Good evening and welcome to Sleepless in Singapore, episode 22, on Sunday the 16th of 2024. As it turns out, last week I have not told you everything about Vietnam. And so today we are going to start with the second half of that Vietnam trip and Ho Chi Minh City, where I experienced a lot and which I liked a lot. And then after that, I will tell you a little bit about Cambodia and maybe Laos before we read some Tom Sawyer. So please make yourselves comfortable, sit down, lie down, and let my voice be your guide to a restful night.

Ho Chi Minh City is a bustling city. There are tons of things to experience. There are tons of things to do. And for me, it started with arriving at the airport and then basically immediately, five minutes after getting a taxi, a scooter taxi, almost having a crash because the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City is probably at least in the top ten of the worst traffic anywhere. Anyway, I survived, obviously. It wasn't a bad crash. And I made it to my hostel, which was a back then wonderful little place, which name I have forgotten, but it was something like the Breakfast Club or something similar. It doesn't matter. It was a very nice hostel.

I arrived and there was a communal dinner going on. Somebody was cooking Vietnamese food and I was immediately invited. I was sitting with the other guests. We had beers. We were having spring rolls. It tasted quite nice. And I was sleeping in a bunk bed upstairs and then all the way on the top there was a little rooftop, like a bar, I guess, a rooftop bar where people could hang out. And I have fond memories of that place, actually so fond that a couple of years later I went back to the same place when I took Christian and his cousin to Vietnam to show them what I like so much about Asia. We stayed at the same place and we enjoyed it very much again, just as the first time.

The second day, after a very typical hostel breakfast, I believe, you know, white bread and Nutella and peanut butter and jam, I left very early for a day trip or half-day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels are these tunnels, the whole tunnel system, where during war times the people were hiding but also transporting supplies, food, weapons, I don't know, all kinds of stuff like underground. And it's a tunnel system, or at least it was a tunnel system that is many, many hundred miles long in total, and apparently it was a big problem to find all the people in these tunnels during war times.

A lot of those still exist, and think about it what you want, but the Cu Chi tunnel place where they take the tourists is almost a little bit like an amusement park, which obviously with the historical background of a terrible war having happened there sounds a little wrong, but then again, who am I to judge? I guess it brings money to the country, it brings money to the people. A lot of people are employed there as guides and there's an entrance fee for foreigners and all that. So we went and saw the Cu Chi tunnels, and you can go down through the tunnels, which I did for the first tunnel, and then the second, and even more so the first, I'm sorry, the third tunnel. They were so tiny and so narrow that you had to like lie flat on your belly and somehow go through there. And even though I'm usually not very claustrophobic, it kind of scared me to do that, so I didn't do it.

But you could go down the holes, and there's still pictures and videos I'm looking at right now where I'm going down this little hole barely bigger than my body. And then they put like a little lid on top of you and then they put the leaves that are lying around there on top of it. And then you cannot see anything. It looks like perfectly fine forest ground. And then you come up. And yeah, it's interesting. I guess it's a fun experience. I don't know if it's supposed to be fun, but maybe I'm also overthinking everything. I don't know. It was an interesting experience.

Aside from the tunnels, there's also a bit museum-y atmosphere. You can see these old cars and old trucks and old tanks and old weapons. And I guess you can learn a bit. It's probably not very deep, very 100% accurate everything, but you can learn a little and I guess a little is better than nothing. And then a very, very weird thing. I believe I've mentioned that before. You can, if you walk like a couple hundred meters further, you can shoot the original weapons they were using in the war. I did not do that. I find that very weird. But again, who am I to judge? It works. They make money with it. And maybe if that helps a couple of people to survive or have a better life, then so be it.

After that morning or that day at the Cu Chi tunnels, whereby the way I just remember looking at the pictures here, I think it was the first time I met my friend Juan, who somehow for the last, how long is that? Seven years, stayed my Instagram buddy who likes a lot of my stuff. And I like a lot of his stuff. And even though we only met back then, back there at the Cu Chi tunnels, and I believe later on at the airport for a couple of minutes, even though it's a very brief and you would say superficial encounter we had there, we are still friends on Instagram. And sometimes we talk and sometimes, Hey, you're here, Hey, you're there. So that's one of the friendships or one of the acquaintances that lasted for many, many years and it's not very intense or it's not very deep or anything, but it's always very nice. And every time I travel, I get a nice comment from Juan or every time he travels, I'm asking, Hey, where are you? I hope one day we'll meet again. I'm sure one day we'll meet again. We almost met again last year in Canada. He's living in Toronto, but he wasn't around when I was in Toronto. So I hope next time, I'm sure next time.

Alright. After these tunnels, the Cu Chi tunnels, I went on a food tour in the evening, like a local food tour. I'm not a hundred percent sure how I found that guy. I believe someone of the hostel might have organized it for me, but there was this guy, Vietnamese local, very young, or at least it looked very young to me, super nice. And the food tour was, he took me on the back of his scooter and navigated all around Ho Chi Minh City. And he showed me that local food is more than spring rolls and soup. And I had an amazing time and I will try to figure out his name. I think I might have it somewhere. And I will try to post a link for the podcast description.

This guy, the first thing he took me to was a Vietnamese pizza place where out in the street, we had this Vietnamese kind of pizza, which is very different from like pizza from Italy, from actual pizza. It's not tomato based. The dough is a little different. Everything is quite different, but doesn't matter. Was very delicious. And it was also very interesting to have that in some kind of back alley, sitting on the tiny chairs with random people. Nobody was understanding what I was saying. And I guess I also didn't understand much, but we got along great. It was a good start.

And then we went on to, I think five or six more places. I don't think I ever ate that much in one evening. We went to a barbecue place, Vietnamese barbecue, which is a little like you imagine. And obviously we had another soup, but then we also went to a night market. And if you've been listening before carefully, you already know how much I love these local markets, especially in Asia, but theoretically everywhere where you have a giant amount, a giant variety of fruit and vegetables and other stuff like flowers. I remember that market because A, it was particularly nice and colorful and B, because we went to a flower shop, not to a vegetable shop. And we bought a lotus plant and I was like disassembling it and peeling out the lotus seed, I guess. And we ate the seeds from that plant from the flower shop. In Vietnamese, I think it's called hát xin. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right though, because apparently in Vietnamese, there are even more ways to pronounce an A than in Chinese. Later on that evening, the tour guide, he explained to me there's a, a, a, a, a, or probably entirely different. But yeah, I remember there are a lot of different ways to pronounce the A. Maybe somebody of you knows Vietnamese and can let me know and then I will happily either fix it in the next episode or just add it to the comments or to the description of this podcast.

After that market, I went to a place where I could make my own rice paper for the spring rolls, like completely from scratch, you somehow mash the rice and you add water and you build a paste and that paste is going on a plate with holes and then you steam that somehow and then in the end, if you do it right, which I didn't, of course, but if you do it right, you get a very nice, very thin, flat piece of rice paper and then you can dry that and then you can use it to make your spring rolls or anything else you do with the rice paper. And after the rice paper and after, I think, another stop where we had some kind of fried noodles, we went for dessert, which was in the street again and I had these durian ice cream puffs. And also I met the nicest local Vietnamese girl who was somehow sitting next to me and somehow noticing that I was taking a selfie of me eating durian puffs, ice cream puffs, and she offered to take a picture and I don't know, somehow we ended up with a picture of her feeding me durian and it was a lot of fun before we had to part ways and go back at, I think, almost midnight after a very, very long day.

And then the next day I had to get up again even earlier because I had booked a Mekong River, a Mekong Delta boat tour. And that tour I have repeated, I think, three times by now and it's the most touristy thing you can do in Ho Chi Minh City or maybe even in the south of Vietnam. It's very much the same every time, even though they pretend it's very individual and all that, but once you repeat it a couple of times, it's hard not to notice that it's very, very similar every time. But even though it's very touristic and even though it's very the same every time, I love these tours. I don't know why, but it's always fun, it's always exciting, it's always interesting to bring your friends and do that.

It's basically a day tour. You start very early in the morning and then it's a two-hour, three-hour bus ride to the river area. I don't know if you know, but if you look at a map, the Mekong down there is not like one giant stream. It's like many, many smaller streams, some goes left, some goes right. So we went down there for a couple of hours in the bus and then we went around in the boat by we, I mean, there's a bunch of people from the hostels and a whole bunch of other tourists. And we were going there in these mangroves with the smaller boats, you know, these boats where they have a car engine on a stick in the back, same as Thailand. And we went to different places where they produce different stuff. There was the lacquer factory or manufacturing where they, with very high effort, produce this like very black lacquer stuff out of all the natural materials they can find around. And then we went to a place where they had a lot of snakes, I'm not sure why, but they had snakes. And I remember having this giant, I think, python around my neck on a picture.

And then there are shops, of course, where you can buy all kinds of like knickknack. And there are a lot of sweets. I remember there was this place where they do this like caramelized almonds and stuff like that. And they wrap it and you can buy it in bulk even. And of course, there's always some kind of cooking course you can take. So for the second time in two days, I made rice paper, still not much better than the first time. And we made spring rolls and we grilled something and then had a nice lunch. And then there is some kind of local performance where the locals sing and play instruments and perform a dance. And yeah, even though it doesn't sound super special, and even though I already mentioned this like what every tourist is doing that goes to Ho Chi Minh City, I still always enjoy it and I can recommend doing it at least once.

You get wonderful pictures. It's obviously very different from anything we know from Europe or from the Western world. It's very colorful. People are very nice. Everyone is posing for pictures. I brought my camera back then, my old Fuji camera, and I have hundreds of pictures literally of people looking at me or posing for me or sometimes just being candid that I took with the camera like a little boy eating, a little girl playing, a woman playing some instrument, some random old guy with a nice red hat with a golden Vietnam star, just sitting there and eating. And the second they notice I take a picture, it's like they are happy. Always all the time that happened, people just look up, they see you with a camera and they're like, "Take a picture of me." And also they're not asking anything for it. It's not like, "Take a picture of me," but it costs five bucks. It's just like everyone seems to be genuinely enjoying to be photographed there. So yeah, amazing time in Ho Chi Minh, even though it was only two days.

And then after Ho Chi Minh, I was flying to Cambodia to see the Angkor Wat in Siem Reap. And that was also amazing and I had also tons of fun because I arrived at the hostel and I was a little tired. I slept a bit and when I woke up, nobody was there anymore because I don't know, I guess everyone was out or sleeping or who knows. I was alone so I opened up Couchsurfing to see if anyone is around and there was this girl Fortunata who, I don't know, texted me or I texted her, I don't remember. And we met at a cafe around the corner and we talked for a bit and then I noticed there is another guy on Couchsurfing asking to hang out with us. And I looked at the guy and I saw he's a local guy and he already texted in the chat that he has a car and he can bring us places. And I looked at the profile and he said he's a taxi driver and I thought that's all like a little bit weird. And I told Fortunata and she said, "Oh, you're so German." Fortunata, by the way, she's living in Italy but she has South American roots and I guess she's not as careful and not as uptight as Germans are. So she said, "Hey, why don't we just meet him and see where it leads to?"

So I say, "Okay." And I text him, "Okay, we are here in that cafe. How about we meet there?" And five minutes later he texts like, "Okay, I'm here now. You can come out." And I say, "Why don't you come in because we're still having a beer or whatever here." And he's like, "No, no, it's better you come out. I don't want to go in there." And again, I thought there was sketch and I voiced my concerns and my travel buddy said, "Don't be so German." And we went out and he said, "My car is here. Please get in." And I again thought, "Huh, why wouldn't I get in a car in a foreign poor country with a man I've never seen before in my life?" So we went in the car and the guy said, "I'll bring you to a good place." And he drove off and he also stopped talking. And we were in the back, both of us, because that's where he wanted us to sit. We were in the back of the car and didn't know what's happening, but the guy was driving.

After 10 minutes he was driving out of the small city of Siem Reap and there was basically nothing anymore. There was desert. And we go on driving into the desert. And once more I said, "Listen, Fortunata, don't you think this is a little weird?" And I asked the driver, "Hey, where are you bringing us?" And he's, "Oh, wait, wait, surprise. It's a good place. Don't worry." I'm like, "Okay, why would I worry?" And so we drove into the desert for like half an hour and then out of nowhere, a big place pops up, like a house. And he parks the car, he says, "Here we are." And we get out and we walk through the gate to the yard and there are, to my left and to my right, there are girls standing there, dressed nicely, maybe a little frivolous. And I thought like, "Huh, the guy brought us to a brothel. Why would he bring us to a brothel with another girl?" But nobody said anything. It looked like decent enough outside in that yard. There were tables. So he said like, "This is the best restaurant I know around here. Let's eat." And we were sitting at the table and another one of these quite sexy dressed girls is coming and asking us what we want to eat. And I ask for a menu. And the taxi driver friend says, "No, no, we don't need a menu. I know what's good. I'll order for you." And I thought, "Okay, so that's probably the scam. You're going to pay like hundreds of dollars for food."

I looked at Fortunata. I thought about voicing my concerns, but I had learned by now that I may be a little bit pessimistic and very German. So I didn't say anything and I thought, "Well, worst case that can happen is they take the hundred dollars." In Cambodia, pretty much everything is US dollars. They take my hundred dollars and that's all I have anyway. So the guy orders like a ton of food. We had two whole fish. We had all kinds of vegetables. We had some grilled stuff. It looked all actually very nice. And he asked me what I wanted to drink. And I said, "Oh, I'll have a beer." And he told the lady. And then a minute later, another lady, again in some interesting bikini kind of style, comes up to our table carrying a bucket with like, I don't know, maybe 10 bottles of beer and ice. And she puts it on one of these little side tables and she pours me a beer and then she stays there. The whole time we were eating, she was standing there whenever I was drinking a little bit of my beer, whenever my glass was like less than two thirds, she was topping it up without saying anything, without talking to us, just like looking pretty and pouring beer whenever I took a sip out of the glass.

And then eventually I had to use the bathroom and I walked to the bathroom and I'm standing there. Sorry for the very descriptive image. I'm standing there at the pissoir and I'm holding what I have to hold to aim properly. And suddenly I feel two hands on my shoulders and I turn around, still like right in the middle of peeing, and there's a guy behind me, like an official waiter, personal guy, and he's giving me a massage. Like a totally not indecent, everything fine, but he's giving me a shoulder massage while I am standing at the pissoir, at the urinal and doing what I do there. And I thought, okay, so that's that.

And then when I was done and when I had washed my hands, he's handing me the paper towel, like in a fancy hotel or in a fancy restaurant, sometimes the people hand you the real towel. And I dried my hands and I stopped wondering about that night and I walked out and I was ready to pay my $100 and see where everything leads. We didn't want to leave that late because the next day we had a very, very early morning trip to Angkor Wat.

So I asked for the bill and the bill came and it was $12. Two whole fish, grilled meat, a ton of vegetables, at least three or four beers, a Sprite, impeccable service, $12. And then when I wanted to pay the $12, the taxi guy said, "What are you doing? We are friends. We split." And he's paying $4. So that's that. And I thought there must be something coming up. I could not believe it and I thought, "Okay, he gave us a nice meal, a cheap meal, and on the way back he's probably going to take our kidneys or I don't know."

Turns out he's driving us back, dropping us off at the hostel, saying, "Bye-bye. Was nice to meet you. Next time you're in Cambodia, please call me. I'm so glad I made friends." And that he didn't talk to us at all, even when we tried. He's so glad to have made the friends. And then he drove off. And then Fortunata looked at me and she said, "See, you're so German. Trust people. Nothing will happen."

That story I won't ever forget. The next morning, super early, we met again, Fortunata and two more people from the hostel. And we went with a bus or a car to Angkor Wat. You have to queue a bit, but it's not terrible. And then Angkor Wat is as impressive or even more impressive as you see on the pictures. It's gigantic. There are many, many different kinds of temples.

I don't know much to tell you about it because, honestly, you have to be there to get the feeling and to, well, feel the impressiveness of all that. And I don't know much about the history or the facts to make this interesting. So I can only recommend to you, you should go there. It's amazing.

I think the thing I liked the most was not the newer, nicer temples, but this older ones where they filmed Tomb Raider with this like trees, you know, that giant trees with a giant roots you can see above ground. The one that looks a little bit like Temple Run images. Very, very cool, very nice pictures.

And then, but of course that's a personal story, what was even cooler and what probably was a very little bit, a very little part of what changed my whole life now is that at lunch or at breakfast, I don't know, it was still in the morning-ish, I was meeting another girl, Hema. And I mentioned her before in my coming to Singapore story, but this is where I met her. We got to talk and she seemed very nice. She had a bit of a difficult year behind her getting divorced from her husband or being in the divorce. I don't remember the details, but we got to talk and we got to share our food and we made plans that after the temple sightseeing stuff, all of us together will go out in the evening.

And in the evening, I think first we went to that place called, I don't know what it's called. There's a place in Cambodia, in Siem Reap, where a French chef is preparing food almost entirely made from insects. We had these fried spiders and we had cockroach, water cockroach. We had a whole bunch of very not typical food. And the chef himself, he was very interesting because he was sitting with us for a while at the table and he told us that he's not doing that for the attraction. He's doing that because he really believes that in the future we have to do that because there is not enough protein to feed the whole world from Angus beef.

So he told us while most other street vendors, that happens in Asia, right? That you can buy a bunch of fried crickets or in Bangkok, in Khao San Road, you can buy all kinds of crap. And that is pretty much what it is, he told us. It's like the weird cockroaches they find in the side of the street. But his cockroaches, they are specially raised for food and they are good quality and they taste better. I didn't think they did, but he says they are like a different level.

He actually said this is not an attraction, not a snack, not a weird thing. This is a nice restaurant with very strange ingredients. And I can at least agree with the second part, yes. So we had a lot of fun there. We took millions of pictures of us eating all kinds of very weird stuff. And then we went out and then we met another guy, I think Hao, something like that, Chinese guy who was super fun and who coincidentally years later came to Berlin. And because we also were still Instagram friends back then, he asked me if he could stay at my place.

And I wasn't around, but I told him where the key is or the code to the door. And he stayed at my place for a day or two. And yeah, just another side track of what happens on these longer trips when you travel alone and meet people. And then also the same night, maybe next night, we met Karen. Anyway, we had a great night. We had a couple of drinks. I think everyone was super tired. And I don't even really remember all the details of what we did.

We took a bunch of pictures. There's this like walking road in Siem Reap where all the backpackers go to drink. I guess we went there as well. And in the end, when we said our bye-byes, Heimar said, "Hey, you should totally come visit me in Singapore. I have a big place. You can stay at my place. Come see me." And honestly, I thought like, "Yeah, that's like the typical stuff you say when you meet and then it never happens anyway." But if you paid attention to episode three or whatever that was of this podcast where I tell the story why and how I came to Singapore, well, this was the very beginning of it. Heimar inviting us to come over.

I think that's probably a nice end to the story and also a nice end for this episode. And then I will tell you about Laos and what came after the next week. And for now, let's do some Tom Sawyer.