Into Cambodia

I stayed in Nha Trang for 5 days in the end. The highlight was easily Vinpearl Land which is an island just off the mainland. You get to it over the longest over-sea cable car in the world. It is a privatly owned island complete with a 5 star hotel resort, theme park, amusment arcade, aquarium and waterpark! It costs just 300,000VND [12GBP] for the whole day and everything is free once you are there. Admittedly the theme park was pretty shocking but the arcades were really cool, the aquarium was the best I have ever been to. It was a huge huge tank with a conveyer belt going through a tunnel so you are basically in the tank with the turles/sharks/random fish with pointy noses/ etc. The waterpark is really cool too, way bigger than the one I went to in Greece last summer, we spent the whole afternoon there. Basically everyone I met turned up at the same time in Nha Trang so there were about 20+ of us all there, it was wicked.

Saigon was OK, the Chu Chi tunnels were very interesting although I decided to opt out of firing a gun. It was tempting but they were all attached to the fence so there was no real aiming, just mindless shooting which I didn't really want to pay $5 a bullet for.

I got totally ripped off on my Me Kong Delta tour. It was $33 for 2 days and a night and the boat to Cambodia. I thought I would see alot of the delta but we only went to 4 different places and all of them were just the usual tour stop-offs with a few groups in front and behind us it was not the experiance I was looking for. The rest of the time was either on the bus or the boat! It was OK, I got a few snaps but it definaly was not what I was expecting. They kept trying to rip us off by getting us to pay more for fast boats. No-one paid appart from a foolish couple who paid $10 for a boat instead of a bus on the first day and then everyone got on the boat at no extra cost and they didnt get thier money back. Then they paid another $10 for the fast boat today which never appeared!! Noone could believe they kept getting thier cash out for these obvious scammers.

I read a book, ''Enders Game" straight through today. It took 9 hours and was definatly better than "Empire of the Sun'' which I also finished today but was much more of a challenge [I have been carrying it since Chang Mai"]. I tried to find a bookshop this evening but felt uncomfortable wandering around in the dark so I will wait for tomorrow.

So my first impressions of Cambodia...Well, it is certianly not as nice as Vietnam, the roads are bad, the place is dirty and I dont feel very comfortable here in Phnom Pen. Going into Saigon was fine and I got the run of the place really quickly but here just feels different. Maybe because I loked myself in my room for 2 hours as soon as I arrived to finish my book and my vision is still blurry.

I am going to S21 tomorrow morning, I wont bother setting my alarm, I need a good nights sleep. Hopefully if I go to bed early enough I wont sleep in till 2 like I did in Saigon one night. Then in the afternoon I will do the killing fields. Get all the depressing stuff over with before heading to the beach place whos name I still dont remember, to chill out and party for a week or so. I will go there the day after tomorrow and get a job in one of the bars if I can. Apparently there is quite alot of free accomadation down there if you buy drinks/meals from the guesthouses but if I find a job I should get accomodation anyway. I have heard that suncreen is a bit of a rare find in Cambodia which hopefully isn't true because I have run out and will need more for the beach!!

I checked my account balances yesterday and they are looking surpringly healthy!! I should have twice as much when I return home than I first thought!! I also met some people from HK on the Me Kong Delta tour who told me it is considerably cheaper to fly to Macau and get a boat to HK so I will look that up after I have finished this entry. Which I have.