The Littlest Hobo Sunday 11th December Pack up and leave Sihanoukville this morning. We are very sad to be leaving this place because it is so chilled out and peaceful. Whether or the the place will be totally ruined in a few years through the inevitable commercialisation remains to be seen. My guess is that it will and the upgrading of the local airport cannot be far off. For those intersted you can buy a nice plot of land for around 70 000 dorrar and build your own guesthouse. Now there's a thought.... The 12.30 bus leaves at 14.00 after the connecting bus broke down on the way. Weather is pretty fine again, a nice 30 degrees or so. We feel like we are getting used to this heat now (albeit after some time). The bus is pretty full and needless to say Amy wins at Scrabble. We stop in the stinkiest toilets so far, even the cockroaches couldn't stand the smell in this place. I have permanent fears that I will pass out and be lost in the toilets forever, only coming to, taking another whiff and then to pass out again, eventually to die of starvation. Nice. Dodgy chicken and rice for lunch. When I say chicken we are not really talking about the meaty bits, Cambodians tend to shove a whole section of chicken in (bones & all) chew it around in their mouth for awhile, eventually spitting out the few bits they don't want to injest. So you can imagine myself and Amy trying to pick the minimal bits of what we would call proper meat from the bones. In a way I suppose it is just another example of how wasteful we are. We arrive back with our newly adopted 'family' 5hrs later in Phnom Penh and they are very pleased to see us, even the 2 year old is starting to recognise us now. Curry for tea while is pretty good and the token alcholic beverages (look we had a hard day right?) Monday 12th December. Up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus to Saigon. Today is the most ambitious bus journey so far at a full 8 hours. As the road is in a reasonably poor state in Cambodia towards the border with its traditional foe Vietnam, we are crammed into a minibus with our bags at the back. There must have been about 16 of us on the bus and as usual the air conditioning was not up to much. Sweaty. I think Amy won at scrabble again but she is winning so often now that it all just blurs into one. We arrive at the border crossing and after lunch consisting of bread with dairylea (it's not all Champagne and Caviar you know) we have to trek across the border in the midday sun carrying all our stuff for about a kilometre. So we arrive fairly dishevelled into our 4th country, Nam. Whilst walking across I made sure that there were no booby traps for the following yankee doodles (only kidding). We got fleeced immediately by the border crossing guards who kindly filled in our immigration forms for us (1 dorrar each) before being fleeced again by some guard just checking that his mates had filled in the form correctly! (2000 dong) Immediately we notice that we are back into some sort of civilisation as there looks like there is a proper road with line markings and the connecting bus does not have water pissing out of it incessantly. Stu wins at Scrabble! We arrive in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) at about 15.30hrs and unfortunately our preferred guesthouse is full. So we stay just round the corner in a small and relatively dingy room for the outrageously expensive 7 dorrar a night. We have been previously warned that Saigon is the rip off capital of the world with street traders giving you none stop hassle. Well this was kind of accurate but it does not compare with our welcoming at Siem Riep where we were practically bundled into waiting tuk-tuk. Have a traditional Vietnamese dish for dinner (pho soup) with is hot and spicy, simple cheap and very good. Saigon beer immediately shoots to the top of the best beers so far chart. Tuesday 13th December We wake up at 3am local time to watch the Spurs vs Portsmouth game live (how nuts are we eh?). Some people might call this stupid especially considering the quality of the picture (which improved by turning off the aircon) and with no sound except a bit of fuzzy static. So yes we are nuts and you can try to imagine how happy we felt, sweating away without aircon watching a fuzzy picture of Portsmouth being 1-0 up at half time with it being 4 in the morning!! Anyway we had a word with the ref at half time and one dogy penalty later we went (back) to bed happy having won 3-1. Up (again) at 9.30 to change guesthouses and we go out for coffee and breakfast. Now just let me say this Vietnamese coffee is THE BEST in the world. It arrives at your table and they let it brew in front of you increasing the suspense. To say that it is strong and strips the enamel off your teeth would also be an understatement. So we headed off for a days sightseeing bouncing off the walls and anything else that did or didn't move. Unfortunately the Vietnamese have inherited a little bit of the spitting habit from the Chinese (but the lugers don't crawl down the street after you). The traffic in this city is TOTALLY BONKERS!. (Mums please read no further). Crossing the road has got to be the most dangerous thing we have ever done. You literally have to walk out into the oncoming traffic, inching your way across the street dodging all manner of vehicles and trying not to die from carbon monoxide poisoning at the same time. Progress is made by oncoming vehicles swerving out of your way but most all all you are lucky to get to the other side in one piece. Bit cloudy today as we walk to the war museum and the re-unification palace. Now we are no experts on the Vietnamese war with the Americans but from the totally one sided view presented within the war museum, those Americans were pretty shady really. All that 'Agent Orange' and Napalm. Hello! some of the original suspected chemical weapons me thinks? And I'm sorry, the excuse 'we were just trying them out and weren't sure of the consequences' doesn't wash with me. Go to the post office which is a very nice colonial building and do a little bit of shopping. Another cheap dinner and unsurpisingly it's a relatively early night. Wednesday 14th December - Amy's birthday today! I see a real life dead old woman lying in her bed on the side of the street (disturbing or what?). The family is outside in a state of shock and the coffin has just arrived. The mourning would go on for a few days and we got to see the whole process as it was basically outside our hotel. I have not-so-cunningly managed to buy Amy a card, (as we had to stop yesterday whilst she waited outside the card shop). We get the bus to chinatown and have a walk around several pagodas. In the evening we go out for a nice plush meal at a fancy French restaurant. One of the highlights was the taxi journey their in a tiny Kia car driven by a former soldier in the Vietnam army. This driver had been stationed in the former East Germany and spoke no English whatsoever. With our Vietnamese being a little rusty stu had to give directions to the center of town in German. Unfortunately the driver did not recognise where we were going so had to keep stopping to ask the locals!!! It was truly one of those bizarre moments that you could not have made up. The French meal (steak and frites for stu and escalope for Amy) was very nice and we had a (cold) bottle of red all for about 30 quid. Thursday 15th December Mostly a quiet day today and it's a bit rainy, the storms here when they occur are pretty amazing to watch. We have decided to go to the Mekong delta for a few days. Stu has a hair cut vietnamese style (really good). We post some stuff back to the uk and the woman makes us unwrap everything we had just spent 30 mninutes wrapping up. Most frustrating. So far we are loving Vietnam, more postcards to come soon. Merry Christmas everyone and have a great new year, we'll be raising a glass (or 2) to you all. Lots of Love Stu & Amy.