South East Asia on a Hamstring – March 7

Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Vietnam – March 7, 2000

Lochie went to the dentist while I got dong out of the ANZ bank’s ATM. A hotel (shh!) changed it for me with no problems and I wandered around pickpocket-happy Saigon with an ill-advised wad of dollars in my bag. Ultimately, I went to the Pham Ngu Lao backpacker’s district and did some boring but essential internet bill-paying.

It’s astonishing how prevalent the internet has become in the last few years. When I last hit the road for two months, in the beginning of ‘98, I had to sniff out every internet access point through India, Pakistan, and Jordan. I ended up paying a fortune to use the computers in luxury hotels and occasionally charmed a computer school or software store into letting me use their internet. But now, in every single country I’ve been in on this trip, it has taken me less than ten minutes to find internet access and the prices have all been fairly competitive. The access, which once was excruciatingly slow, has sped up to “slow-but-not-painstaking.”

Just as I finished up my internet-errands, the skies opened up and poured. A taxi pulled up outside the internet place and the driver pushed the door open just as I leapt through the rain into the back seat. I had him take me to Cafe Van down the street for a takeaway sandwich and then back to the Embassy Hotel. For all his waiting, I gave him 50,000 dong instead of the 12,000 on the meter. I hope he took the rest of the day off.

Lochie was back from the dentist so I convinced her to go to the zoo with me once the rain stopped. The zoo was a pleasant, breezy place with cats and dogs running around next to the rhino and elephants.

We took a taxi through more motorbikes than I knew were on the entire planet and went to our group meeting.

Our new (and final) leader is Stuart, a colorful and gregarious Scottish-Australian. I was too tired of meeting new groups to take much notice of the others – there was me, Lochie, Tom, Julia, and two new ones. The other six would meet us tomorrow night in Phnom Penh.

We ran into Brenda, from our previous group, and she told us a story before running off to dinner. She’d heard that a “friend-of-a-friend” had been up on the Afghanistan border and the customs officials had checked her bags. They had come across tampons and the woman hadn’t wanted to go through a pantomime to explain their purpose. They were small packets with little strings, so the border guards put them in the middle of a field and blew them up, having no idea what their real purpose would be.

It was obviously an urban legend of traveling, with no more basis in reality than Bill Gates giving everyone free trips to Disney World, but I got quite a laugh out of it.

In the morning, we leave for the Cambodian border. Stuart warned us – the ride to the border is smooth and easy but once we got on the Cambodian side, the potholes would outnumber the number of square inches of smooth tarmac!

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