Monday, November 06, 2006

A quick overview of whats been happening


I'm writing this from an email spot in Siem Rep. The tourist destination of Cambodia and it is indeed a real crowd of tourists this weekend due to the fact that its the festival of water here in Cambodia celebrating the war between the Khymer and Cham i think who fought a big battle on the lake tonle sap centuries ago. So all of cambodia seems to have come here for the weekend. Siem Rep is the town closest to the Ankor ruins, the most famous being Ankor wat. Myself and Tim have spent the past few days here. Before that we were Vietnam for around 12 days and we have 4 days left here before flying back to brunei and then back home to sweet New Zealand on the 12th.
So I've included a map and i'll write our progress up to now briefly and you can follow if you so wish. The map can enlarge with a click.

We flew into Ho Chi Minh City on the 23rd of Oct and spent one night there. We then flew with Tims parents to Hoi An which is central coast Vietnam 30km from Danang and fairly famous for its taylor shops. I did a little bit of buying there so I can look all flash sometimes when I get home and spent time chilling around this nice small town. Following that we flew to Hanoi which is huge but has some nice lakes dotted around the city which prevents it being an ugly concrete jungle and spent two days there fitting in a game of soccer, the All White vs Vietnam infact. The All Whites, need i say it were a digrace. We then took a night train to Lao Cai which borders with China and went to a lovely town an hours drive away called Sapa. This is the most mountainous region of Vietnam and has peaks up to 3100m, quite high. All this mountainous country is carved out with terraced rice paddies and is the home to a large number of indigenous mountain tribes which we met afew of, the most notable being a girl called San May who comes from the Red Dzao people. She deserves a whole post to herself, maybe i'll write one later. We then trained back to Hanoi 4 days later and went about 3 hours east of the city and took a cruise on Halong Bay for two nights and three days on a junk boat, great fun, great people and great water. From there we came down and into Cambodia to where you find me now.

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