Toc That

Helen: We seem to have slowed somewhat in our whirlwind trip round SE Asia - we have been in Vietnam for nearly a whole week now. A whole week! Since the last post we took a bus to Phnom Penh (crazy crazy traffic - we sat in a bar and played motorbike poker - we were both tied with 5 people on a bike each, when C spotted a guy carrying, I kid you not, a full size wardrode. We also visited the Tuol Sleng Museum - the old school that was S21 prison during Pol Pot's time. Thousands of people were tortured and murdered there, and it's been left as a memorial to them. There are photos of them on the walls. It was almost too horrific to really take it all in. It didn't really seem real. The most interesting room was an exhibit by a Swede who had visited in 1978 as part of an official tour. Apparently communism was big in Sweeden at the time, and so when he visited he genuinely thought that the Khmer Rouge was a good thing. The exhibition shows the photos he took at the time with his thoughts from 1978, along with his thoughts from now (once the true details of the regime came out he changed his mind - just goes to show how people can be fooled by propoganda - even educated people who ought to know better).
Anyway, I got sidetracked. From PP we went to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) - stayed just long enough to get ripped off by a taxi driver (first time spending Dong so no idea how much stuff costs - we paid at least 10 times too much!) on the way to the train station, and then we spent 4 days in the hills around Hanoi. Wow. Wow. Totally amazing. Have a look at the photos on Flickr to see what we mean. Everywhere we've been so far that's been pretty has looked like Scotland. Not N Vietnam. It looks like nowhere else. Crazy limestone mountains, bright green paddy fields, people working the fields by hand with conical hats, cows that look more like elephants or rhinos. We stayed in stilt huts and traveled on roads that tourists never take - they were rutted, gravely, muddy - C did brilliantly with me on the back. You could tell that tourists never get to these places because every time we stopped to talk to the locals they would stare at C's hair. They would always ask if it was real ('toc that' means 'real hair') and they'd build up the courage to come and pull at it with toothless grins! Our guide Hai was great - he looked like a korean popstar, and was always flirting with the ladies, but he was a real gentleman. He really wanted us to like his country and went out of his way to make sure we had a good time. We stopped and had raw sugar cane juice and sticky rice cooked in bamboo. We saw chop sticks being made and he even took us to his house to meet his family (grandma had black teeth from chewing betel nut and didn't seem to mind that we didn't understand a word she said). We were so lucky - just the two of us and Hai for 4 days.
Right. Off to China tomorrow. Hope we have time to go and see Ho Chi Minh himself before we leave...
Hxx

PS thought you'd like this - we stopped to have lunch one day and a family invited us to join them. We had to decline their offer of home made rice wine (like vodka) but joined them for green tea (we've drunk so much tea in the last few days). We wanted to share with them so we offered them some chocolate. They ate it as if it was beetles, like they were only being polite! Actually, they didn't eat it like it was beetles, because the Vietnamese like beetles (we got served some the other night, and the only reason C ate one is because I ate one first). They eat grasshopers and snails and snakes and chicken feet and pig intestines willingly, but apparently not chocolate!