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June 17, 2006
Pnom Penh -> Ho Chi Minh City
From Sihanouk Ville we were back in Pnom Penh for 1 more night. Here we checked out the Royal Palace and the National Museum. The Royal Palace is incredibly similar to Thai Royal Palace but much less grander. However they did do a good job considering that this palace is new and the country was in war until recent time.
We were back at the Frog & Parrot to watch the England vs Trinidad game. After the game we decided to check out Heart of Darkness once again. The last time we were there there was a power black out and the night ended up the one of the weirdest night in my life! We went to Howie and we listened the music from one of the waitress' mobile phone and they wheeled a motorbike inside the pub for the light! That was one crazy night, the irony is one block away there was power :)
I enjoyed Heart of Darkness and had a good fun although that place is full of weird people. A friend pointed out that it was kinda depressing place, it's really a place for foreigners (read: westerners) to pick up local Cambodian girls. I'm never really bothered with that kind of stuff, those people are risking AIDS themselves trying to pick up random Cambodian girls - the HIV infection rate in Cambodia is one of the highest in the world. Anyway ... full report about HoD when I finally have time to write down all my stories about my travel, which is becoming less and less likely to happen :)
We left Cambodia yesterday to cross the border to Vietnam. Our bus broke down in the middle of Cambodia and that added 2 hours of already 9 hour long bus trip. All up it took us 11 hours from Pnom Penh to finally arrive in our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. In HCMC we had our one last dinners and drinks with Nak, our tour guide, and we gave him present for his amazing job taking us out through the "Real Cambodia", I couldn't have asked for a more fun tour guide.
Good bye Cambodia and Hello Vietnam.
It's amazing that as soon as we crossed the border to VIetnam the differences between the countries are so obvious. Vietnam is much more developed than Cambodia, still a lot less developed than Thailand/Malaysia/Indonesia's Java island but much much more than Cambodia. We had the chance to explore Vietnam today and we spent sometime in Chinatown and the Reunification Palance. Soon we're going to meet up with the new batch of group, hopefully they'll be as fun as the one that we had in Cambodia.
Posted by vhadiant at June 17, 2006 06:06 PM
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