We were looking forward to exploring the Mekong Delta on our way to Cambodia, but for the second time in Vietnam, a bicycle breakdown rerouted our plan. Halfway through the second day after departing Ho Chi Minh City, I suddenly felt a telltale rhythmic bump in my rear tire. It was now my turn to deal with the same ordeal Matt had gone through a couple of months prior in the Yunnan. The cantilever brakes had worn distinctive grooves in my wheel rims over time, making the rear one thin enough crack. We knew our best bet was to return to HCMC where we had recently had our bikes maintained by Van, the owner of Saigon Bike Shop. 

Ironically, by turning back, we discovered what we had been seeking but failing to find: a backroad path through small farming and canal communities that make up the heart of delta life. Unfortunately, that path soon dumped us back on the same type of busy road we had been trying to get off of. Of course, the highway was the most direct route in to the city and we had little time to spare before our Vietnam visas expired. We decided the 50 or so miles we endured was the most unpleasant stretch of road we have ever ridden, made even more stressful by the gradual widening of the crack and bulging of the tire. Yes, we could have taken transport, but at the time it seemed a bearable distance to ride versus the inevitable hassle of putting bikes on a bus. 

Van built two new wheels for my bike no problem, and on the last possible day for us to leave the country without penalty, we cycled from HCMC to the border crossing at Moc Bai, thus completely rearranging our route through Cambodia as well. Originally, we had hoped to cross at the most southerly border checkpoint and travel along Cambodia's coast before exploring inland. Now we were headed to its capital city of Phnom Penh first, then turning south for the coast. We held a new appreciation for the simplicity of Cambodian visa procedures after dealing with the ridiculousness of visas in Vietnam. With indefinitely extendable visas issued on our arrival at the border, we crossed into only our seventh country in fifteen months of travel.

The following day we were taught an unforgettable lesson about Cambodian roads. In Vietnam, the traffic necessitated always taking the smallest road possible, which in Cambodia equates to the unpaved dirt tracks any time one leaves the main highway. It had rained quite hard the night before, so it was actually a mud track, but still rideable, at least initially. But in the rice fields beyond the village, the mud suddenly turned to thick sticky clay, rideable only for the short distance it took to completely fill up my fenders and jam up the wheels. Unable to move, I dismounted and tried to push my bike, but it wouldn't budge. I dug enough clay out of the fender to at least turn it around before it got stuck again. A bemused local woman working in a nearby rice field came over and told me in broken English that the way was no good and I had to turn around, which I had clearly already done. I agreed. She told me again. I agreed. She repeated herself, and I agreed again. This went on for a while. When the helpful woman finally felt she had informed me enough times not to keep going, she turned her attention to helping me dig out clay and push my bike a few feet at a time. Meanwhile, in keeping with the fact that I am always the tester of road conditions from my position in the front, Matt stood at a safe distance from the mud pit and watched the fun unfold.

You would think this defeat would be enough for us to return to the main road, but instead we took a different fork in the road that looked promisingly less muddy. It was all good until the track sloped downhill and simply disappeared underwater for as long as we could see. We resigned ourselves to following the highway in to Phnom Penh, thus learning that a main road in Cambodia is equivalent to a side road in Vietnam thanks to its much lower population density and less developed economy. Besides, the highway provided the entertainment of watching endless overloaded minivans and tuk tuks pass by, crowded to a degree we had not yet seen in Asia. The back hatches of the minivans were open, with luggage and bags extended beyond the bumper of the vehicle with ropes. People sat on the cargo with their feet dangling out the back, others sat among the things strapped to the roof. Apparently the road was exceptionally busy as people returned to Phnom Penh after spending a holiday with family in the countryside.

Vendors lined the road with snacks for the multitude of travelers. At one major intersection, we were beckoned to stop and buy crickets fried with chilies. I bought a portion as a courtesy for the photo opportunity, but of course we tried them as well. The flavor was generally undesirable, likely not from the cricket itself but from what I suspect was rancid oil it was cooked in. Conveniently, we amused the passengers hanging out the back of a van when we handed the baggie of crickets off to them with motions of distaste just as the vehicle slowly accelerated from the side of the road.

Before arriving in Cambodia, several people told us independently of each other that "Cambodia is chill." Arriving to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's "hectic" capital city, this certainly appeared to hold true. The pace of life, the traffic, the nature of the people were all quite mellow in comparison to HCMC. This chillness was most evident in visiting a few of the city's markets where we really had to work hard to get someone's attention while shopping around for a few items. Having recently taken care of a slew of travel errands in HCMC and no visa deadlines to constrain our itinerary, we had the leisure of exploring Phnom Penh more thoroughly than we normally do in large cities.

We made up for never visiting the Grand Palace in Bangkok by spending an afternoon at Cambodia's Royal Palace complex with temples of similar design, as are the other wats we have since seen in Phnom Penh and beyond. While the coronation hall and silver pagoda were memorably beautiful, we were most intrigued by an aged mural facing the courtyard and extending the length of all four barrier walls. Apparently it depicts the Indian epic of Ramayana with Cambodian adaptations.

Sadly, Cambodia's street food scene was also "chill", as in nearly nonexistent. After the vibrant selection in Vietnam that we ate almost exclusively from, we struggled to find equivalent restaurants that sufficiently filled the void. While the local markets had some food stalls in the spirit of street food, our biggest success was a place called MC Coffee that became our go-to breakfast. Iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk was served just as it was in Vietnam, but instead of fried egg banh mi sandwiches, we had the Khmer classic of strips of fried pork and omelette served over rice with a side of pickled veggies.

The night market was a fun scene even though the selection of food focused on skewers of over-processed meat that was deep-fried on demand. A square of inward facing food stands surrounded an area spread with woven mats and narrow walkways to access them. Large groups of friends and families sat in a circle on the mats, piles of shoes at the fringes. We did our part by sampling an Angry Birds mystery meat skewer and finally "getting around" to trying a duck fetus egg. Ok, I ate the boiled egg with a partially developed duck fetus inside while Matt documented. The flavor was fairly similar to a normal hard boiled egg, but obviously the variable consistency and textures were not. It's definitely one of those foods that looks way worse than it tastes though. And then there's the mental bias too.

No visit to Cambodia is complete without recognizing the gruesome and still too recent history of the Khmer Rouge's rise to power and the consequences of it that Cambodia is still dealing with today. We began our education of this element of the country at the Tuol Sleng Museum, also known as the Genocide Museum, and previously known as Security Prison S-21 to the Khmer Rouge. It has been preserved as the largest of many detention and torture centers that had the agenda of extracting false confessions of anti-revolutionary activity from those accused by the Pol Pot regime. It is a particularly sobering experience to walk through the very rooms where prisoners were locked down to metal bed frames in isolation, or shackled by the ankles to each other along a common metal bar, all with original equipment on display. It was also strange and somewhat telling to reflect on how easily the format of a standard school was converted into a prison. Rows upon rows of concrete rooms only required the additions of metal bars in the windows and barbed wire enclosing the outdoor hallways to make the repurposing complete.

Once the accused was sufficiently tortured to confess to their made-up crime, they were transported to a place now known as The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek for mass execution by crude and brutal methods. We paid our respects to this site as a stop on our first day cycling south out of Phnom Penh. A measured but articulate audio tour effectively sets a quiet respectful tone as visitors take in the mounds, holes, bone shards, and even tatters of clothing that all serve testament to the thousands of innocent Khmer who were killed here, from infants to elderly. A plot to maintain absolute control through absolute fear devised by a deranged and paranoid man, but a cunning man who first came to power by appealing to the impoverished and disenfranchised. The ranks of the Khmer Rouge swelled when rural Cambodia was at its most vulnerable, having been devastated by years of "secret bombing" by the good ol' US of A. 

The influencing factors, the circumstances of instability, or any other context to set the terror of the Khmer Rouge in, does not make it seem any more intelligible. The best we can do is to honor the memory of the victims and respect the lessons of history with bringing the intention of peace into all aspects of our lives.

With the significance of these historical sites on our minds, we continued on and soon had no choice but to be absorbed in the joys of contemporary Cambodia again. We detoured a short distance to Tonle Bati, a scenic lake popular with Phnom Penh folks on the weekends. As such, stilted and thatched roofed wooden platforms extend along one side of the lake, each with an attendant who will bring you overpriced food from a nearby restaurant should you choose to relax the day away on their platform. Or, Matt and Casey style, you can rent the platform for $1 and make your own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while watching orange-robed monks cruise by in a motorboat. With the sun low in the sky, we thought about how this would make an ideal spot to spend the night. The platform owner declined to give us permission, but it seemed that she offered her home instead. We weren't quite sure, so she called over a younger lady with some basic English and she offered her home as well. We didn't know what to do then, since it seemed rude not to go with the first lady who offered, but the younger girl became more insistent we should go with her. 

We followed Dara back to her family's home and picked up her BFF Sokny, with more confident English, on the way. Their tall stilted house was quite new, but still very modest by Western standards, especially considering the lack of any substantial furniture and possessions inside. The heart of the home was actually underneath the house, where hammocks were strung up adjacent to large day bed bamboo platforms and an outdoor kitchen. We sat down there for a while to meet the rest of the family and a few curious neighbors, then the girls offered to take us to see Ta Prohm and Yeay Peau, both historical temples from the Angkorian era. Despite a soccer game wrapping up in the courtyard of the temple complex, the otherwise quiet and deserted grounds at dusk lent an eerie feel to exploring the site.

In keeping with all of our homestay experiences, it had to get confusing at some point. Sokny told us to order off the overpriced menu from the lake and she would bring us dinner from the restaurant. We weren't too keen on paying those prices, but she explained that we didn't have to pay, or could pay "as you wish." However, the family had not prepared enough food for us. Fair enough, we were very unexpected guests. Then Dara and she returned with the ingredients of what we ordered and cooked it for us, while we never saw the family eat. After a brief period of improvised socializing after dinner with the friendly family, Sokny politely informed us it was time for bed and they settled us in to the parents' bedroom, complete with a mosquito net and fan. We did need to deploy our camping air pads though as the woven mats provided weren't quite enough cushioning from the wooden floor.

Early to bed, early to rise holds true in Cambodia as well, so the family was already doing chores and yard work when we made an appearance at 6:00am the next morning. We were offered noodle soup and coffee, which we accepted, so the girls zoomed off to pick it up at the restaurant for us. Oh...Oh well. After we ate, we said our goodbyes and gave them enough money that would certainly cover whatever the ambiguous food expenses may have been. 

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience that gave us a bit of insight into a Khmer rice farming family's daily existence in a Cambodian village. At least on the surface, it's not so different from rural life in other Southeast Asian countries. Kind of like Southeast Asian beer, the nuances of flavor may vary slightly, but at the end of the night, it's all same same, and not so different. That said, we were pleasantly surprised by a relative multitude of decent stouts available in Cambodia in addition to the usual lagers. This is a trend that other countries would do well to adopt!

Still on our way to the coast, we next stopped at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center where various animals, many of them endangered species, have been confiscated from poachers or abusive owners. While we rode around the extensive grounds on our fully loaded bikes, we saw many animals we could only dream of being lucky enough to see in the wild, such as sun bears, a leopard, and a new favorite species of monkey called a pileated gibbon. Better still, we saw some that we did not even know existed, like the binturong, which Matt described as "a rat of unusual size." After observing Khmer group after Khmer group obnoxiously harassing the animals in their enclosures to get them to do something "exciting", we realized the scope of the challenge that organizations such as Wildlife Alliance face in this country. If these were people coming to see animals, supposedly with an awareness of why the animals were there, and THIS was how they chose to treat them...More frustrating still was the lack of supervision to ensure a truly peaceful existence for the animals. Perhaps they could charge locals a bit more than 50 cents and hire some visitor supervisory staff or mandatory guides. After all, the well-behaved foreigners had to pay ten times the local rate.

After the wildlife sanctuary, we had intentions of checking out a historical hilltop temple, but with the late hour of the day, we decided to push on to the town of Takeo. We settled in to the nicest hotel room we have ever paid $6 for, and went out to some food carts along the riverside. We shared a spicy green mango salad and gave the skewer thing another chance, but the grilled chicken wings were as meatless as they looked, just skin and flimsy bones. As we were finishing up, a downpour came out of nowhere and we took shelter under the tarp of another vendor along with some sociable Khmer guys who invited us to join their slightly soaked dinner featuring more beer than food. We enjoyed toast after toast of watery beer on ice until the rain abated enough to make it back to our room.

​Once dried off, we took a several hour nap before awaking to an alarm at 2am. We had an important FaceTime meeting with a class of Coloradan high school seniors, but not just any high school seniors. Our sister-in-law, Lauren, teaches a leadership course and incorporated our journey into the preparatory curriculum for the students to design and actualize Capstone Projects. We were honored to have the Before It's Gone Journey be an example of "the ultimate Capstone Project" for the students, even if we don't always feel that way about it ourselves. The students had great questions that really made us reflect on our journey as well.

Leaving Hoi An, we stopped at My Son ruins, a small complex of temples dedicated to worshipping the Hindu god Shiva. The site is thought to be the longest continuously inhabited place in Indochina as an integral part of the Champa kingdom that ruled what is now Central Vietnam from the 3rd to 17th centuries. It was designated a UNESCO site in 1999, despite extensive damage caused by US bombing of the Viet Cong hiding out there during the war. We noticed bomb craters were almost as numerous as the crumbled buildings glowing warmly in the evening light.

We were determined to get back into the hills on the Ho Chi Minh Highway, so from My Son we turned inland on one of those “short cuts that’s really a long cut” roads that Matt always digs up on his various route finding apps. It may not have been such slow going if the dirt road had not turned to puddles and mud in a heavy rainstorm the night before. Matt really prefers that I ride ahead of him, so I was the one to discover a deceptively deep puddle with some loose rocks on the bottom, enough to send my top-heavy big-booty bike careening into the mud. Of course, I went down with it and Matt safely documented from afar. Ok, he did get one boot muddy too while helping to extract my bike and me from our predicament.

A few more days of hot, hilly riding (what’s new?), and meeting some real characters along the way, brought us to the likeable city of Kon Tum. We encountered genuinely friendly people and lots of good street food, the two most important aspects of our travel at this point. That evening the streets echoed with deep drum beats while groups of adolescent boys roamed the streets and took over intersections for lion dances and fire-blowing performances. While watching one troupe perform in the courtyard of a mansion in exchange for a generous donation from the occupants, we learned that this was only the lead up to the actual Mid-Autumn Festival the next day.

Not wanting to miss out on even better festivities, we decided to stay an extra day in Kon Tum. The following night was more of the same lion dances, but with the addition of teams of performers snaking long, flowing dragon puppets through the streets. That alone was quite a feat since so many people turned out to watch from the seat of their motorbike that the streets were packed and intersections were at a stand still, but this appeared to just be part of the tradition. The festival is largely a celebration of children, who are given gifts of lanterns and fun masks to wear. In Kon Tum, bands of teens had crafted their own large-scale lanterns, the ever-popular minions included, which they paraded above the crowds like a low-tech Macy’s day parade. We also bought some of the traditional moon cakes from temporary stalls that reminded us of fireworks stands for 4th of July. The dense moon cakes were filled with a sweet paste and a hardened egg yolk in each half when split in half.

We continued south, overnighting in another fun city called Buon Ma Thuot, and passing by scenic Lak Lake, then arriving late in the day at the junction for Hwy 722, an alternative route to Dalat. The first ten miles of our ride the next morning took us on a gentle climb through coffeeland and poor communities, but the road was in solid shape even with a fun rope-pulled boat ferry crossing on a small river. Then it abruptly turned to dirt as it steeply ascended a hill that formed one side of the broad valley. The road soon narrowed to a deeply rutted footpath, which in and of itself would have been rideable except that it was made of a treacherous layer of extremely slippery compacted clay. We barely maintained enough traction to push forward and even then the wheels slipped out from underneath our bikes a few times.

How could this be the correct road? Our route apps insisted that it was, so I googled “Road 722 in Vietnam” to see if we could get more information on what lay ahead, optimistic that this was just a temporary inconvenience. Sure enough, a blog entry popped up written by some motorbikers who had similar ambitions as us, but sought out this road from the Dalat end. It took them seven hours to go 15 kilometers, mostly pushing their bikes through really rough conditions. And they were going downhill.

We had provisions to camp, which would be a given if we continued on. But after only covering one and a half miles in two hours and not really having any fun, we realized the scope of the adventure. It would be a real feat of endurance with some moments of misery to make it the 40ish miles with 5,000 feet of elevation gain to Dalat. Or we could turn around and take the regular road to Dalat, thus having more time to see more of Vietnam. As though it was sent to put an end to our indecision, it started to rain and the leeches came out. So... We reached the same town where we had started that morning in the pouring rain. We were muddy, soaked, and disheartened from not being hardcore, but still happy to be off that hellish trail marked as a highway on multiple maps.

Highway 725 proved to be a real road, even recently expanded and improved, so the 4,000-foot climb up to Dalat went quite smoothly. While the cool mountain climate requiring long-sleeves (or a winter jacket if you are Vietnamese) was indeed a nice relief from the heat, we were not particularly drawn to the city itself. The real charm of the area is in the outlying attractions, such as waterfalls, which we were not exactly motivated to ride to on the one rainy day we had for exploring. But since we had worked so hard to get up there, we had to at least see something exciting. This took the form of “The Crazy House”, a fanciful creation of a radical architect who seemingly sculpted buildings out of cement rather than constructed them. Dalat’s famed kitsch is popular with Chinese tourists, whom we followed on vine-shaped staircases that traversed steep rooftops while basking in the irony of a “natural theme to inspire people to be closer with nature” made entirely out of shoddily-painted concrete.

We actually much preferred the 100 Roofs Café, a lesser-known alternative with the same core concept as the Crazy House. We stumbled upon it by chance and almost passed it by since the tiny storefront did not reveal the vast multi-floor maze of dark rooms and narrow passageways inside. It would have been perfect for Halloween. We got an intimate tour from the daughter of the visionary architect, who is--not too surprisingly--friends with the creator of the Crazy House.

In the afternoon, we took shelter from the rain in Dalat’s extensive market, sampling strawberries and wine, local products that thrive in the otherwise pine-forested hilly terrain. A nice stop at Pongour Falls on the way out of town the next day rounded out our Dalat experience.

Next we were aiming for the one and only Ho Chi Minh City, more commonly called Saigon by the people who live there, albeit with a little bit of trepidation. We were able to take back roads for most of the way, rapidly descending into the heat once again.  Our route protected us from the worst of the traffic, but gazing across hazy valleys indicated we had not escaped HCMC’s notorious air pollution blowing inland. Out came the pollution masks for the first time since… I don’t know when.

Having arrived to Saigon first through an industrial zone and shipping port, we were pleasantly surprised with the feel of the city once we got into the heart of it. Referred to by numbered districts a la Hunger Games, we headed straight for District One and found an alley-based neighborhood with quieter guesthouses than the nearby backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao, lazily known as PNL. The volume of traffic was certainly intense, but having already been subjected to two months of Vietnamese-style driving, it was not nearly as intimidating as we had been led to believe it would be. The one issue we really had was motorbikes honking us, as pedestrians, when they opted for the sidewalk over the road. Really? Where would they prefer us to walk, in the middle of the road?

After a few days of taking in Saigon, we concluded that it was like a Vietnamese version of New York City: real, gritty, edgy, bustling, essential to find your niche, but also possible to find anything you desire, such as… craft beer! Hands down the best craft beer we have sampled on this journey, we could have visited Pasteur Street Brewing Company every night if the ol’ travel budget allowed. It came as no surprise once we learned the brewmaster was previously brewing at Upslope in Boulder, Colorado. I was smitten with a passionfruit wheat and Matt loved the perfectly hoppy IPA.

Besides the best beer, we also found the best bike mechanic of our journey thus far. Van claims that the well-stocked, fairly-priced Saigon Bike Shop is only his hobby; his bread and butter comes from customizable bike tours of the Mekong Delta and beyond. We spent a day pampering the bikes with everything they needed except a good cleaning, then turned our attention towards various errands that I will spare you the details of in the city where you can find anything you desire. Including fresh-baked cream puffs and McDonald’s soft serve. Not that we would know from firsthand experience or anything…

One important errand worth noting was meeting up with Tieme, an ex-pat who cycled his way to Saigon from the Netherlands and had some amazing stories to tell over dinner one night. He also happened to hold the key to our future of travel: a non-expired ATM card. We had contacted him through the Warm Showers network to see if he could receive it for us. Little did we know that would involve tracking it down at an obscure post office location to be picked up in person. Dinner was the least we owed him for this essential favor!

All of our errands left us little time for sightseeing in Saigon, but we did make it to the hard-hitting exhibits of the War Remnants Museum one afternoon. In addition to an explicit overview of the American-Vietnam War, it also had an important display of the ongoing effects of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnamese society, and a moving collection of photographs taken by photojournalists from all sides who perished in the conflict.

We took comfort from this gravity with some seriously amazing street food, perhaps the best we have encountered in Vietnam, if not this trip, and that is saying a lot considering the time we spent in Thailand. It took a while for me to come around to Vietnamese food, but when I did, it was wholeheartedly. Bun thit nuong was a personal favorite of ours, made up of grilled pork over cold vermicelli rice noodles, garnished with cucumber, a selection of herbs, and mildly spicy fish sauce. Yes, folks, my husband loves things covered in fish sauce these days. Proof that travel is life-changing!

We could have spent another week in Saigon, ideally not running errands, but our visas were rapidly approaching an expiration date and we still had the whole Mekong Delta to see.