Mighty Mekong, Hello Vietnam!

In the morning I try to get inside the royal palace, because I have heard that king Norodom Sihamoni holds a morning ceremony every day at 8am. He is single so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to go to in the front row. When I asked people why he is in his mid 50’s and still single the reply is somewhat unexpected – people think he is gay. I have to laugh aloud, I thought he would be considered something like a representative of God and instead people think he is just gay.

Unfortunately the palace is closed because it is a special festival day celebrating the new harvest and the prince has gone to give a speech to the farmers, so therefore he has skipped his daily morning palace ceremony and I won’t become the Queen of Cambodia. Wikipedia knows that it is ok to be a bachelor: “Sihamoni remains a lifelong bachelor and has no children, which means he does not have a direct successor. However, this is not a problem, as the king in Cambodia is selected by the throne council even when such a successor exists.”

I didn’t make it to the palace, but I hear that somewhere inside there is a room the floor made of pure silver and an emerald Buddha with a huge 25K diamond attached to his forehead. Feels unbelievable that such wealth can exist in this poverty stricken country, but all the money eventually ends up in the government and very little is given back.

We pack our bags and around noon head out to the riverboat. The next six hours will take us out from Cambodia to Vietnam. The Mekong river is a vast net of rivers and in six hours I think I have seen more Mekong than I ever thought I would see.The river turns to a delta in the end and we hop out of the boat in Vietnamese border city called Chau Doc.

In the border the signs and adverts change from the Thai alphabet’s circles and curves to the familiar Roman alphabet. The Romanised written Vietnamese was introduced in 1700^th century by a Jesuit and a scholar Alexander de Rhodes, for the use of educated elite in that time. It was not until 1954 that this Romanised script became the official written script for all Vietnamese. There are loads of accents the French style and it feels good to be able to read things again even if don’t understand anything. The price of water drops to half, because the water is produced locally in Vietnam. In Cambodia everything was imported, because so far there is hardly any local industry or factories. I didn’t see a single factory in Cambodia.

The name Vietnam means Viet people, meaning the people from the south, not from China. Vietnamese language is derived from Chinese, though the two languages are now miles apart. Vietnamese has six tones, which means that a word can be said in six ways and have six different meanings. There are also regional variations, to confuse matters further, so what one learns polite in Ho Chi Minh CIty can be quite opposite in Hanoi.

The transition between Cambodia and Vietnam is really interesting. Cambodia feels humble, quiet and sad. Vietnam is like one big fiesta. There is no sign of the war in the Vietnam side and there is this constant buzz around me. When I walk the streets of Chau Doc with my rucksack, little kids point at me, laugh and yell ‘hello’. A fellow American tour member with his big moustache gets everyone’s attention. No one in Cambodia or Vietnam has a moustache and people are genuinely curious about him. The Chau Doc central market is full of colours and happy faces, the triangle Chinese style hats are everywhere. Vietnam is loud and Vietnam is laughing. I drop my rucksack to the hotel and leave to a scooter ride up to the hills to watch sun set over the rice fields.

The last event of the evening is a meal on a floating restaurant. Vincent Connare would love Asia – his font Comic sans turns out to be as popular font in Vietnam menus as it was in Cambodia. So far almost every menu I have seen is written in that font. And as a bonus, very often the menu is spiced up with clip art with added drop shadow effects in the bravest ones. I decide to try out river frogs, because I thought Mekong river must be full of fat ones to eat. My frogs turn out to be tiny and there is not much meat on the bones. Note: fellow travellers, frogs are not worth the effort unless you are into gnawing little bones. Instead of Angkor beer I now get served Saigon beer.

The hotel has a wi-fi, but it is broken. “Internet is broken” tells the receptionist. Grrr…who broke teh Interweb?