Rain rain rain. Vietnam is meterologically mysterious. All the books say that when you pass through the strip of mountains just north of Dangang, the weather changes, and becomes pretty awful. I couldn’t quite believe them. Yesterday morning I was in tropical winter, beautiful, hot dry climate, giving you the feeling of no care in the world. Today I toured the ancient city of Hue in the rain. This is the same latitude as Yangon (Rangoon, in Myanmar), which instead is hot and tropical. So from now on it’s cold and wet, a good job spring is coming on, although there isn’t really such a thing as spring until a lot further north.

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The last few days I’ve been travelling up the coast of Vietnam by railway. It’s good to have a change from buses, boats and pick-up trucks. I haven’t been on a train since an early, and somewhat bad, experience in Myanmar. It’s 1726km along the iron road from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, the whole journey taking 30 to 40 hours depending on how express the trains you get are.

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Time to talk about shopping. The nice thing about shopping is that it is easy for a tourist to make some kind of judgement about it. Shops are designed to be open, visitable, and for you to be able to find out about them. Also, coming from the consumerist culture that I do, even a bad shopper like me is very well trained. This makes it much easier than trying to analyse, say, the system of government.

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I’ve been here for five and a half days now, and see no sign of leaving yet. I’m staying in a really good guesthouse, a bit away from the main backpacker area, and friendly and hospitable.

My long visit is partly because you have to chill out during the Tet festival. That’s the Lunar New Year, which is the same as the Chinese New Year. For three days people go back to visit their family, so the city is relatively deserted, as recent migration patterns mean that more people in the city have families in the country than vice versa.

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I’m leaving Cambodia, catching the boat tomorrow afternoon to Chau Doc in Vietnam. Internet access probably won’t be as easy and cheap in the Mekong Delta (it’s only half a dollar an hour here, cheapest so far in SE Asia!), and I’d like to be away from computers to take things in, so I’ll probably disappear for a bit. Some final thoughts on Cambodia.

Since Battambang, I’ve only been in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. They’re both highly touristy, so I feel more hassled by people rather than befriended. In Battambang, I’d managed to learn the Khmer numbers, and was starting to learn phrases like “How much is it?” and “Where is the toilet?”. Khmer is much easier for me than Thai and Burmese, as it isn’t tonal at all. Since then it’s been much harder to get support with Khmer, so I gave up. In Siem Reap people would laugh at me if I even said “Thank you!” in Khmer - I guess the thousands of tourists jetting in to see Angkor Wat don’t bother to learn it.

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Gosh, this blog has been flamed in another blog. (Translation out of Internet jargon: Somebody else on the internet has read part of this online journal, and written a bilious reply on their journal). Head on over and join in the fun. I’ve posted a reply (defense!) at the bottom of their blog.

English really is a global second language. At least, in SE Asia, in every country it is the lingua franca. It’s assumed that if you’re a tourist, actually if you’re white, then you’ll speak English. And fluently. If you’re a French or a German independent traveller then you really have no choice; learning even basic English is such good value that you’d be foolish not to.

In Cambodia, the local people are desperate to learn the language. This wasn’t as obvious in Myanmar, but it was still the case. In Thailand the whole process is formalised as in France, so you don’t know that people are learning English, they’re kind of shy about it. It’s only that all people working in the tourist industry speak it which reveals the truth. In Cambodia on every street corner, on the steps of every ancient temple, in monastries, at the tables of exhibitions… Everywhere, people are lurking to practice their English on you. “Where do you come from?” “How old are you?” “Are you married?” It’s their ticket to wealth, to knowledge.

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I arrived here in Cambodia on Tuesday, travelling overland from Thailand. Within eight hours of crossing the border, eight people or groups of people had made warm and friendly contact with me. This left me deeply moved, and in love with Cambodia. Completely different from Thailand where, as in Europe, everyone is too rich, too congested with people, and ignores you.

1. A hassling, fluent English, border truck tout. OK, not the best start and not the most friendly of people, as he hassled and lied about having a pick-up to Battambang. However, he was friendly, and helped me across the border. When I then refused his father’s pick-up, which had no other passengers yet, he was helpful and found me another one. And he taught me the essential first two phrases of Khmer, “Hello!” and “Thank you!”.

• People on the back of the first pickup truck. The most fun and cheapest, and if you don’t book the only, way to get from the Thai border town of Poipet to Battambang is on the back a pickup truck. They fill the thing to bursting, you never quite believe what small space, and precariously balanced cargo another will sit on. An old man sitting next to me held my knee in the kindest, warmest, most unconscious way possible, as he couldn’t reach part of the truck to hold onto. A very young boy fell asleep with his head on my lap. Innocent, friendly, spirited togetherness.
• People on the back of the second pickup truck (had to change truck at Sisophon). Three friendly smiley young women, an older guy with two children and two dogs, who tried chatting with me in English.
• Sombat (aka Bat) at the transport stop in Battambang. Fed up after the tout at the border, I was first of all rude to him, but he turned out to be a great moto driver and guide who took me out to surrounding sites for the next two days.
• NGO man in restaurant. He was sitting at the next table to me, working for an educational charity in the villages, and just started talking to me. He was Christian, and told me a bit about their work.
• Group of friends at the dessert stall. Cambodia has great fun night markets where you can buy food after 4pm, including Khmer dessert stalls. Sickly concoctions, of jelly or rice sweets with condensed milk, ice, or a strange almost potato-like fruit. More fun to eat than delicious. I sat a dark and candle lit stall. The young people who ran it and their friends, were chatty, jokey, and warm.
• Hotel staff playing cards outside. They invited me to join as I went in to go to bed, although I declined.
• Receptionist. Amusingly, after giving me my key, he then changed the television channels to show me which one was the (best?) local porn channel. This is some kind of level of service that I’m not used to!

Since then I’ve been giving English lessons to Buddhist monks, having teenagers teach me to count, and being offered to join a group of people at the next table in a restaurant (Cambodian saying: “The more people at a meal, the tastier it is!”). On the country roads all the children wave to foreigners.

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Bangkok has some excellent public transport, at least great fun if you’re a tourist. There are several canals with super-fast water buses on them, you quickly leap on, pay them 5 baht (about 7 pence) and they zoom much faster than the jammed traffic. There are canvas shields which raise and lower along the side to reduce splashing, although you still get a bit wet with all the wakes it causes. Under some bridges they have to lower the entire roof, and the young lads clinging to the outside who collect your fare duck down.

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Before I forget them, I’m going to post some general impressions of Myanmar/Burma, since I spent the last month there. I spent most of the time being a proper tourist, so I don’t have any real insights into the political situation that you can’t get elsewhere. However, I did talk to an interesting Wa monk (from Shan “state”) in a monastry in Mandalay - I’ll post up some of the stuff he said another day.

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