Sarah's Semester at Sea: Vietnam and Cambodia: It was so hot that I drank about 6 bottles of water a day and my pee was still too yellow

Day 1:

I did a city orientation through semester at sea. It took us to some cool places but I guess Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City takes too much effort to type) isn’t really the best place for sightseeing. Most things we saw had to do in some way with the Vietnam War, which is understandable but doesn’t make for the best city orientation. We went to a Taoist temple which was cool. Then we went to the former presidential palace, which was apparently where the president of South Vietnam was when North Vietnam came in w/tanks to overthrow the government. There was a bust of Ho Chi Minh in the palace and everyone wanted to take pictures with it. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought that was kind of weird. We went to a history museum and saw a water puppet show. Apparently it’s a pretty famous thing in Vietnam, but it’s basically like a puppet show on top of a pool of water. Tubes run under the water that control the puppets so it appears that the puppets are acting on the water and such. It was like a puppet show on crack. Sometime during the day we went to a restaurant. It was cool because the cost of the city orientation included our meal, but it was uncool because I quickly learned that Vietnemese food plays tricks on you; it LOOKS like Thai food but tastes nothing like Thai food. It is very lacking in flavor. Our guide during the city orientation was really funny. One thing he said that made me laugh is he was talking about how ridiculous the English language is and he said, “in your language, a fat chance and a slim chance mean the same thing, but a wise guy and a wise man are complete opposites!” After the city orientation, me, Nicky, Thomas, Nikki, and Tom (why do all my new friends have the same name?) went to get clothes made. I got fitted for a dress. After that, we did some shopping in local markets and then we went to eat. I ordered a chicken dish. It was okay, but again lacking in flavor. I’m sitting there eating with my chopsticks and not really paying attention. I go to put a piece in my mouth and I look down and it is about 90% uncooked. I got kind of worried but tried to console myself with the thought that it had to just be a defective piece because there was no way that I could have put raw chicken in my mouth and chewed it and not noticed. When I got home I took a prescription diarrhea pill just in case. Everything came out fine (pun intended.) Anyway, after we got back from the city it felt too early to stay on the ship all night but I didn’t feel like going out and doing anything so Nicky and I went to an internet café that was right across the street from the ship. I really liked Saigon. It looked like a pretty typical city but it felt much safer than other ports we’ve been to recently.

Day 2:

We went to the airport in Vietnam and took a plane to Cambodia. The immigration at the Cambodia airport was pretty intense…maybe it’s always intense and we just never see it because semester at sea usually takes care of it for us, but 6 or 7 different people had to look at your passport and it was just weird. The Cambodian airport was so weird looking; it looked like a hotel from the outside with all these palm trees and stuff like that surrounding it. When we left the airport, we drove to Angkor Wat and walked around for about an hour. We got to see the sun going down behind Angkor Wat so that was cool. Angkor Wat was sooo big and it’s crazy that it’s still standing. Our guide said it probably took thousands of men over 30 years to build it by hand. Most of the other Temples we went to were impressive but pretty small. Angkor Wat took a long time to walk through. After that we checked into the hotel and then drove to a restaurant. It was a buffet-style restaurant and some people did a “cultural dance show” for us. We couldn’t tell if it was ACTUALLY a cultural dance show or if it was more of a “tourists will like watching this” kind of dance show but it was entertaining. After dinner some of us walked across the street to this mall and got some ice cream. We got back to the hotel around 9 and 5 or 6 of us went to the night market. While we were walking around the night market, we came across this tank of small fish that everyone had their feet in. Some people I was with had heard of this before, but I hadn’t. Apparently the fish eat the dead skin off your feet. I was so curious and I felt like I had to try it so Nicky and I did it. It felt SO weird and I was spazzing out for the first 2 or 3 minutes. After awhile you kind of got used to it. We convinced 2 of our other friends to sit down and do it too. While we were sitting there we talked to some people from England that were backpacking through Asia. They are kind of going the opposite direction as our ship goes, so they had just come from China and were on their way to Thailand. It was cool to talk to some people that were somewhat close to our age and are into traveling but are NOT from semester at sea. It was hard to tell if the fish thing actually worked. I think if I had stayed there for a long time it would have, but since we only stayed for like 20 minutes it kind of just got my feet wet and picked at dead skin and aggravated the problem. It was a funny thing to do though. We left the night market a little after 11 and came back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Day 3:

We left the hotel around 5am and drove to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise. We had to leave at 6:45 which was actually just when the sun was rising. I wish we had left 15 mins later and stayed 15 mins later because we missed the best part of the sun rising. We went back to the hotel and had breakfast. Then we drove to some more temples. Let me just take this time to say that Cambodia was SO HOT. As in unbearably hot. It was humid and the sun beat down on you and it just drained you of all your energy. We went to the Bayon Temple which was cool looking because it had a lot of weird faces and stuff carved into it. We also went to the “elephant terrace,” where royal people would sit and watch elephants have competitions as a way of choosing which elephants they wanted to own. It was all cool to see but after awhile I couldn’t concentrate on anything because of the heat. We went to eat lunch and I felt a little better after lunch but still pretty exhausted. After lunch, we were given the option of going to see 5 other temples on our itinerary or being dropped off at the hotel. I was pretty temple-ed out and I went back to the hotel and took a nap for an hour. Nicky had gone back to the hotel too so after we slept for a little while we tried to find something to do. I asked the woman at the front desk what there was to do in the area and she started naming places to go shopping and I said “is there anything besides shopping?” and she responded, “BESIDES shopping?!” as though I had just suggested something ridiculous. It was then that I realized that we were in a town with nothing to do besides temples and shopping. We tried to get a tuk tuk/rickshaw/whatever they’re called in that country to take us to a different market than we had been the night before. He took us to this weird place that was indoors and didn’t really sell much of anything. It was weird and we spent less than 5 minutes there. We walked out and he tried to take us somewhere else but we didn’t want him driving us around anymore so we told him we would just walk. We noticed we were close to where we had eaten the night before so we went back to that mall and got a different kind of ice cream. Vietnam and Cambodia aren’t big on desserts after meals; their desserts are always fruit. Since I didn’t really like the food that much, seeking out desserts was pretty much the only time I actually enjoyed what I was eating. We talked about what we should do and how there was really nothing to do in the area. Even though I didn’t really want to go back to the temples, I didn’t want to spend my time sitting in the hotel either, so we took a tuk tuk to the temples. I was actually really glad we didn’t go with the group because we only went to 2, not 5, and we could go through them at our own pace, and it was a little later in the day so the heat was SLIGHTLY less miserable…but only slightly. It also felt better to drive in the open-air of a tuk tuk as opposed to the weak air conditioning of a big bus. Our driver also drove a different direction than the bus had been driving so we saw some of the rice fields and other countryside-like areas. We got back to the hotel at 6, around the same time our group did. At 7 we drove to a restaurant. Cambodian food was the same as Vietnamese food to me – it looked like it would be good but it didn’t have much flavor and I was kind of indifferent toward it. After dinner I watched tv in the hotel for a little while and went to bed kind of early.

Day 4:

We had breakfast at the hotel and then drove to the river and got on a boat. The boat took us to a floating village, which was really interesting. I couldn’t believe how normal everyone’s houses looked. They had dogs living with them and I really have no idea how they got there. We passed one floating cage of pigs. We asked our guide how often people have to move their houses and he said they have to rebuild every 5 years. They had a floating school, and pretty much all of the same things any village would have. Our boat stopped at a floating souvenir shop so we hung out there for a little while and played with the dogs. One dog looked like what Rachel would have looked like as a puppy. The floating village was a completely different way of living and it was really interesting to see. After the floating village we drove back to the hotel and packed up our stuff and checked out. We had lunch at the hotel and then we drove to Ta Prohm, the place where some of Tomb Raider was filmed. I’ve never seen the movie so it didn’t mean all that much to me, but it was still a cool place to see because all of the tree roots had grown into the stone and it was more “ruins” than the temples we had seen before. It was also mostly in the shade because of all the trees so it wasn’t AS gross there. It was also a little bigger than a lot of the other ones so there were more things to see, kind of like Angkor Wat but not as big. After Ta Prohm we drove to the airport and took a plane back to Vietnam. We got back to the ship around 8:00 and, like the first day, it felt too early to stay on the ship but we were too tired to do much of anything, so 3 of us went to the internet café. I registered for classes so that was convenient.

Day 5:

I spent most of the last day wandering around Saigon with Jordan, Nikki, Tom, and Megan. At first it was just me, Jordan, and Nikki. We stopped by the place where I got my dress made so I could pick it up. We went to some markets again but I think that 4 days of being in intense heat was starting to get to me because I felt like shit. I went to the hotel where we were supposed to meet Tom at 12:30 around 11:45 and ordered a water and a soda and sat in the air conditioning until I felt better. Jordan and Nikki came a little after 12 and we all sat in the air conditioning together and waited for Tom. When Tom came we ate lunch and then walked around some more. I bought the whole series of Friends, the whole series of the Sopranos, and the first 4 seasons of lost, which I have never seen but I need to see what all the hype is about, for $21 total. I haven’t watched them yet so let’s hope they are of decent quality. While we were walking around we ran into Megan. We all decided to try to get Japan Rail passes but when we got there they said you needed your passport or a copy of your passport, which I didn’t have either. I didn’t want to wait for all 4 of them to do it and not even be able to so I left, assuming that I would be too lazy to go back. On my way out, I thought about it and decided that I should really just get it while it’s cheaper here and not be lazy, but I knew that if I waited for the free shuttle back to the ship, there was no way I was going back out. I paid one of the motorcycle drivers $3 to take me back to the ship, wait for me, and then take me back to the building where the Japan passes were. I had seen other SAS people riding the motorcycles and it seemed like a good deal. Surprisingly, I felt safer on a motorcycle than I have in some rickshaws I’ve been in recently. The traffic in Vietnam is crazy, but it’s a more controlled kind of crazy than it has been in other countries. So, I got my rail pass and went back to the ship.

Vietnam and Cambodia were both a really good time, I just wish it hadn’t been so hot. It wore everyone out even more. This whole country for 5 days/class for 2 days pattern is really wearing everyone down and half the people I know, including myself, are either sick or on the border of being ok and being sick. Even though we are all exhausted we can’t believe how close the semester is to being over and the thought of this ending makes everyone depressed. My roommate was reading me an article about North Korea launching something sketchy and US ships going to Japan to deal with it, so I really hope this doesn’t affect our trip to Japan…especially since I just bought a Japan Rail Pass. I can’t believe I only have 3 actual countries left (Hawaii doesn’t count to me.)

I don’t really have pictures with myself in them from this country because most of what I saw were old temples and such…I’d be fine not seeing another temple for awhile. But, here are a few random pictures:

the "tomb raider" temple: