My favourite new experience in Cambodia and Vietnam was seeing how many people can fit on a moto (motorbike).

In that part of the world, people don’t really ride motorbikes, rather a local kind of scooter or “step-through”. Katie says there’s no age limit to riding them in Cambodia, as long as your feet reach the footrest.

And yes, the whole family will fit on a moto. Very usual to see babies and children sitting in front holding the handlebars. i love it. In Vietnam the children wear helmets .. in Cambodia not.

Traffic here is something else entirely. The one rule appears to be “Give way to bigger vehicles”. Lauli said it was like schools of fish in the sea; you swim with the group, go with the flow.

So far i have seen on the back of a moto:

• a huge live pig with its trotters bound
• whole cooked dead pigs (2 or 3)
• twenty live roosters, tied by their feet
• panes of glass, held vertical
• a live goat bleating pitifully as its enormous scrotum swung in our car window.

Desperately seeking comments:
Please share your “back of a moto” experience.

Thinking back to my time in Vietnam, one of the best things about travelling is the people you meet along the way ..

• Like the Vietnaustralian guy from Sydney who had had “such a boring time” returning home for his sister’s wedding;
• or the Parisien woman returning to her native Cambodia for the first time since 1974, to share christmas with her Son who’s moved to Sydney;
• the German art student who’s half Vietnamese, and studying in Saigon .. to get a better feel for her father’s culture;
• the UK couple, an entrepreneur and his partner, who sold up to go travelling, and flee the UK economy because it has changed shape .. into something more pear-like;
• a Dutch woman who takes a couple of 8-week-long travelling holidays every year.

And that’s not even counting the flocks of wonderful people in Phnom Penh, lovely exPats and aid workers, volunteers, NGO people, teachers and masterful communications officers!

Really it’s all about the people isn’t it

so tell me .. who did you meet in an exotic location?

photo credit: shapeshift

i’ve posted 17 of my favourite photos up on flickr. Selected from a range of ooh about 3000. Is 100 photos a day too much when you’re travelling? i don’t think so.

Some of these shots were taken without looking .. that is i would point and click in the rough direction of whatever i wanted to capture. Usually it would be terrible, but occasionally it worked.

Here’s a slideshow .. or you can look on the flickr site direct, and add comments etc. Go on.

Here at the floating markets of Can Tho, Vietnam, they have i’m sure the Biggest Grapefruit in the World. These things look like honey dew melons. They are big. And delicious.

Just spent 8 hours soaking in the magnificence of the Mekong Delta, with my own private boat captain. (My own company got a bit much, but the markets, the river and its ecology were all gorgeous.)

Occasionally the propellers get caught in plastic bags. So the drivers get the long paddle out of the water, peel off the plastic, and throw the bag back in the water.

The floating markets are so photogenic. i think the locals might get a bit sick of the tourists though. All taking photo but no buying the goods.

i’m trying to be unobtrusive with the mini-camera .. but there’s one guy with a seriously big lens. One of those tourists who doesn’t smile back when you smile at him. You’re only real if you make a good picture .. and even then you’re real in a fully objectified sense.

Anyway, he was the Voracious Tourist for me .. on whom i projected my own “negative affect” as Jude might say.

(Voracious Photos to come .. later on)

photo credit: -RS-

Note to Self: next time i’m about to take a 3 hour sea journey .. do not eat pig trotter soup from a street stall in South Vietnam; just in case the journey is extremely rough.

i had to take a photo of myself halfway across, to find out exactly how green my face was .. but i’m not publishing the photo here. Oh no.

Landed on Phu Quoc Island, a large island which has been sometimes Cambodian, but mostly Vietnamese . (Known as Koh Tral to the Cambodians the island is much closer to Cambodia .. and rumour has it they are not too happy about losing the island either.)

After a 20 minute moto trip, met up with Zeena and Phat .. and did my best to be good company for the evening we had together, but unfortunately i was horrible sick. The smell of their dinner made me go and have a lie down on the beach.

Oh dear.

The pig trotter soup tasted great, too! Really nice soup, and i had fun ordering it, with a fellow traveller from Holland. One of those classic situations where neither party speaks any of the other language.

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PS: i’m on a tropical paradise. Shutup michael. Stop your moaning.

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photo credit: JasonDGreat