El really hates bus journeys
You can sense a definite distinction between Cambodia and Vietnam as soon as you go over the border: Vietnam is much richer and things like the quality of tarmac on the road, and the scooters that people ride all point towards a society which is in a very different economic place. Laos is poor, true, but they farm or fish or make their living. In Cambodia the people seem much more desperate for money. In Vietnam they just realise how much there is to be made from the tourists (and make money they do!).
We had a reasonable bus journey (just 6 hours) from Pnomh Penh to Ho Chi Min City (previously Saigon) and arrived just after lunch. We debated whether to stay but there's not a lot to do in HCMC other than go to War museums and visit the tunnels used in the Vietnam War (here called the American War).
We manged to get an overnight train ticket for that evening and spent the afternoon wandering round, drinking an very expensive cup of coffee while overlooking HCMC's "Notre Dame" Cathedral, and ended up at the War Remnants museum.
The garden is full of US warcraft: planes, tanks and the like, and contains mainly photographs of the Vietnam/American war. One gallery shows photographs taken by journalists who were killed during the war (all nationalities, including Vietnamese) and other shots from various sources. What made them really compelling is that instead of a random picture of corpses with a generic caption, they had captions likie: this is Mr John Doe (or whatever), who lived in this village who was killed aged 30 at 4pm on July 1978. It really personalised the images and made for quite haunting reading. Unlike the killing fields at Pnomh Penh - implemented by their own Government, this was real war: horrific and brutal.
It's built like a tank...er, hang on...
A few beers later, we'd shaken off the sadness and caught our sleeper train to Nha Trang, a bit further north up the coast where we hoped to meet up (again) with our companion from Koh Tao, Carolin.
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