Twenty-Freaking-Five and Alive! The Epic Vietnam-Cambodia Trip

I've posted about this trip quite a few times already, and for good reason - it remains as, and probably will forever be, one of my life's greatest adventures.

Through this trip my love for travel was cemented. It was the first one that really took me out of the world I knew in such a massive, epic way, and I was pretty much in awe the entire time.

I have so many vivid memories from our trip to Cambodia and Vietnam, and often they come back to me randomly - sitting on plastic chairs in a roadside eatery at 2am on our first night/day in Ho Chi Minh; seeing Angkor Wat for the very first time at dawn on our first day in Siem Reap; walking along the lovely narrow streets of Hoi An; finding a tiny, hole-in-the-wall patisserie in Hue; and making friends with strangers on a junk boat cruise in Ha Long Bay. My two weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia remain to be two of the best and most unforgettable weeks of my life so far.

Cambodia





Hoi An, Vietnam


Hue, Vietnam



Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Snapshots: Vendors En Route To Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

My previous "Snapshots" post was giving me a bit of yuppie guilt so I thought I'd share one of the most "real" photos I've ever taken in my trips. This one is from when we were on a bus en route from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Talk about in-your-face marketing. We were luckier than the people in the van because we were in a closed, air-conditioned bus, somewhat protected from the onslaught of a million sales pitches, although we didn't escape all of them - I distinctly remember being offered an adorable baby through the window. And while I didn't pull an Angelina Jolie and currently there is no mohawked Maddox living in my tiny flat here in Manila, I couldn't help but feel a little pang of guilt at what we saw. It was one of those harsh realities you'll be hard pressed not to notice if you travel (and especially if you actually live) in a developing country.

Nevertheless, I'll be forever amazed and inspired by people who live in situations like this, and someday I hope I'll be able to help them make their lives a little better, a little easier.

I hope that baby's doing well.

Siem Reap - Phnom Penh - Ho Chi Minh

This will be short and sweet, because it will just be about our trip back from Cambodia to Vietnam. And mostly because I can’t wait to start writing about our other destinations: Hoi An, Hue, Ha Noi and Ha Long Bay. So here's our journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and back to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, told in pictures (and yes, that is Elton John in one of the photos).

April 7-8, 2009

It was another 5-hour van ride from Siem Reap to Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh. On the way, we stopped by a roadside eatery that served turtles, with the shell and everything! It did not look delectable at all, especially as we had a pet turtle in the house before, but I just had to take a picture before they started cooking them.

In Phnom Penh, we stayed in a hostel called Fancy Guest House, where we were welcomed warmly by Phannak, its quirky owner. He claimed that Elton John had once stayed in the Fancy Guest House, and had an autographed photo of him clipped to the hostel's sign.

Contrary to Siem Reap, Phnom Penh was noisy, crazy, polluted and populated - a shock to the senses, especially after we had spent the days prior in the quiet forest of Siem Reap. We hadn't the energy (and the guts, to be quite honest) to explore Phnom Penh thoroughly but we did eat at a non-profit restaurant whose earnings went to charity. It seemed a popular joint with travelers, as it had an entire wall sprawled with messages from people all over the world. While waiting for our meals, we also saw a huge elephant pass by nonchalantly by the side of the road, much to our surprise. It was the strangest, coolest thing.

We spent the next day on a bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh, where vendors tried to sell us their goods as we sat comfortably within our airconditioned bus. Others who rode open-air vans weren't so lucky - their windows were open to the onslaught of a million sales pitches.

We finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh and checked into Bich Duyen, a small hotel along Pham Ngu Lao, a tiny blink-and-you'll-miss kind of street whose entrance on one side is a small alley that opens up to a narrow street lined with hotel upon hotel. It was, however, one of the best hotels we stayed in during our entire trip, mostly because of Chahn, the friendly hotel manager. The service at Bich Duyen was amazing, the rooms very clean, and the breakfast delicious, and all for very reasonable rates!

Here's a simple tip when trying to find good accommodation - the first sign of a good hotel with good service is its warm, friendly reply to an email inquiry. From the very beginning, when my friend sent out emails to Fancy Guest House in Phnom Penh and Bich Duyen in Ho Chi Minh, the email replies of Phannak and Chahn were already very accommodating - they answered our every question, agreed to our every request. And true enough, we were very happy with the service we received when we stayed in these hotels. Of course, I can't say for sure that this method is failsafe, but I certainly believe that the email reply to an inquiry is a good gauge of how friendly and accommodating a hotel is.

Our night in Ho Chi Minh was a great food trip and a reunion with other college friends. Our first stop was Highlands Coffee, which I guess was sort of like the Starbucks of Vietnam, and then we met with Apple, a classmate of ours from college who was working in Ho Chi Minh City at the time. She took us to Ngon, a great place that served delicious Vietnamese cuisine. The spring rolls were amazing! Afterwards we had gelato at a cute French-inspired joint. We then visited Nina, another college classmate who was in HCM on a business trip.

We got to our hotel very late at night, and discovered that hotels along Pham Ngu Lao actually close at night - much to our horror! For a few seconds we were worried that we would have to sleep on the street that night until the ever-reliable Chahn opened the hotel's door for us. Relieved, we dashed to our hotel room and slept almost immediately. The next day was going to be a long one too, as we were to take a Vietnam Airlines flight to Danang, and from there, head out to Hoi An.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Siem Reap, Cambodia

April 4, 2009

At 2 a.m. on the very first day of our trip, Tiff, Jen and I found ourselves sitting in small plastic chairs on the sidewalk fronting a 24-hour convenience store along De Tham St., Ho Chi Minh’s backpacker district. Having just arrived in Vietnam from our three-hour flight from Manila, we had four hours to spare before our bus ride to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and we didn’t bother renting a hotel room in which to spend such a short amount of time in – we figured there was no need for the typical tourist transition point to ease our way into a strange, foreign land, and instead opted for an immediate immersion into the country we would call home for two weeks.

We were the first customers of the lady who was just beginning to set up her sidewalk food stall when we arrived. Under the orange-yellow glow of a lamp post, the three of us shared a plate of noodles with beef and vegetables and caught up with each other’s lives. We had not seen each other for a while, so there was plenty to talk about. Lulls in conversation were spent observing the few passers-by wandering the streets of Ho Chi Minh past an apparent curfew – mostly they were foreigners coming to and from the few bars that were still open. Pretty soon it was dawn and the street lamps gave way to sunlight, and by 6:30 am our Sinh Café bus had arrived (for information and a review of Sinh Café, click here).

Border Crossing at Moc Bai
I’ve lived all my life in the Philippines, a country of at least seven thousand islands. And being surrounded by water all my life, the idea of crossing over to another country by land is a pretty alien concept to me. So you can imagine my excitement (and slight anxiety, I must admit) at being able to literally walk across from one country and right into another – with the proper immigration process and paperwork, of course.


There were so many people trying to cross the Vietnam-Cambodia border that Saturday morning so it took a while to get our passports stamped and for Tiff (who has an Australian passport) to get her visa. Our tour guide on the bus collected all our passports and had them processed all at the same time. He would call out our names once our passports had been processed, and amidst the heat, the many bobbing heads eager to cross the border, and the tour guide’s accent, it was a slightly daunting task, waiting for your name to be called, after which you had to drag your luggage across the aforementioned bobbing heads (and their own luggage) to claim your passport and have it stamped one last time before you’re let out of the building. In an hour or so we had all successfully been allowed entry into Cambodia and were back on the bus on our way to Phnom Penh, but not before a quick lunch at a roadside eatery. Our Vietnamese Dhong were rendered useless once we stepped into Cambodian territory, and we instead used our US dollars to buy us lunch – noodles in hot soup for Tiff and rice meals for me and Jen. (For tips on money matters in Vietnam and Cambodia, click here).


Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh to Siem Reap
The open bus tour took us from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnam-Cambodia border at Moc Bai and eventually to Phnom Penh, which took around five hours. At the Sinh Café office in Phnom Penh, we transferred to a van which drove us to Siem Reap, a trip that lasted another six hours. Nearly a whole day spent in transit isn’t as daunting as it sounds, to be honest, thanks to the iPod and my terrible lack of sleep the week prior – I pretty much dozed through the entire trip. I got so used to sleeping in a moving vehicle, in fact, that after our border-crossing bus ride from Ho Chi Minh to Siem Reap, I would get on a bus or any moving vehicle and find my eyelids heavy – in a minute or so, however bumpy the road or beautiful the scenery, I would be sleeping.

The Town of Siem Reap
It was already late in the evening when we finally arrived in Siem Reap, and the town seemed already asleep. Driving into the town of Siem Reap was an interesting experience - imagine having travelled over five hours on mostly unpaved, extremely bumpy roads, with scenery that mostly consisted of trees, rice fields and the occasional row of houses, and then to awake and find yourself under the glow of street lights, past large structures with well-manicured lawns, on a surprisingly smooth ride along wide and well-paved roads with street signs that would rival that of a city’s. Siem Reap, while a small, sleepy town in what seems to be the middle of Cambodia nowhere, has the look, feel and tidiness of a city. It just felt so…organized, too organized and tidy for a small, sleepy town, but not in a pretentious, attract-the-tourists kind of way. I daresay Siem Reap has managed to find the fine balance of being a true, small and sleepy town, with its old charm intact, while also being a fairly progressive, modern, and tourist-friendly destination. Is there such a thing as a “sleepy tourist destination”? I didn’t think so before, but after having visited Siem Reap, I think perhaps it might be possible.

A tuktuk took us (read that aloud and it’s like you said “took” three times over, haha!) to our hotel from the bus stop. We were to stay at The Villa Siem Reap, a nice purple hotel that looked more like a big house than a formal establishment, which no doubt added to its charm. We were warmly welcomed by their lovely staff and led to our room on the second floor, but not before asking us to remove our footwear and leave them by the front door. As our trip progressed further we were to realize that this was common practice among hotels in both Vietnam and Cambodia.


We hadn’t the energy to explore the streets of Siem Reap after our nearly 11-hour land trip from Vietnam, so we opted to have dinner at the hotel restaurant and go straight to bed right after. We needed to wake up early the next day – around 5 am – because we were to begin our exploration of the temples of Angkor Wat and catch the sunrise.

Two Weeks in Indochina: Our Epic Trip to Vietnam and Cambodia!

April 4-18, 2009
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam to Siem Reap, Cambodia
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Hue, Vietnam
Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, Vietnam
Vietnam-Cambodia Complete Trip Information