Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos

I spent two-and-half-months traveling in a state of involuntary silence. I just couldn't write anymore. No music, no lyrics, no blog posts. Nothing. After working on 'The World Is Mine' for seven months the project had finally taken its toll on me. So instead of constantly thinking about a new song or the next post I focused on arranging the songs with the guys in Hamburg. And on making the best out of being reduced to the contents of my wallet in Vietnam, on being sucked into the Cambodian expat community, on riding through the soothing countryside in Laos.

As you can imagine, I was extremely glad to not be traveling alone at the time. After all it was Lea who kept reassuring me that not spending countless hours hiding behind my laptop screen, and enjoying the sh… out of our travels instead, was actually ok for a change. Plus we were in Cambodia when the frustration peaked. We worked on the heavenly island of Koh Ta Kiev, we were constantly surrounded by our new found friends, we dealt with this travel agency losing our passports (and then recovering them a few weeks later) and we made it through the tourist-hell of Angkor Wat. All good distractions to keep me busy.

Let's start at the beginning though. Looking back on our travels in the south of Vietnam I'm sorry to say that the region will go down in our travel history as our least favorite spot in Southeast Asia. No matter how hard we tried, things just didn't work out for us there.

The locals we met were grumpy and unfriendly and interacting with them was the weirdest thing: in Ho Chi Minh City our couch surfing hostess Dung and her husband were the only ones who actually talked to us while the other people living in their flat (Dung's relatives and tenants) treated us like air. We had waiters leaving half-way through taking our orders. We had a lady at a dry cleaners who wouldn't give us back our money even though she clearly hadn't washed our cloths. We had a hostel owner denying our request to shorten our stay in his guesthouse (despite our timely cancelation) and putting us in the middle of a heated e-mail argument between him and HostelWorld. We had a 17-year-old dude almost throwing us out of his father's hostel only because he thought that we didn't like it there - an assumption rooted in his poor English skills rather than anything else. It will probably not come as a surprise when I tell you that during major parts of our time in Vietnam, we didn't feel wanted or welcome at all.

Except for the excellent coffee and the daily Baan Mi (stuffed Baguettes) there was nothing there that made us feel good about the place. The so called 'sights' mostly consisted of communist and anti-American propaganda. The much anticipated food turned out to be surprisingly boring and tasteless, especially when bought at smaller street stalls. And the beach towns had been bought by Russian investors who had done a solid job in ruining them by building Soviet style resorts and charging exorbitant prices for everything.

We solved this situation like the white people we are and threw some money at it. As soon as we had booked a two day motorcycle tour at our hostel in Dalat the locals there turned into very friendly and super helpful hosts. And since we had a very good time riding through the Vietnamese countryside on our way to Mui Ne, spending all that money turned out to be a solid investment. Plus we realized that while moving through the country on those (way too) touristic main routes was really not our thing, having our own vehicle to leave the beaten tracks as often as possible was the way for us to unlock the desirable facets of traveling Vietnam. And we couldn't help but to regret the decision to not buy and later resell our own motorcycle.

In the end we even made the most out of staying in the beach town of Mui Ne by riding the ten kilometers to the kitesurfing beach on our scooter every day. And by trying to bribe our way out of being arrested by the police for driving without an international driver's license (the police man felt so sorry for us and the seven dollars we had in our wallet that eventually he let us of the hook). And by meeting Babsi and Lukas, a lovely couple from Austria, whom we spent a very memorable New Year's Eve with: the first part consisted of our hostel owner, his self-made rice spirits and his karaoke microphone, the second part featured a beach bar with a dance floor and a DJ who was surprisingly savvy about Western techno and house music.

We headed for Cambodia in the beginning of January and it's probably save to say that we weren't too excited. After all this was our fifth month in Southeast Asia and we expected to encounter a lot of familiar and therefore unspectacular sceneries and situations (jungle plants, bamboo huts, ancient temples, scooter rides, rice with different toppings, I think you get the gist). Luckily we were in for a big surprise.

First of all, we just loved Phnom Penh! We spent two days there falling in love with the city's rough exterior and it's broken charm, with its underground culture and its lack of modern features, with its vibrant local life and its friendly people. Besides, the city hosted the best museum we had visited on our journey. We spent half a day at Tuol Sleng Genocide museum, the former S21 prison established by the Khmer Rouge. The documentation and audio guide were excellent and brought us much closer to the victims of Pol Pot's murderous regime than was good for us.

It took a few beers and the weekly jam session at Showbox, a bar frequented by locals, expats and tourists alike, to put back a smile on our faces. That is at least until I smoked two hits of this Indian dude's joint and went blank for the rest of the night. I seriously don't know what that was and how that guy was able to walk, talk and ride his motorcycle with both Lea and me on the back. What I do know and remember is that I felt like a zombie and didn't enjoy myself at all.

Next to learning about the deeply troubling history of the country in Phnom Penh, any traveler in Cambodia will visit the temple ruins of Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, there was nothing too great about that experience. I mean, sure, the sheer size of the temples was impressive. And so were the stone carvings, the shaded hallways and the mystical atmosphere of their setting in the jungle. But visiting the complex was ruined by a ridiculous amount of tourists pushing through food stalls and souvenir stands in what can only be described as some sort of assembly line. Seriously, I have never in my life seen anything as weird as an endless line of busses crawling through an area loaded with ancient structures at walking speed, each bus stopping at the major temples for ten minutes to spit out a travel group armed with cameras, selfie sticks and tripods, people physically fighting over the perfect spot to take a picture before pushing back into to the busses to go to the next photo background in slow-motion. We were so glad that we had rented a scooter and thus had the freedom to visit some further away and quieter temples at our own pace.

Regardless of these experiences, being a tourist in Cambodia didn't even come close to shaping our notion of the country as much as us actually establishing some sort of a life there. It started when we managed to sort out this Workaway gig in the last minute and found ourselves traveling to the south of Cambodia right the next morning. Even though we originally wanted to stay for a maximum of two weeks only, four weeks later we were still working at Kactus Resort on the beautiful and remote island of Koh Ta Kiev.

The place was a paradise: white beaches, crystal clear water, lavishly green jungle, and, my personal favorite, glow-in-the-dark-plancton. The feeling of swimming through a sea of a thousand shimmering lights under a black sky with a thousand stars is hard to describe. It was a breathtaking experience that even the people at Disney and Pixar couldn't have made up in all it's cheesiness.

Blending in with all that beauty the bamboo huts of the Kactus Resort were hidden in the jungle overlooking a picturesque bay. Lea and I worked there for about a month, mostly covering bar and service shifts. The job was amazing, especially when looking at the work-to-perks-ratio: we got accommodation, three superb meals a day and as many drinks of any kind as we wanted. In exchange we worked five hours a day. And the work was great, too; it reminded me of how much fun I have always had when preparing and bringing well-made food and drinks to people. Working and living on Koh Ta Kiev certainly made me question the whole office-job-hamster-wheel-situation I had left behind in Hamburg.

Still, as awesome as many aspects of this arrangement might have been, we mostly learned that even the most beautiful places will be spoiled if the people and the group dynamics don't work out. On first sight, things were peachy. Everybody was constantly smiling and kissing and hugging, smoking joints and drinking shots in the middle of the day, drawing Henna tattoos on each others arms and backs and legs and giving each other massages. But it didn't take too long to realize that there was a ton of unresolved issues bubbling under the surface. The whole thing seemed to be a trickle-down-kind-of-situation. It started with the owner, a French guy who occasionally melted down on his guests and his staff, and went all the way down through the managers to the volunteers.

The lowest point we witnessed was the boss throwing a plate of eggs with a fork and knife at the 12-year-old Khmer kid who worked in the kitchen when the local staff had forgotten to bake bread the night before. Then there were the managers who seemed to be under a lot of pressure and overwhelmed with tons of tasks and responsibilities. I was especially unlucky as one of them had this idea in her head that I was working and thinking too slowly, giving me a hard time at every possible turn. None of the other volunteers ever had to rake the entire area, fetch water from the ocean to fill the flushing buckets in the toilets or scrub the entire bar with bleach. Two weeks into us working at Kactus I had an episode of sitting in the most beautiful surrounding and feeling so pressured and undervalued that I could have bolted right there and then. I didn't, of course, and for our last week, the mixture of me being able to handle the situation better, and the manager in question easing up on me, led to us having such a good time that it eventually become hard for us to leave.

However. If nothing else, we learned that paradise is not just about the beauty of a place, but just as much about the people there not talking behind each others' backs, not sweeping things under the rug, not making assumptions or at least discussing them openly. The impact of the people on one's perception of a place can hardly be overstated. They can (temporarily) ruin the nice places and just as well increase the value of the shitty places (like we felt it had happened in Mui Ne in the south of Vietnam).

The only good thing about this complicated situation was that it didn't ruin the relationships between the volunteers. On the contrary, it actually gave us a never ending string of topics to discuss and brought us all closer together. I spent most of my time nurturing the bromance I had going on with Mike, a descendent of British colonialists in Zimbabwe, whom I bonded with over doing Yoga on the beach, talking about philosophy (Look at the cup in front of you. Now imagine everything is one and you are one with the cup.), hitting our private gym (a huge tree that had fallen over on the beach) and taking the resort's surf board out to paddle into the world's most amazing sun sets. And both Lea and I became very good friends with 19-year old Canadian Peanut Guillaume and slightly older Swiss henna queen Camilla. For the first time in nine months we had enough time to actually get to know the people we liked. And in this case our time together even got extended as right after leaving Kactus in the beginning of February we all spent a few days in Kampot together. Our time there was the most pleasant haze of hangouts by the river, outdoor water parks, concerts by local artists and regular food at this one family's restaurant shed, all curtesy of Camilla and her boyfriend Randy (they had been living in Phnom Penh for a few years and knew the place like the back of their hands). Plus we managed to meet with Katrin, a friend and former colleague from Hamburg who was traveling Southeast Asia at the time too. So things could have been perfect. If only there hadn't been this thing with our passports hanging over our heads...

As soon as we left Koh Ta Kiev and set foot on the mainland we learned that this visa agency had lost our passports (which we had given them so that they would process our visa extensions). Their story varied depending on the person we talked to: apparently they were stolen along with 40 others either from their offices in Phnom Penh, or from the bus they used to send them there. So we spent an exciting week in Phnom Penh running back and forth between their offices, various Cambodian Government buildings and our Embassy. And just when we had filed all the paperwork necessary to get new passports and visas the agency miraculously found the lost passports in an undisclosed location. If that had anything to do with one of the other claimants calling his buddy at a local newspaper, who then published a pretty unfavourable article about the agency and this incident, will probably remain their secret.

Be that as it may, we were pretty thrilled and went to Showbox once again to celebrate with Camilla and Randy. Little did we know at that point that this wasn't the end of the story… After all the agency hadn't processed our visa extensions yet. And we were stuck in Cambodia until they got those finished. At least we convinced them to send our passports to their Siem Reap office so that in the meantime we could go and see Angkor Wat. But when we wanted to pick up our passports there it turned out that they hadn't sent them yet. And they clearly tried to stall us, covering for yet another delay.

At that point the whole thing stopped being fun. Until then we hadn't worried too much. And we had listened to another claimant who lived in Cambodia for eight years. He had encouraged us to stay calm and polite and smiley, to take selfies with the uniformed men at the immigration office and to listen patiently to the excuses provided by the agency. After all, in Cambodian culture problems seemed to go away a lot quicker if the overall atmosphere was positive and if those in fault felt like they wouldn't lose their faces over the matter. But when we got stuck in Siem Reap for another two days things got a little louder and a littler uglier than before. And finally, that seemed to give the necessary push. We got our passports back, extended Visas and everything. The visa and travel agency, however, was shameless until the very end. After all the hustle they had caused us, they still tried to rip us off when we wanted to book a bus to Laos. It goes without saying that we don't encourage anyone to use their "services". Ever. So if you ever go to Cambodia, whatever you do, don't do it via VLK Royal Tourism!

Compared to our time in Cambodia our travels in Laos were uneventful and non-spectacular. We stayed on Don Det, one of the 4000 islands in the Mekong on the border between Cambodia and Laos and the place was very pretty and calm. We got a peek at the capital Vientiane and left on the next bus. We did the motorcycle loop through the gorgeous mountains around Thakek. We stayed in Luang Prabang and found it to be one of the nicest cities we had seen up until that point. We went to the mountain village of Nong Keaw where our travels came to a complete stop when I got sick and didn't leave our Bungalow for a few days. We were lucky that our friend Guillaume (the Peanut we had met at Kactus) came to visit us there so he and Lea could go on all sorts of hikes together.

But all in all that was mostly it. I mean, don't get me wrong, Laos was amazingly beautiful, the people were incredibly friendly and riding as well as walking through its nature was soothing and pleasant and, well, simply very nice. But at the same time visiting the country felt a little blunt and tasteless. Uneventful. As I said. And non-spectacular.

In the end the thrill of traveling came back a little sooner that we had expected. We had booked a flight from Hanoi to the Philippines and therefore had to go from Laos to Northern Vietnam, at least at some point and least for a little while. But since we hadn't had the best of times in Southern Vietnam we were not sure if we wanted to go back there for more than a few days. But when Guillaume showed us his pictures of Cat Ba Island and the Ha Long Bay we decided to ignore my cold and the weather forecast for that region and embarked upon the three day journey from Nong Keaw to Cat Ba Island via the border town of Dien Bien Puh and Hanoi.

We ended up staying there for three nights, the absolute maximum since we had to catch our flight from Hanoi, hoping for the weather to clear up. It didn't - and so we saw Cat Ba National Park and the Ha Long Bay hidden behind a veil of grey and desaturation while we were freezing our butts off in our wet cloths. Anyway. The scenery was nothing short of spectacular. And the fog and the rain gave it a certain mystery and melancholic spookiness that turned our visit there into a rather unique experience.

And then, finally, we embarked upon the last Etappe of our three-months-journey through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Unfortunately we were only left with one-and-a-half days to discover Vietnam's buzzing capital Hanoi. But thanks to our couch surfing host Hoa we got a lot more out of these few hours than we could have hoped for. In the evening she took us to a local restaurant together with the ten girls and guys from the English class she had just finished teaching. It was a win-win situation: we gave them an opportunity to practice and show off their newly acquired communication skills, while they introduced us to all sorts of weird local foods (fried pork skin, various kinds of mussels and quail eggs with half-developed birds in them, all served with a variety of dips). Then we had a few rounds of a local coconut spirit. And then Hoa gave me the keys to her scooter so I could drive home. I still can't believe that she trusted a foreigner she had literally just met to make it through the insanity that is Hanoi's traffic. Luckily I was in good shape after riding motorcycles in pretty much every place we'd stayed at. And so I even enjoyed weaving through the sea of cars and buses, being surround by at least 153 other scooters at any given moment.

Back at Hoa's place we discovered that her dog Pumpkin had lost control over her bladder and thus peed all over the mattress we were supposed to sleep on. No big deal, we put the mattress on the balcony and slept on a blanket on the floor, Iran-style. A little more upsetting was the fact that some of it got on Lea's backpacks. So now, some three days after leaving Hanoi and flying to the Philippines, we're still enjoying a subtle stench that follows us everywhere we go. It's probably time to get some hot water and detergent. And to do it soon...