For the second Eid holiday of 2008 I went with a Coworker to Vietnam and Cambodia for a week and a half. The first two days were around Ho Chi Minh City including a trip around the Mekong river delta in a boat. It was a nice mix of city and countryside between the two. One of the more interesting sites in the city was the "war remembrances museum" which could have been more appropriately named the "American atrocities museum". After the better part of an hour looking at pictures and stories of napalm, destruction of villages, Agent Orange and other warm and fuzzies, my friend and I were hoping that there could be someplace where we could let the locals beat us a little so we could feel better. Despite the rough history between US and Vietnam people were generally very friendly to us the whole time we were there. The picture below is on one of the small river passages on the Mekong.
Another of the sites that we saw around HCMC was the Cu Chi tunnel complex. There they had preserved part of a network of tunnels that the Viet Cong had used in the war to move around without detection by the US Army. The network at this site had over 200 km of tunnels at its peak. In addition to the displays of the different types of booby traps and ways that they could sneakily shoot the Americans they also had a shooting range where you could shoot some of the old guns. Since I had already shot AK-47's and M-16's I decided to go for the big one, a fully automatic M-60 machine gun. Note that my ear protection is an old set of stereo headphones with the cord cut off them.

In Hanoi we met up with a friend from work in Houston who had recently started a job in Hanoi. We got to see a bit of the SE Asian expat lifestyle when we met up at a swanky hotel for drinks with some business associates and he then had his driver take us back to the house where his cook had dinner waiting. Seemed like a pretty nice deal to me. After dinner we headed out to see the town. The bar we ended up at was designed in a Wild West theme with wood paneling and wagon wheels everywhere but most of the surfaces inside had been covered in aluminum foil (presumably on the occasion of Christmas). To top it off they had a Vietnamese band playing cover songs on a stage in the middle of the place. Classic. More seriously in Hanoi, we also visited the Hoa Lo Prison or “Hanoi Hilton” as it was called, where John McCain (flight suit below) and other American POW’s were held during the Vietnam War. According to the exhibits, they were treated very well and allowed to do arts and crafts, and play sports in the courtyard. Something tells me that if you asked someone who lived through it they might have a different story.

After a couple days in Hanoi, we went to Halong Bay for an overnight cruise. The name literally means "bay of descended dragons". The limestone formations jut out of the water like the back of a sleeping dragon. This is the view from a cave called Surprise Cave that we stopped at during our cruise. Our boat crew made delicious seafood for every meal with as much crab, ship and fish as you could want, all very spicy and delicious.

After Vietnam, it was off to Siem Reap in Cambodia. Siem Reap is the town very near to the Angkor temple complex, home to many temples dating from ~1100 AD. The one behind me is Angkor Wat and is one of the best preserved of the temples at the site. The whole complex covers many square miles and takes several days to explore. Fortunately we had a great guide that showed us around to all of the highlights. Unfortunately, this included sunrise from the top of a temple after a long night partying in Siem Reap, stairs have never felt so steep.

One of the coolest things about the Angkor temples is how the jungle has grown around them over the centuries. Trees spring forth from walls and roots arch over doorways making for beautiful scenes. Our guide was quick to point out that Tomb Raider was filmed near this spot and Angelina Jolie had been in town for several weeks. The weekend before we arrived there had been a half marathon around the site where several thousand runners ran around the streets and paths through the temples. There seemed to be restoration crews from all the countries of the world working to rebuild or stabilize the ruins and keep the jungle from reclaiming them. Sadly the biggest enemy of the temples was not time but the soldiers and thieves that destroyed or cut the heads off many of the statues during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

All the rest of my photos online at:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=5p42e5n.1awvzgk3&x=0&y=vf5ulm&localeid=en_US