Vietnam and Cambodia

The first week of October was Chuseok an important Korean holiday that I'm told is kinda like Thanksgiving but with more ancestral worship than pilgrims and indians.

Tuesday, Thursday and Friday were days off and my school was closed the Wednesday between which left only a Monday of work to ruin a possible 11 days of vacation. I wanted this day off and asked my director and was denied. I took the day off anyway which eventually ended up costing me my job (see above).

My coworkers Adam and Michelle and Sarah and I left on Saturday for Seoul. We flew out that night and arrived early Sunday morning in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh, if you dig the communist name). We checked into the hotel and found that even at 2am shops, bars and restaurants were still open. Tourism is a huge industry there and it showed. We had dinner and a few delicious Vietnamese beers and then headed for bed.

The next day I resisted the urge to yell "Good Morning Vietnam!" every five minutes and we went on a private tour of the Mekong Delta. The Saigon river has a bunch of little islands that make up the delta and we spent the afternoon touring around on a boat and hopping from island to island. We had a strange/delicious lunch and Michelle fed watermelon to a waterbuffalo. We rowed boats down small jungle tributaries and to a small shop where they make coconut candies and traditional Vietnamese alcohol. One bottle of alcohol had a cobra inside with a scorpion in it's mouth. It was crazy. And the alcohol itself was disgusting. We eventually made our way back to our hotel and ate and drank till bed.

The next day we left for Siem Reap, a city in Cambodia and the site of Ankor Wat, the largest religious structure in the world (take that pyramids!). We got in that night and met a great taxi driver who ended up being our guide and driver the whole time we were there. The hotel we found was made up of small bungalows along the river and it was beautiful. We went out for a buffet/dinner show that featured traditional Cambodian dancing, which, as far as I can tell is comprised of a beautiful cambodian woman making complicated hand gestures while a man dances around her pretending to be a monkey. The show was cool and the food (like it was the entire trip) was amazing.

The next day we drove to Ankor Wat and spent the entire day touring 4 different temples, including the gigantic temple of Ankor Wat itself. They were indescribable. Each were surrounded by jungle and every surface of the temples hand intricate hand carved pictures telling the stories and myths of the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Each temple was different regarding how they were laid out or where they were. There are dozens of temples in the area and we saw the biggest four, including one in the middle of the jungle that was used for filming the movie Tomb Raider. That temple was actually my favorite since it had enormous trees that were rooted and grew through much of the temple. It was beautiful. The large temple of Ankor Wat was also very impressive if only for how huge it was. We climbed to the top of the main tower in the temple and had a pretty impressive view of the entire valley.

After the temple we drove to another temple and found a dozen or so monkeys sitting by the side of the road. We spent half an hour feeding them bananas and watching them chase each other around. We left and rode elephants (!) to the top of a nearby mountain and climbed the temple on top just before sunset. It was amazing.

We spent the next day shopping and Adam (despite problems country wide concerning Visa cards) bought a diamond ring and proposed to Michelle. His choice of doing this in the dusty Cambodian bazaar was perhaps strange, but Michelle accepted and spent the rest of the trip staring at her finger. That night we flew back to Saigon.

Once back in Vietnam, we had three more days which we spent touring the city, visiting temples and parks, eating lots of food and shopping. We bought so much stuff that we had to buy two more bags to get everything home. I bought a bunch of cheap DVDs and had a suit made for $90. We visited the war remnants museum and museum of the tunnels used by guerrillas during the war which was cool but claustrophobic. The last night we went to the main park for the moon festival which was in full swing. We wandered around with a thousands of people in the park blowing noisemakers and playing with the kids.

We left Friday night and got to Seoul early Saturday and headed back to Busan. We had all day Sunday to decompress after our trip. And Monday morning, I got fired.

Was it worth it? I'd do it again in a second.