1050).
Suryavarman I built Wat Phu in 1006 and Preah Viheer from 1005-1050.

Suryavarman II conquered every nation around him, extending his empire from the east coast of present day Vietnam to the border with Burma in the west, to present day Malaysia in the south and half way up present day Laos in the North. When he had finished beating up his neighbours, he built the most perfect temple at Angkor Wat, dedicated to Vishnu.

Angkor Wat
According to George Coedes, Angkor Wat is a replica of the universe in stone and represents an earthly model of the cosmic world. The main tower rises from the centre of the monument and symbolises the mythical mount Meru, at the centre of the universe. It's five towers correspond to the five peaks of Mount Meru; the outer gallery represents the mountains at the edge of the world and the surrounding moat represents the oceans beyond.

The long stone walls are carved with bas reliefs, arranged for viewing from left to right, in the same manner as the religious ceremonies are carried out for tombs in Hinduism. In the West gallery in the third enclosure the bas reliefs represent Indian myths from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (battles) and other ancient Vedic texts. The west and east part of the south gallery have bas reliefs depicting the historical procession of Suryavarman II and Heaven and Hell. In the east gallery you should be able to see the famous churning of the oceans of milk, but unfortunately this was being restored when I was there.

Angkor Wat is a vast labyrinth with steep steps leading up to the various levels. It is difficult to imagine what the whole temple is like when you are in it. Really you need to be above it, which is why they have a hot air balloon to take people up above it (at a price).  I spent several hours in the company of a young Polish girl, who had just finished her degree in Sanskrit languages at Edinburgh university. She pointed out all the different gods, fighting in the battles depicted in the bas reliefs.

Then my tuktuk driver took me to Angkor Thom, another ancient Khmer city, with the most beautiful stone gate at the entrance. This was the gate that I had come all this way to see.

The Bayon temple in Angkor Thom is smaller than Angkor Wat and not as well preserved. But the bas reliefs on the walls are magnificent. They depict battles with the neighbouring Cham, who are represented as small, weedy little soldiers, whereas the Khmer soldiers are big, strong, brave men, beating the poor Cham to a pulp.

Like Angkor Wat, the Bayon temple has exquisitely carved door lintels, peaked towers and labyrinthine passageways and steep steps.

My tuktuk driver left me at the entrance to the Bayon temple and told me to make my way through the wood, where I would see other temples in various states of decay. Wandering through the wood, past magnificent ancient trees whose Latin binomials had been printed on labels, helpfully attached to them, I came to a bucolic scene: cows grazing in a pasture in front of a ruined temple. The cows were not impressed with me trying to capture them up close on camera and made as if to head butt me, so I left them in peace, searching for something to eat in this dried out piece of land.

We drove to a couple more small temples, then my camera ran out of battery.
Back in Siem Reap a band of legless Cambodian musicians were performing in Pub Street, a girl was sitting with her legs in a fish tank, the street was teeming with people, the bars packed.

Phnom Penh

My tuktuk took me off the beaten track, into a warren of winding, narrow streets, where the upper stories of old buildings, in a multitude of different styles, jutted out above the lower stories. The higher parts of the buildings leaned towards each other until someone stretching a hand out of a window could hold hands with someone putting a hand out of a window on the other side of the street. Little bars and cafes on the ground floors were illuminated invitingly.  This is old Phnom Penh, destined for demolition.

The tuktuk stopped at the entrance to a collection of old wooden buildings on stilts built right over the water at the edge of the lake. As I entered it was dark, lit like a Fellini film set. There was loud reggae music playing, drunken Westerners shouting, groups of Africans huddled round tables and Cambodian prostitutes wandering about. This was a fragile floating palace, with wooden bridges across the water, leading to long boardwalks with tropical plants in pots and rooms leading off. Cane chairs with big red cushions were scattered about on a large boardwalk overlooking the lake. There were a few mattresses on the floor for the tired, the stoned and the stargazers (they would have to imagine the stars because there was much too much light all around).

I booked into a basic, cheap room upstairs, which was surprisingly quiet. But decided against joining the noisy crowd downstairs and went, instead to one of the nearby cafes to eat, drink beer with huge lumps of ice and chat to the Australian woman who had fallen in love with Cambodia and worked in the bar in exchange for food and beer. She spent her days volunteering in an orphanage and she wanted to live in Cambodia forever.

Journey to Cambodia

I waited from half past seven until a quarter to eight for the pre-paid transport to pick me up (at half past seven) and take me to the port - to catch the eight thirty ferry. Eventually a man on a motorbike arrived and handed me a mobile phone. On the other end of the phone someone was trying to explain to me why his vehicle had failed to start, and telling me to get into the taxi outside the agency. The taxi went in the opposite direction from where we needed to go, then stopped in a wood, with absolutely no explanation. Minutes passed, my anxiety levels were rising, then a couple ambled out of a house and got into the taxi. When we finally got onto the road to the ferry, the driver put his foot down, but five minutes before we reached the port he stopped and started a long conversation with a woman in the street. All three of us remonstrated loudly with him, but he ignored us completely. When we reached the port, we discovered that we now had to walk (dragging our luggage) along a long causway to the boat. We tried to run, with difficulty and just reached the boat seconds before it left.

The sea was choppy. I had to get out on deck. Deck, unfortunately, was a small area behnd the engine, hot and noisy, already crammed with Vietnamese people, their hens and cocks and sacks of merchandise. After a while I managed to squeeze in and sit on the back rail, in the corner, where the sea sprayed over me the whole way. I arrived encrusted with salt.

We were not impressed with the bus that they had laid on for us. The suspension was knackered and the thing bounced so high that the driver had to keep slowing down. We had all paid over the odds for a nice new bus, but we didn't get it. Yet another border crossing rip off. On the other side of the border they transferred us to another bus going to Phnom Penh, only marginally better than the first one. The air conditioning worked on one side of the bus but not on the other and I was put in the back seat, where I couldn't see out because I was above the level of the windows.

Half way to Phnom Penh a four by four crashed into the bus, buckling the side of the bus over the wheel. After messing around with the police for an hour or so, the driver and his crew found a sledgehammer and bashed away at the bent metal for an hour until they had bent it back enough to allow the wheel to turn. In the process a piece of the side of the bus fell off. Then we all got back in and the bus limped to the nearest town, turned off the road into a place full of broken and bent vehicles and stopped. Everyone cheered. Half an hour later we were all on yet another bus, on our way to Phnom Penh. We arrived at eight in the evening, hot, hungry, thirsty and tired.

Last Day in Phu Quoc

I travelled round the island today on the back of a motorbike. I would not have chosen this mode of transport, but no other option was available, so donning my mask, sunglasses and the helmet offered to me, we set off, on red dirt roads, through forest, past forested hills and mountains. My driver insisted on taking me to see a 'waterfall', which of course did not exist because it is the dry season. But there was a dam and an artificial lake, surrounded by thickly wooded hills, supremely serene, under the hot sun burning in the bright blue sky. Then he took me to the beach where everyone in the know goes - Sao Beach - a beach on the far side of the island, far away from the town and the hotels (and the sewage). The sea here was emerald green and clear, unlike the scummy sea on the other side of the island, where I had been swimming.

Then we drove back along the other coast until we came to the museum, which he insisted was 'very nice' although he had never been in it. On five floors, you start off on the ground floor, looking at fossilised wood, then slices of natural wood from an infinite variety of local trees (who knows how many of them still exist), a few of which had Latin binomials, but most of which only had Vietamese names. Then you progress upstairs through neolithic tools found in Phu Quoc, to pottery, neolithic, then later, up to the invasion of the French colonisers, the fight against them and the three prisons built on Phu quoc to house first the anti-French resistance fighters, then later the communists by the americans, with some pretty horrific photos of the tiger cages they put them in and the bones of the prisoners they killed. I had not realised that the wars that took place in Vietnam spread so far south.

When we finally returned to my 'hotel' I was covered in a thick layer of red dust from head to foot. Hopefully the mask had kept some of it out of my lungs. This hotel doesn't provide soap, so there is a certain amount of red dust on the towel now.

Getting the boat tomorrow back to the mainland - Ha Tien, then on to Pnom Penh by bus.

Phu Quoc

Warm tropical seas, palm fringed beaches, luxurious resorts tastefully hidden behind trees; Phu Quoc is the new Phu ket, where the rich come to relax. The beach this morning was full of huge, fat Russians, who are utterly unfriendly. I, of course, have found a five dollar room, in the town, but within a five minute walk of the beach. I thought it would be a good idea to swim a little, get some fresh air after all the traffic fumes of the past few weeks, but I'm not sure I can survive the feeling of isolation here. I'm begining to feel a nice scruffy backpacker hostel in Siem Reip beckoning me away. And Siem Reip is a long way away - a boat trip to Vietnam, then several days travel by local bus (or by any kind of bus for that matter). I had found a railway line on the map that would have taken me to Batambang (near Siem Reip) but it turns out that it is defunct, so it's back to the buses.

Phu Quoc, in case anyone is wondering, is an island off the coast of Cambodia, but the Vietnamese are hanging on to it like grim death. Ninety percent of the island is protected forest national park. The population is small, so driving across the island is a pleasant experience, through forest and mountains, so different from the Vietnamese Mekong delta, where the roads are lined with shacks wherever you go.

Boat Restaurant in Cantho

Yesterday evening, walking along the riverfront, I came to a boat with three decks, stacked on top of each other, sitting solidly in the water by the riverside. There was a wedding going on in the middle deck, but the top deck was empty. Table cloths blew about in the wind as waitresses laid the tables. I ordered a beer. I asked for some ice. The waitress brought me a straw. I asked for it in Vietnamese. She had a tantrum and ran off to complain to another waitress. Someone else brought me some ice.

A group of Vietnamese people sat at the table next to mine. They smiled. They said hello. Eventually one of them admitted that he lived in the US, so he spoke English (not very well). I ordered some fish balls. They ordered rice, greens, meat and beer. They soon started buying beer for me, then offering me food, then they told me that I should not leave because the boat was going on a little night cruise.

By now the whole top deck was full, every table surrounded by Vietnamese people. The sun had set and fairy lights flashed on and off above the deck. A series of singers performed on stage at the other end of the deck, Vietnamese traditional songs and pop songs alternately. Different singers performed downstairs for the wedding. There was so much noise from the music and the happy conversations of the diners that no-one heard the boat leave. It glided down the river sedately for an hour or so, then glided back.

Today I caught a bus to Rach Gia and caught a boat to the island of Phu Quoc, which is about as far south as I can get in Vietnam.

Floating Markets at Cantho in the Mekong Delta

I took yet another boat trip, this time with a couple of English guys, setting off at five thirty in the morning, to get to the floating markets at their busiest. Little boats laden with pineapples, melons, potatoes, cabbages, mangoes, etc all cluster together at the edge of the river. Boats of every size come to buy from them. Little boats sell hot coffee, bananas and snacks. Tourists arrive in boats of all sizes and buy fruit, pasties and great round crispy pancakes, their boats wedged in among the floating market boats, taking photos. Vietnamese women row little boats standing up. It is dawn and a hive of activity. Some of the boats leave as the sun comes up.

We continued to a  place where we got out to watch rice-noodle making by hand. The wet mixture was spread onto a round flat griddle, covered with a lid, left a few seconds to cook, then removed and placed on a bamboo rack to dry. The dried round flat pancakes are pushed through a machine that slices them into thin strips, about the thickness of a rubber band. The women employed in this tedious, repetitive work chatted non-stop to relieve the boredom.

We continued on to another floating market, where we stayed, wedged in, until the boats began to disperse. Then our boatman took us to a riverside restaurant, where we happily ordered lunch, before looking at our watches and realising that it was eleven o'clock. Oh well, we've been up since five without breakfast. Seems like a good time to eat, we thought. Women came and massaged our backs and shoulders, without a word. then they asked us for fifty thousand dong each. We refused to pay. then the restaurant tried to overcharge us and also added the massage to the bill. We paid for our food and drink and left.

The boatman took the boat into a part of the waterway where mangroves grew. The water was full of rubbish and he had to keep stopping to disentangle the propeller from the plastic bags that wrapped themselves around it.The mangroves didn't look healthy.

After a while we turned into a canal with cleaner looking water and healthier looking mangroves. But they were not like the mangroves I remember from the  Everglades in Florida, where they are properly protected. People had chopped branches off to stop them spreading too far into the channel, branches hanging down did not quite touch the water and those sticking up out of the mud were bare and leafless. Some of the trees had whole patches of leafless branches.

Last night I met a young German woman studying mangroves in Vietnam as her PhD project. She told me that people damaged the mangroves by walking in the mud where the new shoots were growing, in order to collect mussles and shellfish. Her project was to find out whether these people were local to the area, why they came there and all sorts of other things about their lives, then to think of ways in which to communicate with them about the damage they were doing to the environment that provided them with their living. But somehow I don't think the mangroves we saw were damaged by people collecting shellfish. I have a suspicion that pollution may have been the cause.

Into the backwaters of the Mekong Delta

We took a little boat upriver, that turned into a narrower channel, then turned into an even narrower channel, deep in the coconut forest. Frondy branches leaned over the river on both sides and coconut palms rose up all around us. Every few hundred yards we went past huge piles of coconuts, either arriving, or being cracked open to take out the coconut flesh, which is then washed in a series of baths. The washed flesh is taken to a press, to extract the oil.

At a certain point we left the boat and walked to a little house in the forest, where a table and stools awaited us with fresh coconuts, open so that we could drink the juice with straws, together with little plates of sweet pineapple pieces and bananas.. The women of the house were making cane mats, pushing the pieces of cane into the mat by hand and using a loom to press each piece of cane into the mat tightly.

We were transported from the house on an open carriage, pulled by a motorbike, along narrow paths through the forest until the paved paths came to an end and we continued on foot til we came to a bridge, where a smiling woman waited for us in a little boat. Squatting on the end of the boat she rowed us through the narrow channel, showing us her perfect teeth in a beautiful smile, as we passed through the quiet forest, back to our waiting boat.

The sun was setting as we emerged from the narrow channel into the wide river and we saw that we were opposite our hotel. We had travelled in a circle round a small area of the coconut forest.

Mekong Delta, Vietnam

We caught the local rattley bus out of Saigon, which travels fast - not like the lazy Lao busses, which go at about twenty km per hour, stopping every five minutes. These Vietnamese buses go like the wind, hitting every pothole with relish. The whole area is densly populated, including the delta, where we cross over river after river, until we reached our destination. After we left the bus we decided to ford the river and go to an island called Ben Tre. We discovered that a huge bridge had been built, since our guide books were written, so the ferry no longer worked. We walked to the bridge, under the beating sun, where we hoped to pick up a bus, instead of which we were picked up by a couple of motorbikes, not something I had intended to do. But Diana shamed me into it. It´s quite safe, she said. Everyone travels like this. And so they do, whole families on one bike, bikes carrying chickens, entire roadside stalls, toilets, even live pigs. They carry loads many times bigger than the bikes, sometimes hiding the bike almost completely. So I sat on the back of this bike, driving over bridge after bridge, over river after river, past forests of coconut palms and houses.

Ben tre is not the sort of place tourists go to, which pleases Diana enormously. We seem to be the only non-Vietnamese in this hotel, which is the most luxurious hotel I have been in the whole time I´ve been travelling. We have a huge room with a river view, air conditioning, fridge, TV and bathroom, all for seven dollars each. Teak furniture in the lobby, inlaid with mother of pearl flowers and birds - very kitch. A breakfast room open on the river side, with river views, full of Vietnamese families eating noodle soup with pork for breakfast. Cargo boats ply the river, carrying all kinds of cargo, including coconuts, which Ben Tre is famous for. Yesterday evening, Diana drank the milk of two fresh coconuts.


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Saigon

Sleeper bus from Hoi An to Na Trang.
The 'beds' in this bus were not flat. The first third of the bed slopes at an angle of forty five degrees over the end of the bed behind, and the remaining two thirds of the bed are flat. The beds are designed for small Vietnamese people to lie propped up in this position. Tall Westerners have to try to fit in somehow. My legs were a few inches too long, so I had to bend my feet to one side or the other, or bend my knees. A six foot man has to lie with his knees bent, or his feet sticking out into the corridoor. The bus driver had a foul temper and swore at everyone every time we got on the bus or off the bus. He let Vietnamese passengers on the bus all night. They lay in the corridoors, blocking them completely. He refused to stop for four hours to let the passengers get out to go to the toilet. In the end there was a massive protest and he had to stop - but in a wasteland full of rubbish with one flooded toilet. Some of us decided it would be better to squat down in the undergrowth, which we did. Sleep was broken repeatedly. Not a good way to travel.

Sleeper bus from Na Trang to Saigon
Same kind of bus with the same problems, except that it was the day time. The bus drove along a wide, flat valley, between gently sloping peaked mountains on either side. Brilliant green rice fields stretched from one side of the valley to the other for mile after mile after mile. The Vietnamese use irrigation, chemical fertiliser and pesticides to grow as many crops a year as they can. Groves of coconut palms and huge plantations of pineapples broke up the expanse of rice fields from time to time.

The bus drove like a dragon through the outskirts of Saigon, blasting traffic out of its way with its horn blaring constantly. We drove through an industrial wasteland for hours, past dirt, smoke and factories of every kind. Eventually the bus deposited us in a bus station somewhere in Saigon. No-one wanted to tell us which bus station it was and the taxi drivers were all running an overcharging mafia. We tried to find a bus that would take us to the centre but the bus wouldn't stop. Then a young Vietnamese man took pity on us, got us on the right bus and accompanied us to the centre, where he found out the way to the hotel we wanted to stay at and took us all the way to it.

The traffic in Saigon is even more hellish than in Hanoi, because the roads are wider and there is more of it. The only way across the road it to walk through the traffic, which travels much faster in Saigon. I have found a new travel companion - Diana, an intrepid German woman, who, like me, wants to go to the delta independently. I'm planning our escape from this hell-hole of a city as soon as possible.

Hoi An

I have been in Hoi An quite long enough. There's just so much trawling around beautiful old teak shops in the heat that you can do. Time to move on. Which means going on a sleeper bus tonight to Na Trang. I have heard varying reports about these sleeper buses - mainly from very big men who didn't fit into the beds. Since I am five foot seven, I hope that I will fit in OK! They designed these buses for little Vietnamese people, who probably fit three to a bed.

Yesterday I had a chocolate tart. Made with dark, supersmooth chocolate. Heaven only knows where they got the chocolate from. You don't see it in South East Asia at all, mainly because it has to be kept in the fridge to prevent it trickling away in a pool. This was the most divine tart, the first chocolate I have eaten for over two months. And probably the last I will taste for the next month!

Na Trang next stop, then straight on down to Ho Chi Minh city, which I would dearly like to avoid, but the only way to avoid it would be to fly over it, which I do not intend to do. So if I survive the experience, Iwill head straight to the Mekong delta, to explore the islands, before heading into Cambodia.

Hoi An - Temples at My Son

It's hot, hot, hot in Hoi An. Beautiful old town with lovely teak shopfronts. Today a bus load of us went to visit the remains of the temples at My Son. The temples were lost in the jungle for hundreds of years, until a French explorer discovered them in the eighteenth century. Built out of brick at the height of the Cham Empire, the bricks were carved into graceful figures that covered the temples. They were high, ornate and impressive. Unfortunately the Americans bombed them, damaging them badly. The ruins of a few of them remain, with some beautiful stone statues inside.

Vegetation sprouts from the ruins, which stand among trees, creepers and every kind of plant. Blue mountain peaks form a backdrop. I travelled today with a feisty sixty two year old Californian woman, who set off down the track leading to the temples at a smart lick.