Day 1

We left the great city of Phnom Penh for the metropolis of Ho Chi Minh at 7am (I believe this was the only bus of many that we took during the trip that left on time!).  Anticipating a 5-6 hour ride we settled into our somewhat comfortable seats on the Mekong Express, ate our pre-packaged breakfast and watched the new Planet of the Apes.  Things rarely seem to go as anticipated here though.  The second stop was the border between Cambodia and Vietnam.  You may be wondering why I failed to mention the first stop, but it was rather uneventful (just lunch and you can probably guess what we ate).  Getting through the Cambodian side was easy enough.  We got off our bus flashed some official our passport and then got back on the bus.  The Vietnamese side was a completely different story.

So here is how they deal with border crossings in Vietnam.  First we gave all of our passports to our bus attendant who runs them into the custom office.  All of us then made our way into the building with hundreds of other travelers.  We were packed in like sardines and you couldn’t move even if you wanted to.  Every few minutes we would take a step or two forward and after doing this for about half n hour we reached the desk where they had the passports.  Instead of giving us our passports when we got to the desk they just waved us through and told us to wait on the other side.  I should mention that as all this was happening the custom officials were just holding passports up and shouting peoples name.  It was almost too much!  After probably another half n hour on the other side of the customs desk Phil and I finally got our passports.  Turns out they don’t have a scanner so they have to type everybody’s info in one by one.  I could say something about communist countries here but I’ll leave that out.

After that gong show we were back on the bus and only a couple hours outside of Ho Chi Minh.  Or so we thought.  30 minutes outside of Ho Chi Minh there was a huge bang that sounded like a gun shot.  At first the bus kept on rolling, but people quickly started to wave it down.  As we came to a stop a large crowd quickly gathered around the back of the bus.  Turns out that we had blown out one of our back tires.  The humorous or I guess for the motto driver unfortunate part was that the pressure from the tire knocked down a motto that was on the side of the road.  As we exited off the bus the poor motto driver was standing there with his hands on his head staring at his broken motto.  After close to another hour delay fixing the tire and appeasing the motto driver we were back on our way and arrived at our guest house about 25 minutes later.  That evening we spent a great deal of time wandering around the city, including visiting the market.

For the next few days we put on our tourist caps and explored some of sites around Ho Chi Minh.  Around in this case is really a relative use of the word as the one tour took us 5 plus hours away from the big city.