Good Morning Vietnam & Non Kidnapping's in Cambodia!

As part of our Asian run during the WC we headed to Sihanoukville, Cambodia, a sleeply small fishing town that on the face of it didn't have much to offer, this was back in 2008 and we were even docked in a container port in the middle of nowhere and with a bus journey to get us anywhere near civilization.

As this was one of Princesses first stops in the port (or at best once or twice a year) there was not many tours on offer through the ship, there was my hated general bus tour of the island which because of the lack of other tours meant there was 20 buses doing the same excursion. From a logistical point of view this was an absolute nightmare and developed into an ever bigger shit show as the day went on, with the most common problem being mutiple tour buses turning up at the same location at the same time and the PAX wandering off, getting confused and ending up on the wrong bus!

The very same thing had happened to one of the dancers Kyrsten who could not find her bus and recognised me and jumped onto my bus, 'you'll let her bus know we have her on here?' I checked with our tour guide 'Yes, yes, no problem' he replied. Mini disaster averted and we carried on with our tour, unfortunately when we got to our next stop Kyrsten's bus was alongside ours where apparently they'd been waiting for almost half an hour and were panickly ringing around thinking she might have been abducted!

Because our bus driver had not relayed the information that she was on our bus to her original bus they'd held up the tour because as an American woman they thought she might have been kidnapped! This led to a few, well complete dicks (PAX) from her bus giving her an ungodly amount of shit when thet saw her. 'Stupid girl', you've ruined our day' were just some of the comments made when the two buses met.

I personally would have told them to fuck off (politely and with a smile of course!) but Kyrsten got back on her original bus with these arseholes and continued to apologise for the rest of the day.

Overall I wasn't too impressed by our first trip to Cambodia because as well as the tour bus chaos it was overcast and cloudy all day and insanely humid too. I can also remember lots of children begging all over the place with our tour guide telling us 'please do not give them any money' because the kids didn't see any of that money has they had to give it to adults they worked for, pretty scummy.

The best part of the day was a trip to a kids school and some of the guests had known beforehand to bring school supplies like pens and pencils, crayons etc, books to donate to the school rather than giving money. It was definitely a nice moment a positive way to end the day after all the earlier grief.

I'd been into Ho Chi Minh city a few times but next was our first trip to Phu My, Vietnam and it was a great early sail in with the ship gliding silently through weeds and despite the size of the Sun Princess I still got that Apocalpyse Now vibe!

Also I had a really cool sounding tour heading out into the countryside to the Cu Chu Tunnels tour, these were a massive underground network of tunnels throughout most of Vietnam that proved massively successful for the Viet Cong during the conflict. As we entered the tour grounds we saw a bunch of soldiers or locals dressed as soldiers with very realistic looking guns, one of them saw me carrying the camera and immediately yelled out 'Good morning Vietnam!!!!!' right down the lens! Awesome, I thought that is a fucking great intro video for the day and I was eagerly awaiting the rest of the tour unfortunately this was where the filming ended!

One of the other soldiers immediately rushed over and started shouting at the guy who had just delivered a fairly decent Robin Williams impersonation before chasing him away, he then started pointing at me and yelling 'no camera, no camera'. The tour guide ran over to stop a potential international incident and told me 'they want your camera, no filming'. I said 'we'll you might have wanted to tell me that before I started filming and theres no chance they are getting the camera!'

There was some more shouting between the two men and it did not look like things were going well, 'Fine, I won't film but I'm not taking my eyes off the camera, look I'll take the battery off and out that one the bus, then the camera won't work happy?' They were not happy, the upshot was that I had to go back and sit on the bus while they started the tour.

I was definitely not fucking happy but also I was being shouted at by people with guns and although they had not been aimed at me, the threat was still palpable. A little later the tour guide returned and said I could join the tour if I left the camera on the bus, I asked why the camera was a problem when I knew previous videogs had filmed this tour before. 'Its because camera is too big, too official' great, well that cleared things up, I again reiterated that I would not leave the camera unattended but I also didn't fancy sitting on a bus for the next 4 hours.

The guide finally relented and although I couldn't film, I took the camera with me and carried it backwards, with lens cap on, no battery and no tape inside which the guide explained to the shouty dude with the gun. He still had a face like a smacked arse but he grudingly relented so I was at least able to join the tour at that point

And what a shame as it was a great tour, we got to climb down into the actual tunnels and feel our way along in the darkness before climbing out the other end. We were shown examples of all the different traps that awaited the Americans at the time, it was a real eye opener to see the pride from the Vietnamese when they descibed how they repelled the 'invading Americans'

I have to admit before I began travelling I really didn't know a lot about world history and despite it was the first time that I'd been to a country where America had been the enemy aggressor and lost a war

On the next cruise diaries - Flooded cabins and too much alcohol!