Right now I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Can Tho, Vietnam and all around me kids are smoking and playing some kind of futuristic online dancing computer game. Cambodia was crazy but Vietnam is something else altogether - we're in the south right now, in the Mekong Delta, which is supposed to be quiet and slow compared to the rest of the country but after Laos and Cambodia even this town feels frantic, bustling, fast and electric.
Our last mission in Cambodia was a strange one. We spent a couple of days in Kampot along the south coast and got to visit the Bokor Hill Station - once a top-of-the-line French holiday outpost complete with luxurious art deco hotel and casino, now an abandoned ghost-town. It's a spooky place - since the French got run out in the 40's its been a battleground several times over, with the clifftop hotel providing an ideal strategic fortress for various versions of both Cambodian and Vietnamese government and guerilla armies right up to the 80's. Bloody, bloody history there.
To visit there now is like living a horror movie. You can walk right through the shells of the hotel, the casino, the post office and a catholic church perched right up this spectacular hill, and needless to say it's pretty eerie experience. The day we went up there were even thunderstorms, as if the atmosphere wasn't quite horror-movie enough.
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