to Phnom Penh by bus

Travel Truth #3: Happy accidents do happen. Especially at dinnertime. 

My Vietnam-Cambodia hop went off without a hitch. I awoke, dressed, went downstairs, and paid $20 for my laundry, a bottle of water and a ticket to Cambodia. Now that's my kind of trip, right there. The receptionist arranged for a shuttle ride to get me to the bus terminal and before I knew it I was in a tiny, rollicking minivan with half a dozen other would-be passengers, including a sweet old Thai gentleman whose name I shall never be able to pronounce, let alone spell. We boarded our bus at the station, handed over $25 apiece and our passports to be stamped with Cambodian visas, and took off for the border. 

We were on Cambodian soil by 11:20. We made three stops at the border: one to get our entry forms, one to get our visas, and the third for lunch—a spacious open-ended warehouse of a building with a corrugated tin roof and orange tile floors, so cool that a couple of lazy dogs were sprawled down and napping upon it, flies buzzing about their noses. I had chicken and green beans over rice, which I was somehow able to pay for with Vietnamese money (only $2 American). I sat with the nice Thai gentleman and his bent, wrinkled, sleepy friend, who didn't speak a word of English and was wearing a Saigon souvenir baseball cap with the price tag still on it. 

While we chatted, there came a noise like an oncoming freight train. A mild hiss became a rattle, and the rattle an earth-shaking roar. The monsoon rains were pounding down on the tin roof, each drop as big as a .50-caliber bullet, and you could hardly hear yourself think. The Thai gent and I finished our conversation at a yell and then boarded the bus to continue our journey. 

My impressions of Cambodia weren't that different from Vietnam—the two countries looked pretty similar. But the countryside here was dustier, flatter, trashier, poorer, and the people were decidedly more Indian-looking. I saw hump-backed, cud-chewing Brahman cattle, houses on stilts, wells with tin-roofed cupolas, ponds covered with lily pads and filled with garbage, and locals napping in hammocks—hammocks strung between stanchions, between stilts, between fence posts and walls, even between trees at the side of the road. Hammocks everywhere. 

About a half hour before we made Phnom Penh, the bus nosed its ponderous way onto a car ferry and we crossed the broad, rambunctious, muddy Mekong. 

We reached the city at about 3:30 in the afternoon. The outskirts of the town were dirty and dingy, with more of the hollow, crumbling buildings and skewed thoroughfares as Hanoi had possessed—but the Cambodian roads were mostly unpaved and the rotting buildings even dustier and more decrepit-looking. Even the highway from Saigon had been gravel for miles at a stretch. 

I jumped off the bus and nabbed the first tuk-tuk driver I could find. I forked over $5 for a ride across the north-central part of town to my hotel. Five bucks was a bit steep—I overheard other foreigners getting rides for $3—but I acquiesced, as it was the same price I'd have paid for a cab in HCMC. 

My room at the Amber House near Wat Langka wasn't ready for me when I arrived, so I was bowed into a gigantic room with two double beds across the hall. 

The funniest thing was that they had Korean comedy/variety shows on TV. With English subtitles. And as one of my coworkers from Sejong pointed out, they still weren't funny. 

I showered to get the sweat and travel grime off me, rested up for a couple of hours, and then walked to the Independence Monument and the king's memorial and snapped some shots of each. 

I had dinner at the Herb Cafe, a tourist trap of a restaurant and bar just a couple of doors down from my hotel, right across the T-intersection from Wat Langka. I hated myself for even setting foot in it. There was nobody else there but for a young, bespectacled, alarmingly skinny French hipster (perusing a tiny notebook and sipping a cocktail); a tubby, neck-bearded tourist in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts; and an elderly business traveler with a pressed blue cotton shirt and black slacks. I glanced over the menu and picked the first dish that looked good—Khmer amok—plus a whiskey sour. A full meal and an aperitif all for the low-low price of seven U.S. dollars. Zounds. I began to take a (brief) shine to Cambodia. 

I found out later that, quite by accident, I had ordered the country's national dish. Amok is a curry steam-cooked in banana leaves, with thick coconut cream and galangal being integral ingredients. Khmer amok with fish is one of Cambodia's core culinary traditions, though amok can be made with everything from chicken eggs to bamboo shoots to algae. All I can tell you is that the Khmer amok I had at the Herb Cafe near Wat Langka was spellbinding in its spicy savoriness, though (true to my code), I did not take any pictures of it. You'll just have to imagine it. Or better yet, make it yourself and try it. 

Because I had nothing to do when I'd finished my meal (but not my second whiskey sour), I struck up a conversation with the French hipster. As I'd suspected, the tiny notebook in his hands was a handmade Khmer primer. The fellow was trying to teach himself the alphabet while he sat and waited for his Buddhist friends to stop meditating in the nearby Wat Langka. His name was Erwin and he'd been working in financial administration at a local French school for the past eight months. We chatted for a few minutes until I drove him away with my questions, and he packed up and went in search of his friends. I stepped across the road into Samaky, another trendy open-air saloon with liquor bottles arranged on illuminated glass shelves along the back wall. I had a few glasses of Angkor Draft (75 cents each) and stared at the laughing clump of Cambodian ladies in the corner booth and the brooding old white dude with the natty, gnarled dreadlocks hanging down his sunburned, tank-topped back. Then I felt lonely and bored and went back to my deliciously cool room to plan tomorrow's escapades. 

Next up: the first and only full day in Phnom Penh. Prawn shooters are involved. 

Ho Chi Minh City, day three

By prior agreement, nobody in our little clique stirred before noon. We recuperated separately at our respective rooms and convened at 12:30 to revisit the Hungry Pig for some more of their cracking bacon sandwiches. They weren't chintzy with the HP Sauce this time around, either. I went the whole hog, so to speak, and got a fried egg on mine this time. 

Then we split up for the day. Jeff went off with Adam for a foodie crawl across Saigon's underbelly while Jenn and I caught a cab to Notre Dame. 

I also managed to sneak into the big colonial post office and send off some postcards to friends and family. 

I was in a bad way. My cheap Airwalk flip-flops were already three months old by the time I took them on this trip, and all the tread had been worn off the soles. This left me with zero traction on the rain-slicked Saigon sidewalks. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. I came damn near to breaking a leg (or a neck) half a dozen times. It was as if every inch of the ubiquitous square-cut cement tiles with which sidewalks in Southeast Asia are paved was covered with black ice. I prayed to Our Lady of Surface Tension to save my hide as Jenn and I marched to the national history museum, shabby but informative. 

We had a nice nap and then met with Jeff and Adam at 5:30. Jeff clung to the back of Adam's sleek black scooter like a terrified limpet. We caught a cab to the Bitexco Financial Tower, rode an express elevator to the 52nd floor, and drank Manhattans and Long Island iced teas for 290,000 VND apiece (fifteen U.S. dollars!).

The invisible sun sank down behind the murky overcast and Uncle Ho's damp, water-stained namesake city grew dark. The high-rises and spiderweb streets lit up and Saigon was suddenly indistinguishable from any other 21st-century metropolis. Jeff, Jenn, and Adam schmoozed about how fun the place was, but as I sat there with them and stared out the rain-streaked window, I felt nothing but disgust. I was fed up with the garbage piles in the streets, the homicidal scooter drivers, the persistent hawkers, the mawkish artificiality of modernized Asian culture, the pervading sense of cultural smugness about the outcome of an old war, and a thousand other things. I wasn't ready to part company with my pals just yet, but I was eager to get on with my trip and get out of this benighted country. 

I did get a consolation prize that evening, though. Stacey showed up with a friend, Danielle, and we all got a cab to May, a very upscale restaurant in Ward Dakao, District 1. We walked through a dark alley for a few dozen meters until the imposing facade of a restored colonial villa emerged seductively from behind a veil of arica palms like a forgotten but welcoming mistress. Smiling, skinny waiters in light cotton shirts ushered us inside, past the steamy kitchen with its enormous glass windows and up a narrow mahogany staircase to a parlor-like dining room decorated in the vintage French style. Billing itself as one of the healthiest and tastiest restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City ("NO MSG!" screamed the mission statement on the menu's first page), May employs top-shelf ingredients and French-trained chefs to craft a staggering array of delectable fusion dishes. I had the chicken soup, the stuffed squid, the prawns in tamarind sauce, and even a dollop of choco-coffee ice cream. The portion sizes were generous and yet my end of the bill came to just 260,000 dong, not quite $15—the price of a single cocktail on the 52nd floor of the Bitexco Financial Tower. 

After that scrumptious meal (in fine company) there was nothing to do but go back to Green Suites and pack up my things. I'd be leaving on the bus for Phnom Penh the next day at eight o'clock sharp. During our Skype chat that evening, Miss H and I came to a rather momentous decision—one whose repercussions I feel even as I sit here typing this post. We agreed that she would quit her job at Gangnam SLP and return home to the Mojave, while I would stay in Korea only as long as it would take to finish up the fall semester at Sejong University. My thoughts that night were full of the task ahead. As I noted in my journal, "I need to find a place to live..."

Ha-ha. Wait until I tell you about how all that fell out. But it'll have to wait until this travel tale is done. Next up: the first Cambodia post.