Caves, baby poo and a cheese course: Ali's birthday in and around Hue

So it turned out that the Tet celebrations were still continuing from the point of view of the trains and these were either cancelled or fully booked. So the first leg of our journey south would be by overnight bus - apparently the daredevil option but a winner for the budget after all. This was a proper sleeper bus and we had narrow but near horizontal beds where we could very almost stretch out and although it did feel a lot like a jail cell and the baby behind Ali did enjoy hitting him on the head, it did shape up to be quite a good night's sleep. However, waking up on his birthday morning at 0530 to the smell of baby poo, with a nappy being changed in his face, and realising we were two hours late for the tour we had booked, Ali also had to come to terms with the realisation this would be the first day on this trip when he wouldn't have time for a cooked breakfast. We bailed off the bus and bargained hard for a taxi to take us on directly to Phong Nha. Despite our taxi driver being adamant that we didn't want to go where we were directing him, even in front of the signs, we made it with just six minutes to spare.

Phong Nha Ke Bang is a national park riddled with enormous caves that stretch all the way to Laos and even includes one recently discovered to be the largest in the world. The limestone runs down the coast from Halong Bay and the caves in this area are growing in popularity. We visited Paradise Cave, a large one beautifully decked out with lighting for visitors and then Dark Cave, which was a greater challenge reached by kayak and involved climbing and swimming through with head torches and ended in a big underground mud bath. We stayed overnight at Ho Khan's home stay, the local legend who discovered the world's largest cave, but unfortunately didn't get to meet him.

Our trip on to Hue involved a stop at the Vinh Moc tunnels, just north of the Ben Hai river historically the border with South Vietnam. This was another opportunity to go underground once again, this time through the small tunnels in which entire towns lived during the war whilst sheltering from bombs from above. Cramped and hot, these must have been very unpleasant, but an ingenious way of surviving.

On arrival in Hue, Leila had a surprise for Ali as she had book a luxury spa resort for a couple of nights to celebrate his birthday and they even upgraded our room to a villa! The budget went out of the window for two nights and we enjoyed the enormous swimming pool, the spa area where Ali had a massage and some fine dining including a cheese board. Whether the male masseur had been arranged by Leila in advance remains a point of speculation.

Hue was an imperial capital during the Nguyen dynasty between the 17th and 19th centuries. There is an old citadel with the remains of the emperor's palace and many nearby pagodas and local tombs. Unfortunately we where underwhelmed as much seemed to be in need of restoration and were not well presented or looked after, but it was a rainy gloomy day when we visited and perhaps we are hard to impress after seeing the temples of Angkor and Thailand.

Next we boarded the train to head down the coast where once again we hope to find some warmer weather...

North Vietnam: Hanoi and Halong Bay

We flew to Hanoi, from where we'll work our way south through Vietnam. We planned to arrive just after Tet, the Vietnam New Year, as there would be lots of disruption to travel and our first appointment was a cruise to Halong Bay. We'd arranged to meet Roger (Ali's dad) and Eleanor for this trip, as they are also visiting Vietnam at this time. To Ali's surprise, Roger had arranged quite an upmarket hotel in Hanoi and we enjoyed all the free sweets we could handle and a very comfy bed for one night only. On the last day of the Vietnamese holiday we visited a temple and pagoda busy with locals making handsome offerings to ensure their fortune in the new year,

Halong Bay is a magnificent archipelago of limestone islands with sheer rock faces (karst formations) that is one of Vietnam's major attractions. Although the weather was seasonally misty, they were still an incredible sight. Our two day cruise took us through the islands whilst enjoying lunch, into some large caves and kayaking in the cloudy blue waters. The energetic crew had the activities lined up for us and day two began with Tai Chi on the deck at 0630 followed by breakfast, swimming and a cooking class. It was all a great experience and on our way back we planned some budget days back in Hanoi and our next stops in Vietnam.

Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, the big city of the north and the base for the communist government that leads the country. Its old quarter is a maze of quaint narrow passageways full of obscure shops, people eating and drinking in the eateries that sprawl over the pavement, and lots and lots of motorbikes. The cappuccino coffee mixed with egg white that is a local speciality blew our minds. We visited the Prison museum where we began to learn some of the history and culture of Vietnam and feel it is quite a different place the other countries we have been to. We also visited the Women's museum, which proved to be an interesting multimedia account of women's role in history and today. Leila was sceptical when the first section was entitled 'women and marriage' but fortunately it soon moved on to women's other achievements.

Religion seems less significant in Vietnam compared with the other countries we have visited, with one of our tour guides even claiming 'there is no religion in Vietnam'. This seemed especially evident when we joined the enormous queue of people lined up to see former president Ho Chi Minh embalmed and displayed in his mausoleum. A quick history lesson took place whilst waiting to see the communist hero that led Vietnam to independence from the French, Japanese and the Americans in the last century and is apparently revered by the people. He looks quite a lot like a wax work and you only get a minute or so to walk around his display case but nevertheless it was an interesting experience.

Phnom Penh

Our final destination in Cambodia was the capitol Phnom Penh. As we were in a big city we had some shopping to do. We were both tired of Leila having to repair her best pair of trousers every time the temperature dropped so she bought some new jeans from a local fashion store and Ali hustled for swimming goggles at the Russian market - both quite an experience! We were there during Chinese New Year so we marked the occasion by having dinner in one of the city's many Chinese restaurants that was exceptionally entirely vegetarian. We had a great cheap feast but decided not to order the whole mock-meat suckling pig.

The next day we borrowed some bicycles from the hotel to explore the city. Our sightseeing included the National Museum and the underwhelming Royal Palace but these sights were really just a prelude to the intense visits that followed.

We visited the famous Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This was originally a high school but became a prison in 1975 when the classrooms were turned into cells and torture chambers during the rule of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. In the late 1970s the communist regime enslaved, imprisoned and murdered enormous numbers of Cambodians when they emptied the cities and attempted to turn Cambodia into an primitive agricultural cooperative. In just four years, over one third of the population had been killed by overworking, starvation, disease or execution and anyone who dissented was sent to prisons such as Tuol Sleng. The Khmer Rouge photographed all the prisoners who were tortured or imprisoned there and these are displayed today on the prison walls, along with graphic images, the instruments of torture and skulls of some of the dead. Our guide was at the time a child forced to work in the rice fields during the period of Khmer Rouge control and he introduced us to one of the only seven prisoners to survive. Now in his eighties, his wife and children died in the prison but he now spends his time at the prison each day in an attempt to raise global awareness of the genocide and try to prevent it being repeated elsewhere.

After this we visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, 14km out of the city and saw the mass graves where most of the prisoners at Tuol Sleng were executed. Many of the human remains have been excavated but fragments of clothes, bones and teeth are still making their way up to the surface. The memorial stupa houses and displays over 8000 victims' skulls, many cracked or with holes in where they were hammered to death so that the Khmer Rouge could preserve their expensive bullets. Both the Genocide Museum and Killing Fields were harrowing places especially given how this incomprehensibly barbaric period took place in relatively recent history and has had a profound effect on the people of today, many of whom lost family.

Highs and lows on the Cambodian coast

We arrived to Sihanoukville and found the party town to be clearly in a state of 'the morning after'. We headed to the beach for breakfast to find a row of deserted bars and restaurants looking onto the grey sea and a beach strewn with litter and remnants of last night's takeaways. We had embarked on our 10 hour bus journey full of hopes of beautiful beaches so we were pretty dismayed at this sight. The rest of the town didn't add much to this experience and we do not appear to have a single photo from our day here so it must have been bad!

Fortunately we only had to stay one day in Sihanoukville, whilst sorting out visas for Vietnam, then took the ferry to the nearby island of Koh Rong. Just 45 minutes by boat takes you from this overdeveloped ugly town to a perfect island, with the whitest sand we have ever seen (that squeaks satisfyingly underfoot) and beautiful clear turquoise waters. We instantly felt more relaxed and at home! The island is still quite underdeveloped with only a handful of small hotels along the beach, all offering small basic bungalows backing onto jungle. We stayed at an 'eco resort' there which seems to be a term widely used to sell cold showers, as there is little evidence of anything else 'eco' going on, especially whilst the diesel generator is running. After carrying our wetsuits and masks around for six weeks we went for our first scuba dive and snorkel in South East Asia and saw some interesting new sea creatures.

Returning to the mainland we continued a few hundred kilometres east along the Cambodian coast to Kampot, a small town historically famous for exporting pepper. The nearby Bokor National Park was a holiday resort in the 1940s for the French colonials to go into the hills and escape the humidity of the town. It was deserted during the war and later became one of the main and final strongholds of the Khmer Rouge. With an interesting and varied history we booked a one day tour to explore the highlights. This was an unusual move for us as we usually prefer to find our own way around but for one reason or another we booked it. Possibly one of the worst tours of all time, lowlights included: multiple derelict buildings that just looked like abandoned building sites, a lunch that consisted of plain rice and a waterfall that is currently dry! It did however include a sunset river tour at the end of the day which turned out to be quite nice, Ali was very impressed how the boat captain navigated the river with such perfect timing that our view of the sunset followed the contours of mountain and lasted about half an hour. The best thing about Kampot was the great hostel we stayed in right on the riverside, super cheap and in a great location with a friendly atmosphere, good music and free bicycles.

Ancient Angkor

Arriving into Cambodia at Siem Reap we went straight to one of the highlights of our Southeast Asia trip. The Angkor Archaeological Park includes the remains of many ancient cities dating from between the 9th and 14th centuries when the Angkor empire was one of Southeast Asia's greatest. Many of the stone temples and religious structures are incredibly well preserved and are a magnificent palaces of the gods built by the kings. The temples span both Hindu and Buddhist periods of the empire and include shrines to Shiva and Vishnu as well as the Buddha and the kings themselves. Symbols such as nagas (mythical eight-headed serpents), asparas (celestial dancing nymphs), smiling face towers, and lingas (phalluses) adorn the temples many of which are themselves structured to symbolise the mountains of Mount Meru, the centre of the Hindu universe.

Angkor Wat is the most famous city and is the world's largest religious monument. It's central temples feature the towers which are Cambodia's national symbol and its city is surrounded by a moat and a wall with many intricate bas-reliefs - carvings showing stories such as the battle of Kurukshetra between rival Hindu clans and the procession of King Suryavarman II, the founder of Angkor Wat.

The experience of magnificent Angkor is only somewhat tainted by the hoardes of snapping tourists zipping around the site in noisy tuk tuks and trudging around in big tour groups. In keeping with the fitness efforts and budgetary constraints we opted to travel around by bicycle, a slower but more relaxed approach although it seemed that our $2 bicycles were considerably less well maintained than every other cyclist we saw. We just went to around six or so of the many main central temples but were able to enjoy these at our own pace, giving Ali time to attempt to locate all the details from our guide book. Although the large numbers of women and children touting their souvenirs, drinks, fruits and guidance can become wearing, many have very good English as well as an excellent sales patter. The Cambodians seem so incredibly friendly and we enjoyed a long conversation with one woman who told us all about her wedding in Cambodia and life as a vendor. She married an Austrian and hopes to move to Europe but doesn't seem to get on with his family because she is too slow at cooking and cleaning!    

After two days cycling we took a tuk tuk for the long journey to Beng Melea, a distant temple deep in jungle which is taken over by trees, roots and vines and Banteay Srei, a miniature temple with small and intricate cavings which are said could only be the work of women, as well as the Cambodian Landmine museum where we began to learn about the recent and troubled history of modern Cambodia.

Unfortunately Leila accidentally overdosed on super drowsy travel sickness tablets. Whilst this created some challenges during the day it did enable her to benefit from a solid 9 hour sleep on the night bus onwards to Sihanoukville (a far superior night bus to our previous experience with near horizontal beds and no noticeable vomiting).