December 20, 2014 – Phnom Penh Cambodia to Phu Quoc Vietnam
Well, it’s time to say goodbye to The Wats and Siem Reap and head on over to Vietnam. We’ve decided that since we came up here on the bus, we should head back by boat via Tonle Sap. It sounds like an interesting way to go, and we haven’t had an adventure for at least 12 hours. The friendly folks at the front desk arranged everything. It’s a bit pricey at $45 a head, but the trip is only five or six hours, and there shouldn’t be any construction!
All we have to do is be ready for a 7 am pickup, and everything should be fine. Then we got a call in the evening. “Please be ready to go at 6:30.” Rats! That means no breakfast, as it only opens at maybe ten to seven. Oh well. Up we get and are all ready to go at 06:20, and of course, no one shows until 08:15! The good news: that means we get one more omelette and a cup of their terrific coffee. The bad news: the minibus that shows up for us is actually a motorcycle with what looks like a cattle-car on the back built for six small people, and it already has six big people in it. So by the time we get in, there are eight people, and all the luggage is stacked on the tailgate about 4 feet high. The poor motorcycle goes chugging down the road headed for the docks, and luckily, it was only a 20-minute drive…. The boat turned out to be a long, narrow speedboat thing that held about 50 people in reasonably nice seats, but everything is a bit long in the tooth and the windows are dirty, and it is very noisy once the hydroplaning culvert gets going. On the other hand, we can go outside and climb onto the roof and watch the world go by at about forty mph, which is what Deb did for most of the trip. Tonle Sap is a honking big lake. Even at low water, we were out of sight of land for most of the first two hours, and it took probably four hours before we were definitely off the lake and into the river. Lots of commercial fishboats with what looked like drift-nets but could have been longlines, and lots of little lakeside communities jacked up on stilts to accommodate the enormous variation in lake levels.
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The Tube of Death from the rear, showing overflow luggage. Ours was inside!
The sleepy people sit inside.
And the thrill-seekers sit on top.
The boat pooped us out right in downtown Phnom Penh on schedule, and all we had to do was collect our luggage and cart it up a steep ramp to the street and find a tuk tuk driver who wasn’t too carnivorous to take us back to our hotel. It all worked out fine, and by happy hour, we had been hugged by the hotel staff and were ensconced in our shiny new room. I figured that today might be a bit of a trial, so without telling Deb, I had splurged on an update. For the princely sum of $34, we got a huge brand new room with a curtained four-poster plus a marble bathroom with a glass-block shower and soaker tub. Woo hoo!
Pnohm Penh chickens definitely have lips.
Sadly, we had to say goodbye to our hotel friends the next morning and head off in the minibus to Vietnam. I expected this to be our most perilous day as we planned to take a minibus for four hours to the border, go through customs, take another minibus for half an hour to the ferry terminal, take a two-hour ferry ride to Phu Quoc, and figure out how to get across the island to our hotel. Piece of cake, really, provided all the balls fell into the proper holes…. and the odds of that would be? Once we were all loaded into a surprisingly nice twelve-passenger bus and on our way, they announced that the air conditioning was broken and then rolled down all the windows! No worries, it was still pretty comfy. Lucky for us, the horn wasn’t broken, or we would have had to cancel the trip. The road was in surprisingly good condition, and we spent most of the trip in the middle lane of a two-lane highway, passing big trucks while the oncoming traffic scroonched over to make room for us. It all worked out somehow….
Yes, this guy DID just pass us on the highway.
One surprise at the border, the Cambodian side has three big casinos, and there are 2 more under construction. Apparently, the Vietnamese government doesn’t permit them, so someone on the Cambodian side is cashing in. Customs was surprisingly easy. We had to give them a buck each for taking our temperature (no, not like that, that costs more), and after a 10-second exam of our passports and visas, we were good to go! One more 30-minute bus ride and we were ready to pile onto/into – The Superdong!
Double-decker dong or double-dong decker?
The Superdong slips and slides travels through the water at a good clip. It’s got two levels, good seats, wifi, and music videos, and it does everything a fast ferry is supposed to do, and it got us to the island of Phu Quoc in just under two hours. Left on time, arrived on time. Hmmmmn. Not only that, there was a fleet of minibuses waiting for us, and they weren’t clapped out, and we all drove the speed limit on our own side of the road. Wait, what? Maybe the Vietnamese have their act together? So, at the end of a long and fairly tiring day, we pulled up in front of our shiny new hotel, which looks really nice and was paid for four days in advance. I can smell a beer. We walk into the lobby, and the termagant (female dragon) behind the desk promptly informs us that we have no reservation, they have no knowledge of our booking company, we can’t use the phone to straighten everything out, and she won’t call the toll-free number. “You go now!” is the best we could get out of her. Luckily, we had Skype on our tablets, and after 30 minutes of tension, we finally got a key and headed up to our room. Not an auspicious start. The termagant would doubtless have her way with us eventually, but not tonight. The room is very good, my darling Debbi produced a bottle of French bubbly she had ferreted away in one of our bags (I love that woman), and we put our feet up and celebrated the end of another perfect day. Welcome to Vietnam!