By bus to the fifth country of my journey - Cambodia

A few relaxed hours at the beach of Mui Ne, an uncomfortable bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City, a war museum that made me think, a tourist boat trip through the Mekong Delta, the exciting border crossing to Cambodia, the realization that the nightlife in Phnom Penh is sleepy compared to that in Ho Chi Minh, Hoi An, or Hanoi, a reunion with my parents after over two months in Angkor Wat, two days of bed rest after food poisoning, and finally, a beach like in a travel magazine in Otres near Sihanoukville.

As I write down these situations, experiences, and places I have visited, I realize how much I have done since my last entry, how often I have packed my backpack and how many hotel rooms I have seen in the last eight days. This is probably the difference between vacationing and traveling. While you tend to stay longer in one place on vacation, when traveling - especially with a backpack - you have the urge to experience as much as possible. After three days at the beach, the call of hiking in the mountains and exploring one of the Asian metropolises, after three days in the city or in the mountains, the call of the beach. It is the thirst for adventure that drives you. This luxury of getting to know so many places and cultures outweighs the sometimes internally arising effort of packing the backpack anew almost every day, not knowing where you will sleep the next day, and constantly engaging with new people and circumstances.

In retrospect, I have to admit that Vietnam has not captivated and fascinated me as much as Myanmar, India, or - as far as I can judge after five days - Cambodia. Too many tourists, too few authentic impressions, greed for money that motivates locals to interact with tourists rather than genuine warmth, huge hotels and developed beaches instead of secluded bays. Even in the deepest hinterland, the level of development is much higher than in the tranquil Myanmar, and one feels far removed from originality and remote life. And even the often highly praised Vietnamese food did not convince me, but rather - at least temporarily - made me a vegetarian again, after we were served fish and crocodile instead of what we ordered in Mui Ne, and a crispy dog steak instead of chicken in the Mekong Delta :-(. What really touched me about Vietnam is the war history deeply connected to the country. It was only in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), after visiting the famous War Remnants Museum, that I became aware of how close in time the events of the Vietnam War actually took place, that today Vietnamese restaurant or hotel owners and American tourists shake hands, who were fighting against each other only 40 years ago. The photos exhibited in the museum were shocking, I was not aware of how much suffering the Vietnam War brought, how many innocent people were tortured and had to die, and how many villages were destroyed. Unthinkable that on today's dream vacation island Phu Quoc, there was a torture camp run by the Americans. It took a long time for me to get even a rough overview of the complex events, France's role, the different splinter groups and political factions, especially the Viet Minh movement, that fought against each other.

After two weeks traveling through Vietnam, from north to south, we then set off by bus from Ho Chi Minh City towards Phnom Penh last week. In just seven hours - including a somewhat complicated processing at the border (you have to get off the bus first to officially leave the country of Vietnam in a huge deserted hall, then get back on the bus to cross the border and get off again to enter Cambodia) - you reach the capital of Cambodia. After a five-hour stop in Phnom Penh, we continued our journey by night bus at midnight and, after a tire puncture in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia, reached Siem Reap, the location of the famous Angkor Wat, in the early morning hours. Together with my parents, we explored the impressive and vast temple complex. Which temple is the most beautiful? This is hard to answer, but the one with the most mystical atmosphere is certainly the Ta Prohm temple, built in the year 1186 and famous as a Tomb Raider temple, where Angelina Jolie as the tomb raider Lara Croft searched for a stolen relic in the giant overgrown buildings. It was like an incredibly vast labyrinth, walking through the narrow temple corridors and admiring the thousands of rock carvings, with a new sculpture, relic, or stone passage leading into the dark depths of the temple after every corner.
Almost incompatible with the mystical and ancient atmosphere of the temple area was the Pubstreet, a party street in the middle of Siem Reap, where the old and young traveler scene meets. One bar after another, it offers everything your heart desires in terms of food. For example, we enjoyed delicious and delicately thin Italian pizza and red wine from Veneto in a passage reminiscent of Tuscany and felt like somewhere on Lake Garda.

For me, it was fascinating how quickly the prosperous and modern Siem Reap turns into a completely different world just two kilometers outside the city, which we witnessed firsthand on our mountain bike trip. We cycled through impoverished villages, finally encountering playing and waving children on the unpaved and muddy roads again, and especially at the floating villages on the huge Tonle Sap Lake, we felt like time had somehow stood still. Children navigate the small wooden boats through the water covered with water lilies, women sit on the ground cooking fragrant rice dishes, and men, dressed only in a loincloth and armed with a hoe, set off for their daily work in the rice fields.

Unfortunately, I got something wrong in my stomach, and I was confined to bed for some time, and only yesterday we finally headed towards the beach again. Otres Beach, a backpacker's paradise!
My travel report is also a bit delayed because we are besieged in the evening by Cambodian children who have discovered my tablet - within seconds, I was surrounded by a group of children who just wanted to watch Tom and Jerry on my tablet for hours :-)!!!