Borderlines

The time of holidays in the sun is past, the time of heavy duty travelling is here again!

I took to the road this morning from Kep, a small town on the Cambodian coast about 40 kilometres from the border of Vietnam. Kep used to be the summer playground of King Sikhanouk and his friends until first the Khmer Rouge, then the Vietnamese rolled up and blew the place to blazes. Now it kind of reminds me of the Angkor temples - though in Kep the crumbling palaces being taken over by the wild are bullet-riddled 60's and 70's mansions of the playboy king and his buddies.

In Kep I spent a final leisurely day on the beach at Rabbit Island - seen in the first picture in the distance. So this morning I finally emerged from the beach shaking sand from my ear and salt from my hair, but re-energized enough to set out for Vietnam.

Departure was at 06.30 - and this is one of the seven wonders of the modern world; I have (temporarily) become an early bird! I am mostly in bed by ten and rising by seven! Here it's worth using every sunlight hour - and the options for amusement after the sun sets are few; no television, events to attend, books to read (well one, but all too soon read, and then bookless once more) and the night full of venomous mosquitos. (Another temporary personal modification is my hair, which in the moist tropical climate is curling in a very Shirley Templesque way).

So early this morning I said a fond farewell to Cambodia, bopping up and down on the back of a scooter along pock marked red dirt roads. I had some anxiety about crossing the border, as I didn't have a visa beforehand. Finland belongs to the very very limited list of nations, whose citizens get a free 15 day entry into Vietnam. However to get this free visa you are officially supposed to be able to present a valid ticket out of the country within the mentioned 15 days -something I obviously couldn't do, since the train ticket to China isn't bought yet. I saw myself checking out of Cambodia and being denied entry into Vietnam - and unable to re-enter Cambodia, since they do not issue visas at this border... stuck prepetually in the border no-mans-land - becoming a minor tourist attraction, like that guy who was denied political asylum in France, but couldn't return to his home country so he spent twenty-something years at Charles de Gaulle airport...

Well, obviously, that didn't happen and Vietnam welcomed me with open arms. An instantly noticeable upgrade was that scooter taxis here offer a helmet also for me, the passenger, whereas in Cambodia only the driver wore helmets (which strangely does nothing to increase the back-bopping passenger's sense of security).

Talking to many travellers who had just arrived in Cambodia from Vietnam, the most usual comment about Vietnam seems to be: beautiful country, shame about the people. This possibly undeserved estimation could be due to the fact that, as a traveller, the people you need to negotiate daily with are the drivers of scooters, buses or mini-vans. From my experience today, all my fellow passengers on the buses etc have been total sweet hearts, but in Vietnam drivers are rip-off artists par excellence!

First I had to haggle down the scooter ride to the border town from 4 dollars to 1 dollar (going rates), then I was told in town that the bus station had moved 20 km out of town and it would cost me 6 dollars to be taken there (of course the bus station had not moved, so luckily I didn't buy these guys' story) and then the bus tried to charge me 150.000 dong (around 9 dollars - an obvious overprice by local standars) for a ride, which I finally got for 60.000... and so it went all the way. Two buses and 3 scooters later my sense of humour with these guys was fraying at the edges.

Finally, after 10 hours of bladder shaking and nerve-wracking travel, I arrived here in Can Tho, on the Mekong delta. Tomorrow I'm off to see the floating markets - starting at 05.30 in the morning! It's the new me!