Eating tarantulas and exploring Phnom Penh

Phonm Penh has an interesting blend of old and new.

I had one day to explore the city before hopping a night bus to Siem Reap. One of the more interesting sculptures, seen everywhere in Cambodia, is the majestic chicken-dragon. Maybe its a wyvern?

The palace was beautiful and full of wonderful sculptures and architecture.

The highlight of my day was eating tarantulas.  There is a restaurant called Romdeng that has them on the menu. People think eating tarantulas in Cambodia originated during the Khmer Rouge rule because food was so scarce they started frying up spiders.

This is actually a good resturaunt. They give jobs to at risk youth so they have the tools to make a future for themselves. The tarantulas were magnificently presented.

And... down the hatch!

They were really good, if a little chewy. The exoskeleton has a tendancy to get caught in your throat. The head was by far the best part, certainly the meatiest. I recommend everyone try them, if only for the shock factor.

The killing fields of Choeung Ek - Phnom Penh

My first day in Cambodia was a heartbreaking one. I went to visit the Tuol Sleng genocide museum and the killing fields of Choeung Ek. The Khmer Rouge was the communist party that ruled from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a society ever attempted. The goal was to transform Cambodia into a peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative, untainted by anything that had come before. People were killed just for wearing glasses and being educated. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died, about 1 in every 4 Cambodians. And all this happened less than 40 years ago.

Visitors pay homage to the victims

The worst

The first stop was the killing fields. A portable audio guide walks you through the grounds and describes the brutality that occured in the now peaceful orchard. There are depressions in the ground formed after the excavation of mass graves.

Periodically small pieces of bone and clothing emerge, which are collected by caretakers. It is said that the spirits that reside here are restless, as they are never still.

Collected clothing from victims

What gave me chills was a recording. To drown out the screams of people being killed in the evening, they played the khmer rouge anthem with a desiel engine in the background. The recording gave a small audio clip of what may have been the last sounds these poor people every heard. The speaker was hung on this tree.

At the heart of the killing fields is a massive monument. Within holds the skulls and bones of 8000 people. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. I took photos, not to be disrepectful of the dead, but so people could see the atrocities of what happened in Cambodia.

That afternoon I went to the genocide museum. The building was once a high school that was turned into a prison and torture chamber. As many as 100 people were killed a day. The corriders display the faces of all the victims that went into Tuol Sleng and never came out.

Ho Chi Minh (Saigon)

Saigon has a similar energy to Hanoi. There are motorbikes everywhere at all times of the day.  However, the streets aren't as narrow.  I didn't explore Saigon as thoroughly as some may. I chose instead to visit the national park. However, I did eat a lot of street food. There were fantastic sandwiches for 75 cents. I had no idea what meat was in them and they were delicious.

I bought a lot of sandwiches from this nice lady

I found another colored rice cart. It was dessert rice. The lady covered it in sugar, custard, sesame and coconut. Yum!

I stayed in district 1, the backpackers area. At night the streets are lined with people sitting on short plastic chairs and drinking lots of Tiger and Saigon beer. My hotel was right off this street, 96 room for rent. It threw me off when I first got there because the front of the hotel was a store. The people were nice and the room was clean with ac. What more can you ask for?

There are lights everywhere at night.

Cat Tien National Park

Outside of Ho Chi Minh is Cat Tien National Park. I had only heard about it from reading my Lonely Planet guidebook. It is home to some small populations of the endangered javan rhinocerous, gibbons, langurs and other monkeys.  I really wanted to explore this natural area since most of my time in Vietnam had been spent in cities. My favorite thing is discovering the ecology of new places.

I made a friend on the Ha Long bay tour I took around Christmas time, Octavio. He was also interested in hiking around the park. After about 2 weeks we met up in Ho Chi Minh and caught a bus to Cat Tien. The bus ride was interesting. There is no actual stop, they drop you on the side of the road in a random town. Thankfully there was transport waiting to bring us to the park.  After a 25 km ride and a short river crossing, we were in the park.

The first activity was a boat ride to Go Tien, a rescue santuary for gibbons and langurs.  The animals had been saved from being eaten, sold as pets or used in traditional medicine. For example, langur bones are ground and given to  pregnant women as a calcium supplement. I think there are less destructive ways to get your calcium.

The highlight of the rescue center were the golden cheeked gibbons. When they are born they are all blonde and slowly darken to black. They stay black for several years. When females reach puberty they change back to blonde. They have a great call that almost sounds like whale song echoing through the woods. The ultimate goal of the sanctuary is to introduce the gibbons and langurs back into the wild and it has been very successul over the years.

That afternoon we rented bikes and went exploring. The jungle along the sides of the path were green and really beatiful. There were some fantastic twisty vines strung across the road.

A few times we jumped of our bikes and I showed Octavio all about the joys of flipping rocks in streams. The streams had some of the usual aquatic invertebrates: mayfies and caddisflies. I also had him hold his first millipede. As I plucked it from the ground and went to place it in his hand he backed up and said, "No, it is too much for me." which I thought was pretty funny.  I persuaded him by saying that it would not bite and he relented. That was the ice breaker. From then on he wanted to touch everything.

A little unsure

That evening we went on a night game drive. It didn't quite compare to the ones I did in Africa, but it was still cool. There were a few strange deer and a civet. A civet is a type of spotted weasel. When we got back to the camp it was dark and I pulled out my headlamp to teach Octavio all about eye shine. If you place your headlamp right in the center of your forehead and scan the area around you, you can catch spots of blue light. These are spider eyes and is the best way to find them in the dark.  There were tons!! I once again wish I had brought a UV light so I could find scorpions in the dark. They fluoresce under UV light and glow blue.

However, there were lots of other cool creatures around. There was this insect, I think it mght have been some kind of hemipteran, that disguised itself with particles from its surroundings. If anyone knows what it, please let me know.

The highlight of my evening were the uropygids, or vinegaroons. I was checking out a flower bed and saw an ovipositer sticking out from under a leaf. Thinking it was a cricket, I grapped it, then immediately dropped it. It took my confused brain a few seconds to process what the bizarre creature was. By the time I idenified it, it was gone. I was heartbroken at first, as I had never seen one in real life. However, they were everywhere. We found a pair mating and named them Jesus and Maria. I though the spanish names appropriate with Octavio being Chilean. The male presents the female with a sperm sac and you could see his long front appendages locked underneath her.

Vinegaroons get their names because they have glands under their abdomens that secrete acetic acid, so they smell like vinegar. When the pair separated we scooped up the male in a bottle to take a closer look and he was definitely secreting some type of smelly defensive fluid. After mating, females head back to their burrows and lay their eggs, which they protect. When they hatch the young ride on her back, eventually molting then leaving the nest. Afterwards the female dies. It takes 3 years to become sexually mature and they can live another four years after that. So cool.

That evening I had my first leech encounter. Those things sure do move fast! I had them all over my feet and even on my wrists. Absolutely disgusting fat little things. When Octavio saw them all over me he made me check him and we was covered as well. He freaked out a little bit as I pulled them off, keeping his eyes closed and muttering to himself in spanish, hahaha.

The next morning we had a private guided tour of the forest. Before leaving we coated our shoes in a gel that keeps leeches away, awesome.  The guide, Jin, was really knowledgable and spoke fantastic english. He knew all the latin names for all the plants and knew enough to explain some of the biology. There were some goregous trees. One grew outwards by dropping off pieces of bark.

Some trees were huge, about 500 years old. One was even 700! They were amazing.

We were really lucky because we saw langurs and macaques jumping through the trees and running along the ground. It was mid morning, so it should have been a little late for them to be so active. It was fun listening to them run through the tree tops.

I would highly recommend a trip to Cat Tien if you like roughing it in nature. However, two days/one night was not enough. Two nights/three days would have been best so we could have done some farther hikes. Also, in the early early morning there are gibbon treks. They only take 4 people every morning and were full when we tried to get in. I think that could be really fun as well.

I've found in Vietnam that getting somewhere is just half the battle, you have to get back as well. We were dropped off on the side of the road again. No signs, no chairs, really no proof that was where we were supposed to be. This time transport was not waiting for us. So we waited, and waited, and waited, then it started to rain... These very nice Vietnamese shop owners brought us into their store, gave us tiny platic chairs to sit on and looked over our ticket. None of them spoke english, so we got to play charades for a few minutes. Eventually a bus came by, they flagged it down, spoke to the driver and we got on. This was definitely not our bus, but hey, we made it back to Ho Chi Minh.

Nha Trang beaches

Nha Trang is about a 12 hour sleeper bus ride south of Hoi An. This by far was probably the worst ride ever. Halfway through the night at 2am they made us switch to another bus, but one that sat up. All the bags wouldn't fit under the bus and they were yelling at us in Vietnamese. It was pretty miserable. Doubly painful since we had not slept much the night before since it was New Years.

But we did make it to the beach!! I love the beach and had missed it. It was nice to see the waves crashing against the shore. The waves were very big and powerful. I spent some time playing in them that afternoon and they knocked me around like a ragdoll. So much fun.

We weren't up for doing much that night, so Jordan and rented out a "3D" theater to watch Magic Mike, which was hilarious. $2.50 got you a drink and any movie from a choice of about 120.

The next day we explored the city, walking by the beach and visiting the city's temple. It was a little too rainy to enjoy the beach that afternoon though.

Nha Trang is supposed to be beach party central, but I think my favorite aspect was not the bars, but rather the street food stands. Corn on the cob and sweet potatoes are slow roasted on the side of the road. Whole lobsters are sitting, steaming, in metal pots. One woman had several pots of different colored rice: green, purple and orange. They each had a slightly different flavor. One place I ate at every day cooked meat on a grill right on the road. It might have been pork. It had this amazing sauce all over it. I have no idea what was in it. They served the meat over rice with some greens and sweet chili sauce. Yum! The entire meal cost 30,000 dong, or $1.50.

Our last day we took a "booze" cruise along the islands. The whole experience was a little odd. We visited an aquarium. It did not have the best displays but it made up for this shortcoming by having the architcture of a giant pirate ship.

We were given a chance to snorkel along the coast of one of the islands. The masks were rediculous and were circles that covered your whole face. However, I was impressed by how beautiful the coral was and the diversity of fish. I would have thought that the unsupervised tourism would have killed everything. Sadly I think that will be the eventual fate of the reefs. Right in front of me a vietnamese local dove and plucked a huge piece of coral from the rock, effectively killing it. It made me really sad.

Lunch on the boat was delicious. They folded down the benches into a table, which we all sat around. It was very efficient. The food was the usual cuisine: noodles, rice, squid, morning glory greens, spring rolls, chicken. I am never going to be able to go to a chinese restaurant in the states again. The food here is that good.

Afterwards the crew entertained us by pulling out a drumset, electric guitar and tambourine. They sang and danced for us, one guy was in drag (ladyman) complete with coconut boobs. Absolutely fantastic.

Then they had karoake, but with a twist. You didn't choose a song, they did and you sang along. They chose songs that germans, russians and chinese would know. It was really cool. When it got to the American Idols, Jordan and I, we sang the Backstreet Boys, I want it that way. It was pretty epic.

After singing, they played the grease soundtrack and made us jump off the top of the boat and swim to a float. The tambourine girl was sitting in the float and handing out a house cocktail in small plastic cups. We weren't sure if it was tequila or vodka, but it was good. That was the extent of the booze cruise though. I definitely think it was false advertising.  And if things weren't already weird enough, on the way back to the shore there was a vietnamese man standing on the prow of his boat singing My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion into a microphone. A good day, but definitely a strange one.

Hoi An

Just a four hour bus ride south of Hue is Hoi An. Hoi An is a larger city and is situated on the coast. It has a lot of character and is known for its culinary delights and tailors.

I explored the markets and bought tons of fruit. I was able to try dragonfruit for the first time, which had a really nice, light flavor. It also looks wicked cool.  Mangosteens are an ugly brown fruit that you cut through and eat the white fleshy center. It may be the best fruit I've ever tried. Also up there on my list are lychees. I love them like I love cherries. That is saying a lot.

Since I love to cook, I was excited to see all the cooking classes available to learn traditional vietnamese cuisine.  We rented bikes and rode to the vegetable village, where all the fresh greens and veggies are grown for the city.

Then we were given a tour of the market.

Finally, we were allowed to do some cooking! We made pork spring rolls with a sweet chili sauce, mackarel in a clay pot and a fantastic green mango and carrot salad. The dressing was made from lime juice, garlic, fish sauce and a few other wonderful things. I find it interesting that in vietnamese cooking they basically use all the same ingredients for each dish, but just change up the proportions slightly. You wouldn't think that would affect the flavors much between the dishes, but it does.

As I was in Hoi An I had to have clothes made. I found this job with some adorable seamstresses. They showed me books and books of designs. All I had to do was point at something and pick out fabric, which they had draped around the shop. The measured me and promised the clothes within 24 hours. Now that's service.  The first fitting did not go well, everything was too big, but they assured me they would fix it. The second fitting was much better. I was really impressed with the quality of the clothes. All together I had them make me a jacket, a dress, a pair of jeans and a cute fancy top. I miss looking fancy when I go to the occasional club while backpacking. I also had a pair of silver strappy sandals made for my feet. The woman traced the countours of my feet and measured them. It was a really cool experience. I wish they had this type of thing in the states.

New years was spent in the usual fashion. The night was stated with fresh beer for 4,000 dong a glass (about 20 cents). We headed to a not so great bar called Volcano Club. I think it could have been a really good place if the crowd had a different makeup or was bigger. We spotted a beauty parlor across the street and Jordan decided she wanted to dip dye the ends of her hair  again. While we were waiting for her turn, we met a pair of backpackers who were really fun. The kept bringing us drinks at the beauty parlor and we even talked one into getting a mohawk, hahahaha. They took us to a cool bar for the actual stroke of midnight, Before and Now. All in all it was a good random new years.