Retracing: Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

A couple of weeks ago, we sped through Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City -- two nights in the former, one night in the latter -- on our way from Siem Reap to Hanoi.

We liked both cities, but were traveling too fast to post about them at the time. As we hide from the drizzly weather here in Hue, Vietnam, it's a good time to remedy that.

When we arrived in Phnom Penh after dark, it seemed to me at first like Bangkok, arrayed along a riverfront with bustling shops and restaurants. In the daylight, it was clearly very different, much less prosperous, more like a city in India, though with fewer people and a mellower feel. There, we visited Tuol Sleng. Once a high school, it was a detention center where thousands and thousands of people were tortured and killed during the four years of the Khmer Rouge's rule. It is still a place of palpable horror. The man in charge of it, "Comrade Duch," is now, finally, on trial. Very few Khmer Rouge leaders have been brought to justice.

Today, Phnom Penh is still an impoverished-seeming city but is also lively and friendly. It has a very nice open-air museum with Angkor Wat-era sculpture, a rather surreal silver-floored temple with a Buddha so encrusted with jewels that even its pupils are diamonds, and a very pleasant waterfront.


Phnom Penh's riverfront, looking a little busier than it really was, thanks to a slow shutter speed


The Foreign Correspondents' Club


Some of the colonial buildings in Phnom Penhave been restored, some not so much

The ciclo -- ubiquitous in Phnom Penh and most Vietnamese cities

The several-hour bus trip to Vietnam was fairly uneventful, though our visa had been made too short and we were unable to get that fixed. 0ddly, we noticed several huge casinos as we approached the border; an unexpected taste of Vegas in Asia.

Border commerce -- the masks are very common here, for bad air and for keeping the skin pale, and maybe staving off H1N1 too

An impressive game of hacky-badminton that we watched from our dodgy dinner stop

We only spent a night and a few morning hours in Ho Chi Minh City, which many people, except the government, still call Saigon. Its lively urban energy was immediately noticeable. We wandered around and survived our first fraught attempts at crossing Vietnamese streets, wading our way through an unpausing sea of motorbikes.

Our first Vietnamese coffee -- you watch, you pour a little more hot water in, you wait


A Saigon restaurant kitchen -- we ate at a table across the alley


Relatively mild traffic for big booming Saigon


At the Ho Chi Minh Museum, a badly stuffed Chinese water deer looking coy (note the fangs)


Revolutionary jargon is alive and well