I booked a Mekong Delta tour including a boat ride to Phnom Penh as my exit from Vietnam. I do not like booked tours. Like the Cu Chi tunnels tour (which felt very much like Disneyland--400 people every day come to see the guerilla tunnels and primitive weapons the Vietnamese employed in their wars, first against the French colonialists and then against the Americans), I was just whisked from one sight to the next, fighting other tourists for photo opportunities, sitting in plastic chairs at tourist cafes to partake of whatever gimick this stop has to offer (weaving, coconut candy making, honey wine or honey tea, traditional music and fresh tropical fruit, floating fish farm). Everywhere the same coconut carved nicknacks--tiny tea sets, salad tongs, forks and spoons, beautiful chopsticks, funny monkeys--and woven silk. I look and admire, but do not buy. A few locals that obviously were not benefiting from the tourism begged from us. Made me sad.
The boat ride from Vietnam to Cambodia was much less crowded than the slow boat to Laos and while many of us chatted, I missed the culture-building experience from before. I spent much of the ride with my head buried in a companion's Cambodia Lonely Planet. When I did finally look up (because the driver asked us to move forward to re-distribute weight as our boat was running aground in the narrow side channel we were chugging up to traverse the Mekong delta), I noticed we were boating through a rural area, much like the fishing villages along the Mekong in Laos. Children bathing and playing in the river laughed and waved and shouted "Hello!", women washed clothes in basins on the shore, men carted rock and sand from boat to shore or mended fishing nets. I was very happy to see this openess and friendliness again after the hustle and bustle of HCMC (Saigon) and the tour of the Delta.
Somehow, subsistence farmers in rural areas seem better off than poor families in urban/sub-urban slums. Farming and fishing families are close to their land. They still sit together for meals and the television does not operate 24-7 because they no not have enough electricity. They make things and share stories. This looks like culture to me. Children in the cities seem slower to laugh and smile. Jaded. It doesn't feel healthy to me.
Arriving in Cambodia and docking to change to a bus for the last hour of the journey, poverty like I have never seen stretched along both sides of the horrible road. My bus mate laughed--poverty? Try India...Some day I will, but for now, this streetside ghetto takes the cake. Corrugated metal shacks, trash everywhere, dirty holey clothes...wow.
I thought pothole dodging was among the national sports in northern Vietnam...seems they train for the olympics here! Potholes are 6-15 feet wide and long, up to a foot deep...many stretches of street are not even paved. I wonder what Phnom Penh has in store.
