Come & Go Vietnam Blog

This blog regularly bemoans the lack of creativity & original ideas in Vietnam’s tourism industry, so praise the Lord for the Quang Ninh People’s Committe, who have come up with a barnstorming new idea for improving the image of Vietnam’s best-known tourist attraction, Halong Bay – paint all the boats white.

Thanh Nien newspaper reports that “under the decision issued on Thursday by Quang Ninh’s People’s Committee, all tourist boats, except dragon boats, will be white with brown sails. Boats which fail to follow the decision by April 30 will have their licenses revoked.”

Although the news has been greeted with some cynicism and negativity – one boat operator complained that it will cost his company almost $50,000 to repaint his fleet, whilst one wag on Facebook commented that it would make the boats easier to find on the seabed after they’ve sunk – I think it’s a marvellous idea. Why bother with environmental protection, enforcing safety standards and ensuring a great customer experience, when you can achieve all this by simply painting all the boats white?

It’s an idea that should be rolled out to other areas of our tourism industry as soon as possible. Taxi problems at Tan Son Nhat airport? Paint them all white! Dishonest cyclo drivers hanging around Ben Thanh Market? No problem, paint the cyclos white! A new tourism logo? How about a plain white space instead!

With such brilliant, unorthodox thinkers working in our industry, I look forward to seeing Vietnam’s tourist numbers shoot past the 10 million mark by the end of June. Our worries are at an end.

A white boat, positively reeking of honesty & reputation

Last night, as I so often do, I went out for oc (shellfish/snails etc) on the street, this time at 149 Bui Vien in the heart of the backpacker district. Sitting on a plastic chair, drinking cold beer, eating clams & crab claws & watching the world go by is one of the great pleasures of living in Vietnam, and a highly affordable one in a city where restaurant places are getting increasingly silly (such as a new creperie charging $15 for a crepe, for example).

So last night I’m sitting on my plastic chair, swigging my Saigon Red (one of the world’s worst beers but for some reason, the oc experience just doesn’t feel right without it), chewing on some dried squid & enjoying some good company, watching the never-ending sideshow that is Bui Vien. And several times our table is approached by women selling snacks out of baskets that they have detached from their shoulder poles. Shrimp crackers, peanuts, quails’ eggs & the like. Tasty stuff to supplement our seafood feast. During the 45 minutes we’re there, at least half a dozen of these women approach us. They’re not annoying – they’re polite and take no for an answer when we don’t want to buy anything.

But the big problem is, THEY ARE ALL SELLING EXACTLY THE SAME THING!!! And the chances are, if we say no to the first two, we’re going to say no to the next two as well. And that sums up not just the Vietnamese snack industry, or the travel industry, but Vietnamese business altogether – why risk being original & doing something new, when you can copy what everyone else is doing and be sure to make some money, even if it’s not much?

If any one of these women had been selling, say, wet wipes, or Tic Tacs, or fresh yogurt, or strawberries, they would have made a sale – but no, they’d all gone out into the street (a street populated at that time largely by foreigners) with identical baskets of food, & were all faring as badly as each other.

Wander along Bui Vien & visit the dozens of travel agencies there, & the same principle applies. They’re all selling the same tours, often booking people onto the same buses, all trying to undercut each other to the point where they’re making as little as 50 cents per person on a Cu Chi tour. Try to book something different – a trip to Sa Dec for example – and you’re out of luck. Why sell Sa Dec when none of your competitors are selling it? Surely that means noone wants to go there?

This lack of diversity is one reason why so few tourists (around 5%) come back to Vietnam – why come back a second time when you’re going to be offered the same stuff you were offered last time round? For the sake of our tourism industry, we all need to diversify & find original stuff to offer our clients to keep them coming back. Singapore opens up new attractions every year and attracts over 12 million tourists as a result, and this in a city with little culture or street buzz to talk of – Saigon has had nothing new to offer visitors in years.

We were selling Ben Tre tours in 2009 when everyone else was sending their Mekong Delta tours to My Tho & Vinh Long. Now they’re all copying us, & we’ve moved our itinerary further down the river to avoid them. They’re still selling shrimp crackers.

One of my projects for 2012 is to pick a particular street in Saigon, & wander its length taking pictures of anything interesting. On Monday I had a meeting with my web designer at the newish Bootleg DJ Cafe at the eastern end of Le Thanh Ton St, so decided to kick off the project there & then.

Le Thanh Ton (named after a 15th century emperor of Vietnam) runs north-east to south-west, starting at the junction with Ton Duc Thang & finishing opposite the New World Hotel. The eastern end is famed for its range of bars & restaurants, including the legendary Sheridans Irish House as well as the city’s best Indian restaurant (Ganesh) and several bars of a somewhat dubious nature aimed at Japanese businessmen. I took lunch here, at newish Chinese restaurant Room 18 which, with its stylish interior, friendly service & value for money prices, is a favourite haunt of mine, before wandering south-west.

Heading further south you take in such famous sights as the Hotel de Ville and the Rex Hotel (there was also a beautiful old French colonial mansion here, by the junction with Dong Khoi, but after being fully refurbished it was disgracefully bulldozed to make way for the city’s newest white elephant, Vincom Centre).

Once past the Norfolk Hotel things get more interesting as hotels & office blocks give way to shophouses & street life (on Monday for some reason there were literally hundreds of shoe repairers working on the pavement, never seen that before) before you arrive at the famous Ben Thanh Market. From here I looped back the other way on the opposite pavement, stopping en route at the chic new Cosmo Coffee venue, where I had an iced coffee on the terrace – a very nice spot & the prices are reasonable but the service was a bit surly.

As is usual in Saigon, the most interesting sights weren’t buildings or monuments, but people going about their daily business and those little quirks that make Vietnam so fascinating – flowers & incense tied to a truck bumper, a shoe repairer in a cowboy hat scowling as I took his picture, a woman making banh chung for the Tet holiday on the back of her bicycle.

Watch this space for more Streets of Saigon soon!

Coming to Vietnam & want to avoid the touristy stuff? Or coming back for a repeat visit & want to do something different? Here’s our list of 30 fun & non-touristy things to do in Vietnam…

1. Go to a rural wedding – you can’t beat rice wine shots at 6am
2. See Vietnam the way the locals do – from a motorbike, with a Vietnam Vespa Adventures scooter tour or an Easy Rider tour of the central highlands
3. Join the locals on a tiny plastic stool for bia hoi on the pavement in Hanoi
4. Spend a day relaxing & eating seafood at Bai Sao beach in Phu Quoc, the most stunning
   

   Bai Sao beach

   beach in the country

5. Think about swapping that internal flight or long road journey for a relaxing, scenic ride on Vietnam’s ramshackle but charming trains
6. Get out of the tourist areas & visit some authentic wet markets, eg Tan Dinh in HCMC
7. Get up early & join the locals for morning exercises in a local park, or around Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi
8. Eat oc (shellfish/snails) on the street at night
   

   Stilthouse, Mai Chau

9. Spend the night in an ethnic minority stilthouse in Mai Chau
10. Smile at everyone you meet – it really does work
11. Escape from the modern world at Jungle Beach, a hand-built eco resort on a private beach near Nha Trang
12. Befriend your hotel’s security guys – they’ll be your best friends if you have any problems with rogue taxi drivers
13. Do a cooking class on the beach at Mui Ne Cooking School, the most idyllic cooking class location in Vietnam
14. Go for a blind massage
15. Find & join in a game of da cau (shuttlecock) in a park – not as easy as it looks but it’s good fun
16. Act like Andrew Zimmern & try some bizarre food – minced snake, grilled scorpion & field rat are on many restaurant menus
17. Spend the night in a jungle lodge at Cat Tien National Park, home to many endangered species
18. Cross the road in Saigon or Hanoi – a real sense of achievement when you make it intact
    

    Saigon traffic

    to the other side!

19. Ride a motorbike over the Hai Van Pass at 5am on a clear summer morning, and see sunrise at one of Vietnam’s most spectacular spots
20. Visit Cholon (Saigon’s historic Chinatown) by cyclo – vibrant markets, magnificent colonial buildings and great Chinese food
21. Try out your handicraft skills at a lantern-making workshop in Hoi An
22. Take a private blessing ceremony at a colourful Cao Dai temple
23. Go trekking in Con Dao’s national park to observe wild monkeys
24. Drive the spectacular coast road from Quy Nhon to Tuy Hoa
25. Enjoy a relaxing couple of hours at a local hairdresser for a haircut, hairwash and head massage – the whole lot will cost less than $2 in many places
26. Get some friends together & rent a private karaoke room with a couple of cases of beer
27. Try night fishing for squid off the coast of Phu Quoc
28. 

    Ben Tre scene

    Visit Binh Thuy ancient house in Can Tho, where the film The Lover was shot – and contribute to its upkeep

29. Visit the UNESCO biosphere reserve of Cham Island near Hoi An – sail there on a traditional ghe nang boat, and stay in a village homestay
30. Get off the tourist trail in the Mekong Delta – avoid My Tho & Vinh Long, & try Ben Tre, Sa Dec or Tra Vinh instead

Interested? We can arrange most of the above activities, so please contact us on hello@comeandgovietnam.com

Big thanks to Kris Goetghebeur, Scott Bowen, Craig Anderson, Tin Bien, Tim Scott, Jake Catlett,  Naya Ehrlich-Adam, Mario Jukic, Irina Kim and Irene Wong for sharing their suggestions.

I was about to write a wish list for Vietnam tourism in 2012, when I thought hang on just a sec there young man, didn’t I do this a year ago? So I decided it might be more worthwhile to look back at my 2011 wish list and see which of my wishes, if any, have come true. So let’s go through them and see, and I think you can probably guess what’s coming here.

1. Visa on arrival

No progress here that I’m aware of. Visas still have to be applied for in advance, and anyone deciding to travel for a weekend away at the last minute will have to go somewhere else. Even people with a genuine reason for last-minute travel – such as this Canadian woman desperately trying to visit her son who was critically injured in a motorbike accident – still have to jump through the requisite hoops. A free 15-day transit visa was introduced this year, but it required jumping through more hoops than the average dog show, and so can’t be considered progress. Wish realisation factor: 0/10

2. Taxi clampdown

I tried to get a taxi at Tan Son Nhat after returning from Singapore recently. There was still no queue, touts are still allowed to mingle freely with arriving tourists, and I was told I could only get a Mai Linh taxi (the only reputable firm in the city) on presentation of a Mai Linh customer card. Luckily I have one; tourists don’t. Newspapers talk of taxi clampdowns but there has been little evidence of it. Wish realisation factor: 1/10

3. More awareness of the benefits of tourism

Little evidence of this amongst tourism industry workers sadly, but at a recent talk I gave to some students at ERCI in Saigon, there was widespread shock and disgust at the amount of scamming tourists are subjected to. The younger generation are starting to wake up, let’s hope they take over soon. Wish realisation factor: 2/10

4. Better care for monuments & historic buildings

Now-bulldozed colonial building, Nam Ky Khoi Nghia

I will only pass one comment here – the building I used to illustrate this point was bulldozed within a few weeks of the original article being written. Wish realisation factor: 0/10

5. More fun-based marketing

Again, fun seems to be off the agenda as far as Vietnam’s marketing “experts” are concerned. Things have improved a little bit – trade show stand design is getting a bit more stylish, and Charming Vietnam ads have popped up at Premier League football grounds in recent weeks – but we are still awaiting a new tourism marketing masterplan with its accompanying logo & slogan to give us a hook to work with. Wish realisation factor: 3/10

6. More boutique hotels in Saigon

Thao Dien Village boutique hotel opened this year, and Sen La Boutique Hotel is currently under construction on the corner of Hai Ba Trung & Le Thanh Ton, though as I haven’t seen the plans, & as they knocked down a lovely French villa to build it, I’m not getting my hopes up. Wish realisation factor: 3/10

7. Traffic-free days

Plans are apparently afoot to transform several areas of HCMC into pedestrian-only zones at evenings & weekends, notably De Tham/Bui Vien and the areas around Ben Thanh market & Notre Dame Cathedral. Let’s hope those plans come to fruition AND are properly enforced. Wish realisation factor: 4/10

8. Nightlife encouraged, not discouraged

Seems like more new bars & restaurants opened in Saigon in 2011 than ever before. Admittedly, most of them are crappy, overpriced lounge bars & pseudo-fine dining joints that will be the flavour of the month for a few weeks before closing down quietly before 2012 is out, but the likes of RED, La Plancha and Room 18 have improved my quality of life considerably in the last 12 months, and it also seems that on the rare occasions I stay up past my bedtime, there are still plenty of places open. We have a winner! Wish realisation factor: 7/10

So what’s my tourism wish list for 2012? Sadly it’s pretty much the same as for 2011, with the emphasis still on visas, destination marketing & cultural preservation. I’d also like to add better shopping in HCMC – at present, I do most of my shopping in Bangkok and unless the equivalent of MBK opens here in the next 12 months, I can’t see that changing.

I must’ve done a lot of travelling since starting Come & Go in 2009 – my 10-year passport, brand new in 2008, is already full and I am currently going through the tortuous & expensive process of renewing it. 2011 was no different with various trips in Vietnam & also to Cambodia, Laos & Thailand, as well as a week in Madrid for FITUR back in January. So here are some of the best experiences I had this year…

BEST HOTEL/RESORT

The beach at La Veranda

I’ve stayed in a lot of places this year, from rough & ready Mekong Delta homestays up to the luxurious new Six Senses Con Dao resort. As is usual in Asia, service & breakfast were generally the two main gripes, but one resort stood head & shoulders above all others – La Veranda in Phu Quoc. Staff who greeted me by name on arrival, charming colonial style, iPod docks, laid-back, unobtrusive service, free frozen yogurt on the beach and a wonderful brekkie all combined to make La Veranda an object lesson in guest-centric resort service.

BEST MEAL

Despite living in Asia for nearly 9 years, European food will always reign supreme for me so despite some great meals in Laos and Thailand, the winner here is a little place called El Txoko de Ander in the grim Madrid suburb of Barajas, where I stayed during FITUR in January. It summed up everything that makes Spanish food, for me, the world’s best – simple, fresh, high-quality ingredients served in a rustic atmosphere. El Txoko serves all my favourite things – good red wine, chorizo, Serrano ham, cheese, salt cod, olives, fresh bread – from a menu that is striking in its simplicity. With ingredients this good, you don’t need marinades or dipping sauces. And the prices were astonishingly low and put Saigon’s mediocre, overpriced dining scene to shame.

BEST PLACE FOR A BEER

As regular readers will know, this blog wouldn’t be complete without me having a beer at some point, but 2011’s most memorable bevvy wasn’t in a bar or club, but in an ethnic minority village on Laos’ Bolaven Plateau. We were well off the tourist track & decided to wander into a stilthouse village to take a few pics, only to discover that we the first foreigners the vast majority of the villagers had ever encountered, meaning we had a crowd of friendly, curious followers. We stopped for some cold Beer Lao at the village shop and enjoyed our beers under the watchful eyes of what felt like the entire village.

BEST PHOTO

Back in 2009 I bought my first DSLR camera, but only in March this year, after a photography weekend with professional photographer Peter Stuckings, did I get away from my camera’s pre-settings & start doing things manually, with vastly improved results. But the best pic I took all year had nothing to do with my expertise (or lack of it), & everything to do with the subject & the time of day. After a long day’s journey in southern Laos, from Attapeu en route back to Pakse, we stopped off at an ethnic minority village to take some pictures. The light was perfect (it was the ‘golden hour’), and whilst most of the villagers ran off & hid from these two tall, scary-looking white guys, the girl in the picture just stood there & stared at me, smoking a big green roll-up, and let me grab a quick pic, and it turned out to be my pic of the year.

BEST NEW DESTINATION

I discovered a few new places this year. Bizarrely I’d never been to Can Tho or Sa Dec until March this year & loved them both, and last month I visited the Cambodian city of Battambang for the first time & was charmed by its colonial charm and laid-back pace. But my big discovery of the year was the southern Laos city of Pakse. Small, friendly, plenty of beautiful old colonial buildings & temples, and some great riverside nightlife, as well as being a great base for visiting Champasak, Vat Phou and the Bolaven Plateau. Add in cheap accommodation and direct flights to HCMC, & it’s amazing I saw so few foreign visitors there.

BEST OLD DESTINATION

I revisited several old favourites in 2011, including Phnom Penh & Siem Reap, Singapore, & a

Duong Dong harbour, Phu Quoc

city that is rapidly becoming my second home, Bangkok. But the runaway winner here is my favourite place in Vietnam, the tropical island of Phu Quoc. Home to miles & miles of deserted dirt roads, the country’s best beach (Bai Sao), some great beach resorts, fresh seafood & friendly locals, Phu Quoc is exactly how I like life to be. Plans are afoot to ruin it with golf courses, casinos, conference centres & the like, so go now before mass tourism & the powers that be turn it into another Nha Trang.

BIGGEST RIP-OFF

Sadly, travelling a lot means getting ripped off a lot too. I’m generally savvy enough to avoid the cheats but a lot of first-timers to Asia fall victim. Nominees include Singapore hotels (particularly during big events such as the F1 Grand Prix or ITB Asia); flights between Vietnam & Cambodia; Saigon’s dining scene (which got REALLY silly in 2011); Air Asia, for advertising flights for $1 which, once you’ve added on all the extras, end up hardly any cheaper than regular flights; and several resorts in Vietnam for charging upwards of $100 per person for compulsory festive gala dinners. But the winner has to be Saigon airport taxis. No use going into detail – you all know the score – but the fact that the authorities tolerate thousands of tourists, most of them first-time visitors, being overcharged, threatened and abused by the city’s taxi drivers, is absolutely disgraceful and remains a huge stain on our industry. It’s easy to sort it out, so why not sort it?

TRAVEL HOPES FOR 2011

That I have a successful trip to ITB Berlin in March & that my stand is confirmed before Tindersticks tickets sell out…that Vietnam introduces a genuine visa on arrival process & starts marketing itself properly…that tourists can get to & from Saigon airport without being ripped off…that cheats & overchargers, be they hoteliers, taxi drivers or restaurateurs, fail to prosper…and that I have the time to spend a whole week on a beach somewhere!

See below for a selection of my favourite travel pics of 2011…

This week, Vietnam’s media has been full of self-congratulatory articles about Halong Bay being named as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. People genuinely seem to believe that the award will lead to a huge spurt in tourism and really put Vietnam as a whole on the world tourism map.

But some people, myself included, have smelled a rat. Firstly, Halong Bay’s status on the list is only temporary, with the final list to be announced next year. Why? Well, if tourism officials in the Maldives are to be believed, the whole campaign is just a moneymaking scam for the organisers. Following their own nomination, the Maldives claim they were asked to cough up the following:

•$350,000 for a platinum level sponsorship licensing fee,

•two $210,000 requests for gold level licensing fees,

•a $1million license fee to put the New 7 Wonders of Nature logo on planes,

•a $1million license fee for their national telecom operator to participate for allowing phone voting and,

•a request for a ‘World Tour’ stop in the Maldives for the New 7 Wonders delegates to party and enjoy the country at a cost of $500,000.

That’s over $3m, just to be on a list that isn’t even officially recognised. I wonder if Vietnam, with its annual tourism marketing budget of just $1.5m, is going to shell out that kind of money? I hope not.

And what’s that about it not being officially recognised? Well, UNESCO certainly don’t think so and have distanced themselves from it, claiming it’s just about media hype rather than actual environmental protection. Will any of the above money be put back into infrastructure & preservation schemes? I doubt it.

Thirdly, Vietnam itself resorted to various shady tricks in order to get Halong Bay on the list, with one company in particular (see pic) requiring its staff to send 100 SMS votes each, threatening them with the sack if they didn’t vote.

So, basically, who gives a damn? The campaign doesn’t seem to have generated that much publicity outside the participating countries, and clearly has very little credibility. Vietnam would be better off spending its time, money & effort on cleaning up Halong Bay, educating its local people about business ethics, pollution & environmental preservation, and closely monitoring safety standards on its boats, rather than engaging in pointless cosmetic exercises like this.

Earlier this year, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced the introduction of a new 15-day transit visa, allowing tourists who are spending less than 15 days in the country (ie the vast majority of Vietnam’s 4 million visitors) to get a short visa for just $5. As someone who regularly bangs on about Vietnam’s outdated visa regulations and their detrimental effect on our industry, this seemed like good news.

Alas, it was too good to be true. A client has just asked us if we can arrange a transit visa for them, so we enquired with the powers that be, and here are the requirements:

• The visa must be arranged through a local tour operator in Vietnam (even for tourists who are using an overseas travel agent, or travelling independently!)
• The traveller must have booked a tour with a tour operator, and their full itinerary needs to be sent to the Ministry for approval
• If they HAVEN’T booked a tour with a tour operator, then the tour operator applying for the transit visa, in this case ourselves, must send a minder along with the client at all times and note their activities and hotels carefully. Seriously, I’m not making this up.
• We have to write a guarantee letter to the client and send this to the Ministry in Hanoi, who will either approve or reject the transit visa application within a 10-day period.
• The visa issuer, ie ourselves again, is liable for any damage caused by the traveller’s offspring during their stay. Again, I’m not making this up.

What planet are they on? Why issue a more convenient, practical form of visa but make it so difficult to get hold of? It’s no wonder so many of the tourists I chatted to in Cambodia last week said they would definitely go back to that country, but wouldn’t bother returning to Vietnam simply because getting a visa was so much hassle. WAKE UP.

Last week I took another trip to wonderful Cambodia to look at a couple of new business opportunities, and combined it with visits to a few less heralded spots on the alternative route from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. So after a warm welcome from my local partner in Phnom Penh, including a visit to his orphanage/school and a lot of cold beer (a new brand, Cambodia Beer, was being launched that very week so we tested its qualities most rigorously), and a night at my regular hotel, the Cardamom, we set off early the next morning (well, 7.30 – that’s early for me…)

Our first stop is Cambodia’s former capital Oudong, where we have a tasty breakfast of grilled chicken & rice, before heading to Phnom Preah Reach Throap, one of the most sacred Buddhist

Oudong

sites in the country. After stopping at the foot of the hill to buy sunglasses (as usual, I’d lost my previous pair) and a new krama scarf (I think I left my last one in Laos) from an 88-yr old woman who cuts me a tailormade krama for $3, we trek up the 900-odd steps, passing sunbathing monkeys as we go, to reach the spectacular temple at the top. It’s very colourful and offers fantastic views of the surrounding countryside. Going down is easier than going up, and the icebox of cold beers that we filled up in Oudong is a welcome sight when we get back to the car.

We then move on to Kompong Chnang, a bustling market town with crumbling colonial facades lining the riverfront. We hire a Vietnamese boat pilot and embark on a rowing tour of

Floating village, Kompong Chnang

the floating village, and I have to say it turns out to be the nicest such village I have yet visited, a lot cosier & better maintained than those in Tonle Sap or Chau Doc, and with local inhabitants yet to be jaded by mass tourism – the locals smile, the kids wave & blow kisses as we pass. And noone asks us for money. The boat pilot asks us to help out with the rowing at one point; I agree on condition he gives us a $1 discount; he decides he can handle the rowing after all.

During the boat ride my partner gets a call from a friend who lives near Kompong Chnang inviting him to lunch, to celebrate his forthcoming wedding (his third!) So we pitch up at his friend’s house & are greeted with fresh fish, soup and the obligatory case of Angkor Beer, and a good time is had by all.

As usual I doze off in the car for an hour or so as we head along the flood-damaged road to

Downtown Battambang

Battambang, waking up on the outskirts of what is Cambodia’s second biggest city. You wouldn’t know it; it’s a fairly sleepy place, a scenic riverfront lined with beautifully preserved French colonial buildings (which, I’m informed, are protected by the government – Vietnam, take note), and after visiting a couple of hotels, we check into the King Hotel to catch up on some work before heading out for dinner to Mohasal Restaurant.

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that eating, particularly trying out the kind of weird stuff that would make even Andrew Zimmern think twice, is one of my biggest pleasures when I’m on my travels, but tonight I encounter a dish that beats me hands down. We kick off with wild boar stir-fried with chilli & basil, a classic Cambodian dish and a very tasty one. Then it’s some kind of lizard – a waste of a dish really, as despite the very tasty Thai curry-style sauce it’s served with, it’s virtually all bone & gristle. And then it arrives at our table. Steamed turtle. Boiled whole, shell intact. I’ve never tried turtle before so am licking my lips in anticipation when the shell comes off, and I have to stop myself from retching as a mass of brown-grey internal organs & flesh spills out, along with several eggs. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve seen on a table since biology classes at school. I dig in & give it a try (the eggs are OK), but the appearance & odour are too much for me and I have to hold my hands up & admit defeat. My partner tucks in undaunted & is clearly enjoying having the whole turtle to himself; I try to look elsewhere and settle on the waitresses, one of whom misunderstands my look and starts getting a bit too friendly. I’m relieved to get out of there & go to bed.

The next day begins with a very nice breakfast on the pleasant riverside terrace of the King Hotel, where we watch monks returning from their morning alms-gathering (not being a

Monk at White Elephant temple

remotely religious/spiritual person it continually amazes me that a country as poor as Cambodia can always find money to build temples & keep monks well fed). Then we drive across the river & have a wander around Battambang itself. Its riverside is lined with charming colonial buildings (including one wholly intact colonial street one block back from the river), and there’s also a busy and interesting market and the spectacular White Elephant temple. A very nice, under-explored town with a lot of tourism potential.

From Battambang we drive to Phnom Sampeau, another hill/temple combo but here the monks have built a road to the top meaning cars & motorbikes can drive up, which is a relief to my Cambodian partner who struggled with yesterday’s climb. Halfway up we stop at the grisly killing cave, where the Khmer Rouge would club victims over the head & then throw them into the cave below. The cave houses a large golden Buddha as well as hundreds of skeletons of Khmer Rouge victims, a real contrast with the flowers, trees & sunny weather outside.

On top of Phnom Sampeau we give a donation to an elderly monk to help with their road-building, and he performs a blessing for us by way of thanks, then we explore the  hilltop temple, accompanied by a couple of local kids – they don’t ask us for money, they just seem to want to be entertained for a while.

From Phnom Sampeau it’s a bumpy drive along a dirt track to Phnom Banan, an Angkor-era

Phnom Banan

hilltop temple consisting of five towers. It’s a hot, sweaty 500-step climb to the top, passing struggling elderly French tourists en route, but the summit is very quiet & peaceful, the crumbling old towers surrounded by flowers. I’ve finished my tour and am about to descend when my local partner finally makes it to the top.

A quick lunch of fried noodles and then we move onto a grape farm & winery. I wasn’t aware that wine was made in Cambodia, and whilst it won’t win any prizes it’s a lot more drinkable than Dalat wine, and their brandy is really very good indeed. Thence back to Battambang to pick up the road to Siem Reap. We stop a couple of times en route, once for more food, and again to shoot some men fishing off a bridge, drinking cold beers from our icebox as we go, before journey’s end – Sokhalay Resort in Siem Reap, where we are attending the opening party.

As for Battambang, it’s well worth a visit and at least a night’s stay, with plenty to do & see for a couple of days – definitely a good stopover on the drive to Siem Reap and a far less touristy insight into the real Cambodia.

Fancy following in my footsteps? Check out the image gallery below, then email tim@comeandgovietnam.com to arrange your trip!