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Last Friday we ventured to Phenom Pen for the weekend, it was a 30 minute plane trip, we opted for this rather than the 8hour bus or 4hr boat.

Prior to landing the spread of the Mekong could be seen covering a vast area. We stayed in a hotel called the Frangapani and it was right next to the merging point of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap river, which drains out of the lake by the same name.

Our journey into the hotel was via Tuk Tuk and we got to see the traffic up close, nothing exceptional, but it did feel relaxed much like Siem Reap as compared to down town HCMC, which is just load, dirty and fast!

The hotel was lovely, friendly staff and great roof top restaurant, the bed was also nice – we slept well and were up early waiting for friends so we could go off to the Killing Fields. The taxi arrived an hour early and we left just before 10am detouring to avoid the congestion caused by a protest against the Government not ceding to the  will of the people as expressed in free elections and leave office. In fact the tourist numbers were right down as the news of civil disobedience and the potential for over reaction from the police and army was keeping people away.

The Killing Fields is a somber and grisly place – the collection of skulls being hard to view, and when you realise that this was just one of many and that 3million died in about a three year period of Pol Pot rule, it is hard to understand. The prison that we visited early on route, an old school, is also a terrible reminder of the atrocities committed with the gallows still in plain sight.

At one point on route we past hordes of people on the road, both sides, and these turned out to be workers from the factories heading home for lunch, there are factories all over, newly build or in construction, often they have blue roofs and have a sinister aura, mostly there were no signs saying what the purpose of the factory was – low wages and exploitation were in the news!

Sunday saw Cathie and Helen  off shopping ALL day except for a quick lunch time visit where they interrupted John and I at the Irish pub next to our hotel – we had viewed the museum.

Monday saw us off to see an Ankor Watt type ruin at Tonle Bati and a visit to the wild life rescue farm. The latter was most unexpectedly well developed with large spaces available to all animals, many of which were victims of poachers or urbanisation or farm clearance. The Sun Bear being the  highlight.

As always the people were fantastic and it was a pleasure. Pictures at:

https://plus.google.com/photos/115822802180325365262/albums?banner=pwa

What a fabulous place, Siem Reap was like a small country town, friendly people and the trips out the temples amazing. We set off each morning in a Tuc Tuc with a guide and driver, I was at first hesitant (my risk analysis brain told me this was risky), but it was the best way to get around, the open air keep you cool. We also hired the young taxi driver who had picked us up at the airport and he took us high into the mountains.

I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

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Went with the school swim team. It was cool and I could get out and look around. A different city to Saigon, the lakes in the middle have long history, and I began to appreciate the significance that water has played in how Vietnam evolved. Many of the myths and legends revolve around water, the big rivers and Mekong delta have shaped the southern parts.

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A quick trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels and then the AFL grand final at the Sheraton  spider Everet was the guest speaker.

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At the end of the year the team took Cathie and I to a local Karaoke.

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Great fun!

Cathie visited in late September 2012 and we took a trip to the highland city of Da Lat – another 8 hour drive, you can also fly so it turned out, a tad quicker, but then you don’t get to see the sights.

It is simply a lovely area, over 1000m so no humidity, much like the highland areas of Sri Lanka.

Here are three slides shows.

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https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swf

In early September 2012 I decided on a weekend trip to see the sand dunes of the coastal area of Mui Ne, this turned out to be a bit more time consuming than I expected. I turned up at 8am at the tourist office in HCMC and eventually boarded a bus, which was a normal local bus….all very interesting, comfortable and with a few stops as it took 7 hours to trek the 200klms!!

The bus weaved its way in and out, passing regularly on the outside into the on coming traffic, and this was a wall of traffic and on one occasion an inside route around some slow moving truck.

I was dropped on the side of the road not the resort I had booked….fortunately I saw a sign and walked the 1k in the hot sun and hot and flustered when I arrived, but the room was sunning and the view beautiful, after a walk on the beach and dinner I got set for an early start – 4am to see the sunrise over the sand dunes.

Two wake up calls got me into the jeep at around 4:15 am, and off we set, with me jammed up the back bouncing around – no seat belts, but running commentary of what we will see – and suddenly there the dunes were, a great expanse of sand inland by about 10kms and the seen was magical, as you will see in the slide show below.
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At around 6:30am we set off to see the local beach scenes and have breakfast, this was some glutenous prawn things but I liked them and consumed plenty. The locals were out in force – best part of the day as boy did it get hot around midday.

The fishing scenes were great, see the pics, all the traditional boats, the round ones included and much activity on the beach, and everyone was so friendly.

The final things was a walk up a creek to look at some interesting erosion and colours of the sand and cliffs were striking.

Off back to the resort and then a 7 hour trip home – all terrific, next time I will take the train, it is only 4 hours.

I live in a resort called the Riverside, right next to the Saigon River, initially I was in a third floor apartment, the a ground floor with a garden view and now we have a ground floor with panoramic views of the river out cover our sliding door to the patio – the river is less than 10m away, as is the bar.

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The above slide show I think needs Flash MAC people! The pictures of the rive and boats is what happens all day and night, endless traffic and the sunset can as picturesque as any place on earth. There are some views of the down town – the Cathedral and on of the tangle of Internet cables which adorn every intersections.

The following two slideshows are just more of the city and surrounds, the hustle and bustle of Sai Gon and the mass of bikes is hard to comprehend at first. There are also some cloud and sunset pics – I am told I over do these, but like Tuner the colours and patterns of the light in the sky are endlessly fasinating.

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https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swf

This blog entry brings me to about mid-September when I made a visit to the Mekong via Mr Son’s taxi.

The Mekong is just amazing, a place of wilderness, vast tracts of water, canals dating back thousands of years, French developments, all sorts of plants and animals, many only found in the Mekong. It is home to the Charm people who as Islamic and date back 2000 years when they colonised from Indonesia and at that time were influenced by the Indian religions. They lost power and influence in the mid-1400’s, but there building legacies lives on as we shall see in a latter blog about My Son.

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I did the standard tour, all very interesting. The low boat is carry sand dredged from the river and is bound for Singapore’s beaches!

Today I have been listening to music to spark the mind, to lift the curtain. My mother who was a classically trained musician introduced me to Handle’s Messiah and Mozart’s Great Mass Cm and the Requiems – in Dm and others. If you are keen you can  listen via YouTube.

Great Mass in Cm

Handel’s Messiah Chorus

These are uplifting, whilst celebrating Christ it is hard not to be emotional involved when listening, at least this is what happens to me and I am an atheist, but as someone said to me recently you are spiritual. I also listened to some Wagner – the old joke being “Does you name start with a V Mr Wagner, IX W”, anyway, I have always fund his music confronting almost brutal, in modern terms he was heavy metal – the Overture to the Flying Dutchman being a good example: Overture

Wagner had some odd views, the existence of inferior races being one, and his music  adopted by the person responsible for the greatest world tragedy yet. It raises the question, which Derrida et al. posited that “there is nothing but the text”, this is the basis of post-modernism, in that literary works can be interpreted and deconstructed in multiple ways, each of equal validity. I have always puzzled on this, Tolstoy as I understand him argued that artistic works, primarily literature I guess, has a serious purpose and the writer should try to communicate clearly, he reportedly was most put out when readers or critics did not interpret his writing the same way he did – play writes like David Williamson are the same . You can image Tolstoy saying to Derrida “You can stick your multilayered post structural analysis – I mean what I say and that is that, there is no other valid interpretation”.

Bob Dylan did not want to be held up as a beacon of rebellion, he reacted against being included into the protest and political movements – I think he was probably saying I am free to write what I write: you are free to interpret in whatever way you wish – Blown in the Wind and Time They are a Changing being the two most adopted songs by the left.

It is interesting when you view a painting, it affects you – or at least some do, it is clearly subjective, but on the other hand how come experts can decide what is a good and bad painting. Doesn’t this imply some level of objectivity, but it is clearly different to the objectivity of Science. All that is happening with art critics is a kind of power over what you should think, hence we had Picasso et al. saying no, the old masters where fine but art is about…..well about what?

My first blog for a while, if you have got this far I am going to update the recent travels and possibly you will find something there, and maybe in what I said above, which is purely my opinion. Love to all.