Travel diary #5: Where to start?

Where to start ?

South Vietnam… walking wounded everywhere… drinking beer with cyclo drivers in Hué who, after a few bottles of “Dutch courage”, started to talk openly – “One night I went to bed and there were four people in my family, in the morning there were only two… BOOM”... bombs cannot distinguish between children and soldiers… more tales of woe in Hoi An, I befriended a man who owns a ‘street restaurant’, one night I was priviledged enough to be led upstairs in his house, I had absolutely no idea why at the time. On reaching the top room I was amazed to find a huge shrine dedicated to his Father, Brother and Sister, each one of them murdered. His 65 year old father took a bullet from a sniper, his brother, who worked for the Americans was branded a traitor and executed, his sister was killed in action. The smiling black and white faces of these people stared out at me from a carefully mounted montage of photographs… I was then asked to offer prayers and burn incense in their honour… it was all too much for me to take, the innocent family photographs snapped on the beach, on a swing in the garden, at a wedding; I cried…

27 tortured hours on a bus to Saigon, a black, cancerous lung in the torso of Vietnam… Heroin, blood filled syringes, a mother so dazed she almost drops her baby… a frail old women, almost blind, begging in the street. Even a small task like dismounting the pavement takes her almost five minutes; stop, crouch and then sit on the ground, slowly put one leg onto the road and then the other, reach out for something or somebody to hold onto and finally, raise into a standing position again, each painfull artheritic action performed with a dignity I have never witnessed before…

a quick escape to Cambodia’s Southern beaches. Fve days of much needed rest… land mines so common that you cannot walk off any path or trail… Phnom Penh where you are covered in a film of red dust 24 hours a day… eating a ‘happy’ pizza from the ‘Happy herb pizza restaurant’ and thanking God that I never ordered it ‘Very happy’... screaming through streets on the back of a crazy Khmer’s motorbike to get back home and having to concentrate hard in order to hang onto the back, lights passing in vapour-trailed slow motion, my speech slurred like a drunk…

down to Kampot to visit the Bokor national park and the abandoned collonial French hill station… a 90km round trip up the side of the Bokor mountain on a road that was one large pot hole punctuated by many smaller potholes. The entire journey undertaken on the back of a moped. My driver wore large tinted glasses, leather gloves and drove like a true bastard – “He’s a Muslim” chirped Anne’s more conservative driver. I still have to figure out what this had to do with his driving skills. Walking through the ballroom of the abandoned hotel and then up to the roof to look out on the rainforest below, a stunning sight indeed… cringing in fear as I realised I would have to get back on the bike for the journey back down the mountain… unable to sit properly for two days afterwards… back again to Phnom Penh were a ballsy thief stole Anne’s wallet from off of the bed as I slept… a cockroach invasion last night in the new guesthouse… roaches 2 inches in length click-clacking across the wooden floor and hanging off the mosquito net…

We are exhausted…