myrainasia

After a month long hiatus (from blogging, not traveling) I think I am ready to start again. This is basically for the 10 faithful followers who have asked me to keep writing.

I write now from Dalat in the Vietnamese interior. At the moment I am obsessing on visa issues. I bought the expensive 3-month multiple entry visa in New Zealand. It is good from March 1 through June 1. Unfortunately, when I got to Thailand I decided to head north instead of east and then continued on a slow tour through Laos and Cambodia. Thus, I didn’t enter Vietnam until May 10. This left me 3 weeks in Vietnam of which I have now used up almost 2 and have not even made it to the center of Vietnam. Supposedly it was easy to get a one month visa extension, but I have discovered that that applies only to the 30-day tourist visa. So now I am working at getting a 2-week extension to my visa. Oops. Either I will have my extension in a few days, or I will be scooting out of Vietnam faster than hoped.

During my “writer’s strike” I spent about three weeks in Cambodia which I loved. Here’s the quick update:

Siem Reap- home of Angkor Wat. Spent 4 days there, 3 at the temples. Take a thesaurus, look up magnificent or unbelievable, and then just apply all of the words and you will have a semi-apt description of Angkor Wat. Also got my first intro to Cambodian traffic which makes being a pedestrian challenging to say the least. Siem Reap is mostly a tourist town which is a bit sad. The temples are managed by the Vietnamese (under a 99-year lease) and I am not sure how much of the money filters down to the Cambodians. There are about a zillion hotels in town, with another million under construction. It is hard to imagine how all of these hotels make money. I am told there are a lot of package tours from Asia. This is even sadder since it means that the tourists fly in on a foreign airline, pay for a foreign-owned hotel, take a tour package to view the ruins and then leave. Cambodia is worth more than a pit stop.

Gotta run- my Easy Rider will be here soon. Will pick this up.