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Reunification Palace (Ho Chi Minh City) - Click to View Hi-Res Image

The Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City is one of Vietnam’s most famous landmarks. Designed by Ngo Viet Thu, it was built in 1962 and completed in 1966 to replace the Norodom Palace, an old French colonial palace destroyed during the Vietnam War in 1962. During the war, it was the presidential palace and residence of the president of South Vietnam. On 30 April 1975, a North Vietnamese Army tank crashed through the main gate and ended the Vietnam War. The Reunification Palace now serves as a bit of a time capsule and museum, displaying how the president lived during the war; you can even go underground and see the warroom.

I hope you enjoyed the TravelTuesday Picture of the Week! Enjoy the rest of TravelTuesday on Twitter and follow me @hyperren. Come back next week for another PotW!

Post Office at Ho Chi Minh City - Click to View Hi-Res Image

This is the beautiful post office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, designed by Gustave Eiffel. It’s a gorgeous building, both outside and inside, and mailing a post card from here was one of the highlights of my trip.

I admit it, the main reason I chose this as my Picture of the Week is because it was featured on last week’s episode of The Amazing Race, which may just be my favorite travel show of all time. Last week was the first time I ever watched an episode and yelled at the TV, “I was there! I was there!” (Do you need proof that I was there? Check out this picture.)

That was this week’s TravelTuesday Picture of the Week. Enjoy the rest of TravelTuesday on Twitter and follow me @hyperren. Come back next week for another PotW!

On the fourth day of my trip around Southeast Asia, I woke up early, took a shower, and prepared my things. I readied my passport and bus ticket, stuffed my laundry in my one backpack, and made sure I had the essentials on my person. Today, I was going to cross the border from Vietnam to Cambodia.

It was a beautiful morning, so I took pictures of the view from my budget hotel.

I took the elevator straight down into the restaurant, and I had a buffet breakfast for the last time. I loaded up knowing that it might be a while before I had a decent meal. I took my time because I was up quite early. After breakfast, I checked out, and walked down Bui Vien towards the Sinh Cafe office, where I would wait for the bus. On the way, I bought a large bottle of water as well as a set of batteries.

My bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia was at 9am and would take roughly six hours. There were a couple of locals in the bus, and there was a trio of European girls, and… that’s it. The upside is that it gave all of us free rein to take entire rows of seats to relax and sleep during the trip. It was great; I didn’t have to worry about leg room!

Approximately four hours into the journey, we made it to the border. Because I am a citizen of an ASEAN nation, I didn’t have trouble going through immigration (in fact, I didn’t even have to face the immigration officer at all, unlike the three European girls with us). We had lunch at a restaurant on the border. It was tough, because I don’t think they spoke any English at all, so I had to make do with pointing to order. That said, the food was good.

The most surprising thing about the border was the number of casinos on the Cambodian side of the border. There were already a handful of resort-casinos there, and a lot more were under construction in the same area. It wasn’t something I expected, so it definitely came as a surprise to me. (In contrast, the Vietnamese side of the border was mostly farm fields.)

A couple of hours later, we were in Phnom Penh. It’s the capital city of a developing country, and we disembarked in the center of it all. I’d been warned about how unsafe it was there, and how underdeveloped it was, but I didn’t feel any of that at all. It was an emerging metropolis, not unlike some of the big (but not huge) provincial cities in the Philippines, like Bacolod. There were a lot more high rises than I expected, with more being built. The major highway was well-paved, not the dusty dirt road I was expecting.

I decided to walk towards the area where I wanted to stay at, which was near Sisowath Quay. Big mistake. It was extremely hot, and I was a little lost, not to mention I needed to use the bathroom. It took a while before I found the nearest coffee shop, where I stayed in for a bit to cool off, use the bathroom, and grab a drink. Within an hour of my arrival in Phnom Penh, I found what I was looking for.

I stayed at the Bright Lotus Guesthouse I. Still spoiled from my private room experience in Ho Chi Minh City, I got a Single room for $16 a night. The room actually had two double beds, so a group of four could, conceivably, rent out that room for $4 a night per person. The room had airconditioning, cable television, and a relatively large private toilet and bath. My room in Phnom Penh was $2 cheaper than my room in Ho Chi Minh City, but it was already considerably larger. If this was how Cambodia was going to be like, I thought, then I’m gonna like it here.

The guesthouse was walking distance from Sisowath Quay, particularly the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (more on that in my next entry), as well as the National Museum, the Royal Palace, and the Silver Pagoda. Wat Ounalom was also nearby, and if you really wanted to, you could walk towards the Night Market and Wat Phnom. There was a second-hand bookstore nearby, as well as a convenience/beauty store (think Watsons), a silk shop, a travel company, an internet cafe, and your pick of bars and restaurants. Also, as this was a heavily touristy location, there were a LOT of tuk-tuks around.

I rested a bit at my room, then checked out the area around me. Sisowath Quay was still being developed; there was a large strip of ongoing construction by the river. Perhaps in a couple of years, it would be even busier than it was now, but when I was there it already seemed busy enough as it was. I spent a little time at an internet cafe, then explored the area more. I spied a handful of pizza places serving “happy pizza”; I’d been warned by Robert Alejandro in his book The Sketching Backpacker than the “happy herb” in their pizza was marijuana, so I stayed away. Instead, I found myself at a bar-and-restaurant serving Cambodian food, and had dinner there.

I decided to keep my drinking and night sightseeing to a minimum. I needed to get some rest after the gruelling trip so I could get energy to explore Phnom Penh the next day.

You can check out pictures from my trip at Flickr.

Day Three was my last full day in Ho Chi Minh City, so I knew I had to make the most out of it. I missed out on a lot of the sights because of the rains on Day One, but Day Three was bright and sunny. I was a little more familiar with the city (and my maps), so I had a little more confidence searching for the more touristy destinations in the city.

After another delicious buffet breakfast, I headed out in search of the War Remnants Museum. The place was clearly marked on the maps I had, but a lot of the smaller streets in the area weren’t clearly marked, not to mention I wasn’t sure where the entrance actually was. I ended up circling the area several times, nearly giving up when I followed a big sign with an arrow pointing to where it was then didn’t find it. Eventually, I found it, paid the 15,000 Vietnamese dong entrance fee, and entered the museum.

There are eight “permanent thematic exhibitions” inside the museum. Some were being housed in what looked like warehouses, but I believe it was just because the main museum building was under reconstruction. In any case, they were clearly marked, and armed with your brochure, one knew exactly where to go to next.

The first area was called “Historical Truths.” It gave a rundown of the facts and figures of the war, as well as a chronological timeline of the events that lead into the war, and of the war itself. It gave information on which countries participated in the war (including the Philippines) and how. There was a definite anti-American bias to how the events were presented, but it didn’t take away from the fact that the war was a long a painful thing. The section ended with a quote from former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, from his memoirs “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”: “Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

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The previous night, I’d booked a day trip with Sinh Cafe, one of the many tour companies in the Pham Ngu Lao district of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was a trip to visit the Cao Dai Temple as well as the Cu Chi Tunnels. The trip cost 130,000 Vietnamese dong, or the equivalent of about $7-8. The cost didn’t include lunch or the entrance fee to the tunnels.

The bus departed at 8:15am, so I had to be at the Sinh Cafe offices at around 7:45am. There weren’t too many of us on the trip, so our tour guide disposed of the microphone and/or megaphone (I wasn’t sure exactly what he had planned to use) and just spoke to us in a loud voice. The tour company provided each of us with a small bottle of water (which supplemented the big bottle of water I brought along) and a pack with wet wipes (one piece) in it. We would find out later that day just how useful the wet wipes and water would be.

The Cao Dai Temple is in Tay Ninh, a couple of hours away from Ho Chi Minh City. The tour guide informed us that there would be a rest room stop on the way to the temple. We were taken to a place where Vietnamese handicrafts were being made, and naturally, there was a souvenir shop. In fact, in order to exit the compound with the rest rooms and return to the buses, you had to pass through the shop. It was a pretty good ploy to try and get tourists to part with their cash, but I didn’t bite because the prices were much higher than at the market. The shop had a lot of lacquerware, some great art stuff that would look good on a wall, assorted vases and such, chopsticks and chopstick holders, keychains of all sorts, and pearls. It was a nice stop, but again, way too expensive compared to the markets.

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