We spent a few days in Phnom Penh, took a TucTuc out to the mass graves of the killing fields and spent a day in an orphanage a few kilometers out of town, played with the kids and watched them learning english. We took a bus to Battambang, we arrived there in the early afternoon and hardly made it out of the bus before the employees of 2 different hotels started to circle around us and tried to convince us to stay at their place, battling against each other as if there's no tomorrow and left us in a state of shock squeezed in between them ( maybe we were still under shock from the fact that our bus hit a cow earlier on our trip). We explored the surrounding of Battambang by motorbike the next day, driving through dozens of villages with wooden houses on stilts, visiting different temples, buddah statues and the "killing caves" , another place where the Khmer Rouge left marks of their dreadful deeds. We took the bamboo train from one village to the next, which was pretty funny, especially when another bamboo train showed up from the other direction and one of the trains needed to be ripped apart and taken off the railroads. We bought a boat ticket to get to Siem Reap on Friday, but to get to the boat we had to survive 2 hours on the back of an pickup-jeep first, 14 people on the back with all their luggage, sitting squezzed in on the metal frame of the jeep while we made our way over bumpy field - roads that turned into "gorges" now and then. The boat trip was very relaxing after that, althrough we had to stop once as the propeller/engine got stuck in the mud because of the low water level. People got on and off at their floating houses or from their little paddling boats and we took a package of mangos or other things a few houses down the river now and then. Eventually we made it to Siem Reap, originally we wanted to start early today to see Ankor Wat, but we changed our plans as it was impossible for me to leave the radius of 3 meters around the toilet last night. Anyway, we made it to the landmine museum today - to see some mines is one thing, to get showed around by someone who lost a limb and his siblings through a mine and to hear his story is another , - one that makes you keep your breath and fall silent.

We spend a couple of days at the beach of Mui Ne, we didn’t leave the sunloungers in our little resort-place except for a short trip to the sand dunes or the market in the next village ( or to get another mango-coconut fruitshake, of course! ). On tuesday we finally made it to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City, did lots of shopping and spend our evenings in the GO2 eat – bar in district one, where you can meet very obscure people. A trip to see the Ch Chi tunnels in the north of Saigon was a must, off we went with millions of other tourists to stumble over the terrain, to squeeze our big bums into one of the original entrances ( and to pretend that it was easy to get them back out ) and to creep through a little part of the tunnel network (one that had been enlarged for fat western tourists, of course- still a strange feeling ). We decided to go to Cambodia by boat, but to get there we had to go to the Mekong – delta first, we spend a whole day on different buses and boats, which was pretty exhausting. The next day we started early to see the fish farms / floating villages on the rivers of the Mekong delta, before we jumped on a boat to cross the border, while kids waved at us from the shorelines. After the day on the boat and 3 more ours on a bus we finally made it to Phnom Penh yesterday evening. We started to explore the city today, went to see the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, the Independence Monument, the russian market and the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, a former school which was turned into a gruel prison during the Khmer Rouge regime.

We had the most bizarre random night that evening when we walked home from a bar through the empty quiet streets of Hoi An...we saw light in one of the houses and a group of young vietnamese people sitting on the floor of their living room - one of them playing the guitar - the first thing that crossed our mind was karaoke, so we stopped and asked the complete stunned group if we could come in, few minutes later we sat on their livingroom floor, singing jingle bells ( the only song we all knew) and sharing rice wine, and two hours later we left their home to stumble back to the hotel, exhausted from wild dancing to the Bonny M - video/cd they came up with. We spent the next 2 days visiting the Cham Towers in a place called My Son and enjoying the beautiful old city of Hoi An - dozens of tailorshops where you can ( and will ) buy new tailormade clothes. We took the overnight bus to Nha Trang, the place where all our cameras disappeared, which is a pitty, as I had a hurrendous video of the vietnamese and the english chick singing the german song "Pack die Badehose ein", something that should have been saved for the future generation to dwell on. We did a boat tour/ island hopping over there and celebrated the loss of our cameras in the sailing club, as we had a texican to pay for us - HELL YEAH - before we raced each other back to the hotel in cylos. We went on to Dalat the next day- not a place to linger around for long, althrough it seems to be quite popular with the vietnamese for a kitschy honeymoon. We hired a motorbike with driver to take us around Dalat to see waterfalls, pine forest (where some dogs chased us back up the hill when we took the wrong way and ended up in someones property) , pagodas, temples and buddist monasteries. As we didn't want to hop onto the open tours- cattle bus again, we stuck with the bikes.. and I squeezed in between noodle (my driver) and teddy (my backpack) the next day to make our way down to Mui Ne. We stopped several times along the way to have a look in one of the hundreds of greenhouses around Dalat where they grow vege's and flowers and to see some farms along the way growing coffee and mulberry ( to farm silkworms), we had a look into a silkfactory aswell (tried a cooked silk worm, little better then the raw witchity grub I had in australia) and stopped at a family owned rice-noodle "factory" ( which was basicly a basin to soften the rice and a mincer to turn the rice into noodles ) and another place where they made dried sweetpotato slices. After 9 hours on the bike we finally made the 250 k's to Mui Ne, spotted the ocean again with dozens of fishing boats (and even more little swimming nutshells to supply them). Today we lingered around the beach to relax our sore bums, but tomorrow we'll head towards one of the sanddunes in the surrounding to see the sunrise and to do some more sandboarding.

We jumped off the train in the morning and took a bus straight down to Halong Bay, where we boarded one of those Junk boats to cruise around the bay and marvel at dozens of islands, caves and little floating fishing villages. We stayed overnight on the boat and headed towards Cat Ba Island in the morning, hiked around the island, climbed up the peak and did a kayak tour to Monkey Island ( I didn't tip over this time- that's a first!!) in the afternoon, which left us pretty exhausted in the evening. We planned to go out for a drink or two, but we ended up having a karaoke night with some japanese guys - the mic went around the table and when this crazy vietnamese guy snatched it away to sing one more french chanson we entertained ourselves with magic tricks ( the japanese we've named "dangermouse" had a pretty amazing one, he could make 2 coins out of two coins, better then letting a bottle of beer disappear under the table) - HILARIOUS!!!!!! We left Cat Ba Island the next day, headed back to Ha noi once more to catch the overnight train to Hue. We were joined by a german doctor and his vietnamese cousin, which we had met on the Halong trip - which means we now have our private emergency surgeon and a vietnamese travelguide/translator/bargainer in our team - could we have done any better???? We tried to make our way out of the train station, which was difficult because you had to squeeze through hundreds of people who tried to convince you to stay at their hotel, it felt like being a popstar for a day. We ended up right across Thu's Cafe on THU wheels, which became our "base" in Hue. We went on a motorbike trip with Thu's brothers the next day to see the the surrounding of Hue... ricefields, little villages, people producing insence sticks, temples with praying monks, royal tombs, pagodas and the citadel- a fantastic trip. In the afternoon we got some bicycles and cycled around Hue once more, just to experience the afternoon traffic on a bike, turning left on a street with several lanes (crossing several lanes with oncoming motorbikes and other vehicles) was quite an adventure. We left Hue this morning and took a bus to Hoi An, which seemes to be a lovely relaxed place, I just loved walking through the old city this afternoon.