Kampuchia

It's the country I spent most time in so far, but finally I'm out of Vietnam and into Kampuchia (Cambodia for those unfamiliar with Khmer transliteration). Up to Hoi An I was loving Vietnam. It's got a bit of french va-va-voom thrown into the already exciting SE Asian hotpot. But the further south you head the more the gloss fades and the less tolerant I become. By the time we fast-boated over the mekong border I had a bitter taste in my mouth. Not from the huge amounts of coriander the Vietnam chefs put in every dish, but more, the apathy and occasional hostility from the locals and the open desire to fleece you as much as possible.

Overall though I fell in love with Vietnam. The food is some of the best in Asia, the climate varies from UK temperate stuff in the north to desert hot in the south and the things to see, on the whole, are the most interesting and varied in this region. When you combine the usual pagoda/wat stuff with a war museum and shooting range I say you are onto a tourism winner.

It is from Mui Ne that I pick up the recap then. We reach Saigon in a not unreasonable 6 hours. Every bus journey is six hours, whatever they advertise it as. It's late and Saigon is big an scary after the weeks in coastal villages. We have agreed not to make our usual mistake and settle for the first hotel we find so we walk all over looking at rooms to find almost all hotels are full. So we return to the first hotel we found and take their (now rate inflated) room. The first signs of tension are beginning to show between Amanda-Sue and me. We are equally annoyed with each other for no good reason. I think my non-stop juvenile joking is wearing thin and Amanda has assumed my Mum's responsibilities in telling me off for not cleaning my teeth twice a day. A good meal and everything would be forgotten but I pick the restaurant and according to my new Mum I was wreckless in my choice and the food is awful (the food hasn't arrived at this point, but that is just me being pedantic).

It's time for some emergency action on my part to salvage the situation and the next morning I get up early to find an improved luxury hotel room for the lowest price possible. With my finely honed haggling skills I get a room half the size for about twice as much but it doesn't smell of mould and the sheets aren't made of highly flammable synthetics so all of a sudden everyone is happy.

A bowl of Pho for breakfast and we are happier still - 50 pence for a bowl of noodles with beef brisket in a soup and you are set for the day. But it's late by now and half the day is gone. I go for a haircut and shave (the first in a few years) and then we are off to the five star majestic for some cocktails to celebrate that we haven't gone our separate ways.

Ever since we reached Vietnam my debit card hasn't worked and I finally decide to do something about it along with sorting my insurance claim out now that I'm through the worst of it and won't need to readmit myself to a hospital. So we trek to the Saigon branch of HSBC (the world's local bank) where I enquire about my card. The manager doesn't know and says I need to contact HSBC UK. I ask if I can use his phone and apparently no, while HSBC in the UK is the worlds local bank, HSBC Vietnam is the worlds worst bank. He tells me to try the Post Office for international calls. So I do and I buy an international calling card with 15 minutes of talk time. 9 minutes later and I've put in my sort code, account number, date of birth, second digit of my security number and fifth digit of my security number. They have retrieved my balance of all four of my accounts and now I am holding for a customer service representative. The clock is ticking and at 10 minutes I finally get through to the recorded message informing me the call centre is closed (it is 7.30am in the UK). I am wrong about HSBC Vietnam; HSBC UK is the worlds worst bank... by far. When I do finally get through to someone (someone in India - where it's only 3 hours behind Vietnam and a not unreasonable noon) I am transferred to Fraud prevention and told my card has been blocked because I've used it abroad. I explain that I've been using it abroad for a full three months and if they actually want to stop fraud they should try to react a smidgen quicker than that. But the line is bad and the wit it lost somewhere over the indian ocean. She does at least remove the block before my second phonecard runs out.

Everything is sorted but I'm still close to losing it. If a tuc-tuc driver approaches me now I'm scared of what I might do (and more scared of what he might do in return when I fail in what I was trying to do). So we walk through a park towards the reunification palace giving me the opportunity to take some deep breaths. At this point I am aware that I would normally brush over or slag off the tourist attraction that we are visiting, but for almost the first time I am impressed with an attraction and would recommend the palace to anyone that is anywhere near Saigon. It's been left exactly as it was when the Viet Cong marched into Saigon in 1975. The retro 70's feeling of the architecture and interior is intoxicating for someone who loves to feel like colonial times are here again. I imagine myself sitting in the games room demanding some kaffer gets me another G&T. Admittedly wrong race, wrong time and wrong colour, but that's just what comes into my head.

There is a great video in the basement all about how the Vietnamese struggled against the Americans and embraced the Viet Cong, how the Americans killed thousands and the Viet Cong saved thousands, how the vietnamese women were still firing their AK-47's at American soldiers while giving birth to the next generation of anti-imperialist troops. A complete work of fiction, but entertaining for it.

We follow this up with a morning visit to the Cu-Chi tunnels. On the outskirts of Saigon this is where thousands of Viet Cong troops could remain hidden from the Americans and conduct raids at night. It's been disneyfied with some poor mannequins sitting in reconstructed tents. The reconstructed tunnel itself is about 150m. After putting up with all the disney crap first (which includes firing my AK - sadly no kids around) we are finally allowed to enter the tunnel. Our guide tells us there are exits at 50m intervals. The map we are shown by our guide shows kitchens, medical centres and bedrooms all connected on three levels by this tunnel. So after the first exit at 50m, with everyone else getting out, I persuade Amanda-Sue to carry on expecting to come across something more interesting than a 3 foot high tunnel at some point. By the end of it and having given up on finding a room we leave the tunnel to find our group and guide have left us and gone on. It takes us a fair while to find them in the jungle and we have missed a lot of what our guide was saying. But since he couldn't speak English, the entire site is one big tourist pile of fictional shit and that I've been stuck in a tunnel crouched and sweating like crazy I couldn't give a shit about anything except where our bus with A/C currently is and how long it will take to take me back to something approaching reality. So if you get the chance don't go to Cu-Chi. But if you do and you have a guide called Suwe, please, please, please take your AK-47 off it's stand turn it to his face, tell him this is from Robin and pull the trigger. He is good enough to drop us at the war remnants museum on our way back to Saigon which is a seriously depressing place full of pictures of Agent Orange and napalm victims. There are a couple of feotuses in jars with two heads and the like just in case you were thinking of having supper. Whilst they have an understandable dislike for the Americans they actually hate the french far more from the 1940's and 50's Indochine fighting. There are a few rooms here dedicated to pictures and stories of purely french atrocities... and I didn't think I could dislike the french any more than I already do.

It's time to leave Saigon, take the malaria tablets again and head into the Mekong Delta. It's a three day trip that ends in Phnom Penh and rather than the small group sizes we have had on tours up to now this is a full size coach load of tourists who have all paid just $25 to do this. I've always said you get what you pay for and in this case we didn't even get that. Day 1 is spent bussing to a boat stop taking a quick boat journey either to a factory where they make some local tat or to a random point in the river where we turn and sail back. The vast majority of the time is spent on the coach and at one point we are supposed to get a ferry over a large part of the Mekong in our coach. But the queue is long and our guide, Moon, decides it makes more sense to offload us and walk to a passenger ferry. On the other side we can then wait at dusk by the river and sewers for our bus to catch us up. You can probably see where this is going, but just to spell it out so I can vent some of the plenitude of frustration built up from this tour: the bus obviously goes no faster in the queue with us off it and we wait for about 45 minutes for it to catch us up. In all that time we are completely surrounded by mossies deep in malaria country. There is no A/C on the side of the road but plenty of it on the bus so I'm not alone in asking Moon why in Buddhas sweet name he decided this was a sensible course of action. As is typical he explains nothing but puts on a big toothy Vietnamese smile just asking for his teeth to be smacked all over the road.

Our night is home-stay - some little bungalow on the river. The food is typical of home-stay food: authentic but inedible. I'm on a table with French people and images from the Indochine rooms of the war remnants museum keep popping into my head. But I hate our guide so much at this point I've lost interest in hating the French. Plus these guys all seem quite nice and cheerful (they could easily have been laughing at me though - I've no idea).

Day 2 and it's the same formula. Bus, boat, factory, market. No explanation of anything and no enthusiasm from anybody. I'm ready to go straight to Cambodia but we have to put up with one more night in this hell-hole they call the delta. Because of our home-stay night we get an upgrade tonight to an air-con room in Chao-Doc. It does indeed have air-con, but nothing else. The door is frosted glass and at the top of the stairs that every other guest has to come up to go to bed. Above the door is a gap three bricks high and about five foot long which ensures the air-con is completely wasted. At 3am the kitchen (at the base of the stairs) puts on a CD of the little mermaid soundtrack (on repeat) and that is the end of any possibility of sleep on the nylon sheets that give you static shocks should you just roll over.

There are some more markets and villages to see before our boat leaves the next morning, but we skip all that and jump on a fast boat at 8am. Sadly by skipping the mornings sights I miss the opportunity to not tip our guide. I obviously don't tip him, but I wanted to do it very obviously so he'd know that I found him a completely useless human being.

The Cambodia/Vietnam border is your typical inefficient SE Asia experience. The border guard soldier is actually lying in a hammock smoking a cigarette while we wait. There is an x-ray machine which is employed in what must be the most pointless security operation in the world and then we're in. The Mekong is boring by this point - wide and flat - and so I read Harry Potter all the way to Phnom Penh.

As is now expected on a tourist route we are met by about ten to twenty touts for tuc-tucs, hostels, motos and some who can't even be bothered to tout but just ask for money. This is the part of the world that gave us that incredibly annoying Motorola sign off phrase of "Hello Moto". Every moped driver will stop and say it to you in the hope you will jump on the back and pay him 1000 Riels for a journey. But apart from that negative they all seem a bit nicer than Vietnamese. We eventually take a tuk-tuk for $1 to a hostel of our choice. The driver tells us our hostel doesn't exist anymore and being the wisened traveler I tell him I've heard that one before and let me guess, you know another hostel that is similar and close but will give you a fat commission. He doesn't understand me and continues driving. When he pulls up to our hostel we discover that it really doesn't exist anymore and I blame the lonely planet and all it's scam warnings for ever making me doubt our poor tuk-tuk driver.

Since we took the fast boat we are in early enough to kick start the Cambodia leg of our trip with a journey out to the killing fields where just 20 years ago anyone and, it would seem, nearly everyone was exterminated and buried. It's a cheery way to say hello to a country but essential viewing that brings it home that something like that has happened in my lifetime.

We're still in Phnom Penh. It's not the prettiest town and it has precious few sites, something I think will be repeated throughout Cambodia. Everything here is about Angkor Wat. It's on their flag and it's their national beer. There really is little else to keep the tourists here. So tomorrow we head up to Angkor for what I firmly expect to be the absolute highlight of my trip. Fingers crossed.