Join the motorbike crowd

Editor's note: Seattle Times reporter Haley Edwards is traveling in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Syria and filing dispatches. For the jaunt around Asia, her 23-year-old friend, Stevie, is her sidekick. ("Or I will be hers; we're still working out the details," Edwards says.) In the Mideast, Edwards will meet three friends from college, two of whom are living in Damascus, Syria. See her dispatches below (most recent on top).

Speaking of motorbikes ... That's the main way to get around in Vietnam. There are taxis, but only a few. If you want to get anywhere quickly, hop onto the back of a moto driver's bike (drivers hang out on every street corner) and he'll take you anywhere for about 50 cents. It's really fun and, statistically speaking, incredibly dangerous (sorry, Mom).

If you're a teenage girl in Saigon, you ride on the back of your boyfriend's moto and hold onto his stomach. If you're anyone else — and if you're riding on the back of a stranger's bike — you don't hold on at all. You just balance with your hands on your knees, looking bored.

If you're a tourist, you hold on with both hands, look terrified, and occasionally yelp when your driver runs three red lights in a row.

Cross the road and hope not to die

A quick note on crossing the street in Ho Chi Minh City: Oh. My. Goodness. You'll think you're going to die.

First of all, 95 percent of the traffic in this Vietnamese city is two-wheeled. Bicycles and little Honda motorcycles rule the road and move like roaring schools of fish, swallowing the cars and buses that block their way. Second, traditional traffic rules (i.e. stop at red lights; yield; don't kill pedestrians) are considered more advisory than anything else.

So that brings me to crossing the street. If you want to cross, you can't just wait for there to be an opening in traffic. There will never be an opening. Just steel your nerves and take a step off the curb. Then another step. Then another. The sea of motorcycle drivers will just avoid you. Whatever you do, don't take a step backward. Just keep walking forward, maintain your pace and don't freak out. That's how the locals do it.

I don't mean to sound blase. It's completely terrifying, especially at rush hour. And especially at night, when you don't even have the benefit of looking oncoming drivers in the eye.

Other advice:

1) If you can find a Vietnamese person who's crossing at the same time as you, stay directly next to him. Walk when he walks.

2) If you're crossing in a group, stay very close to one another. It's easier for the moto-drivers to avoid a clump of pedestrians.

3) Run only when absolutely necessary.

4) Try not to imagine your own imminent death.

A little extra protein with dinner

After two weeks of living out of our backpacks, Stevie and my standards for cleanliness have dropped precipitously. Last night we had dinner at a Saigon street cafe. Seconds after our beef-and-pineapple dish landed on the table, a swarm of little green insects descended on it. We shooed most of them away, but a few were stuck in the sauce. Geckos shimmied down the walls and a cockroach skittered over my foot. We looked at each other, shrugged and dug in. (A little more protein never hurt anyone, right?).

On that note, if you want to travel in Southeast Asia, you're in for some delicious meals. And you can find hundreds of places with a little more ambience than the one I was just describing. But a word of warning for the squeamish: People in these cultures aren't estranged from their food in the same way we are. To us, the "chicken" in a chicken stir fry comes from Safeway. To them, chicken is the one just outside the restaurant, clucking around. If you order chicken here (or rabbit, or duck, or pig or anything else) the waiter is liable to bring a live chicken to your table, at which point you'll be expected to inspect it and approve of it, as you might inspect and approve of a good melon.

Munching on crickets and dancing at Apocalypse Now

HO CHI MINH CITY/ Saigon (most of the people here still call it Saigon) — This place is incredible. Feverish, whirling, overwhelming. All the guidebooks warn that it "churns" and that's about right: Street markets spill out onto every sidewalk, hundreds of thousands of Honda motorcycles, Vespas, bicycles and cycle rickshaws crowd the streets; the sounds of construction, honking, yelling and laughter rise up through the vaguely-French architecture and reverberate in the eves.

Stevie and I went out to eat tonight at this place called Bo Tung Xeo. Some of the stuff on the menu? I copied them, for all of your benefits, exactly as they're listed: "Sliced ostrich. Steamed goat penis with Chinese medicinals. Grilled fields rat. Fried cricket. Deep fried scorpion. Mixed bonded chicken feets. Bloody-cockles salad. Roasted pigeon. Grilled turtle dove. Kangaroo grilled. Grilled breast she-goat. grilled crocodile. Eel rice gruel. Pig heart with garlic."

The fried crickets weren't so bad. Taste like corn nuts.

Spent the day doing everything tourists are supposed to do in Saigon: Rode a cyclo, visited the old French post office, had a drink atop the Rex Hotel (where the South Vietnamese and American captains used to lunch during the war), visited the Reunification Palace, the Jade Emperor Pagoda and the War Remnants Museum. Whew. A few highlights:

The Reunification Palace. It was built in the early '60s by the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces rolled onto the front lawn and took over the place. They toppled the government, but pretty much left the palace exactly how they'd found it. The result is that the whole building is a time capsule to 1975 — complete with all the garish furniture, avocado-green carpeting and disco decor. The fake wood-paneled bomb shelter, lined with '70s-era maps, enormous FM radios and spying equipment, feels like something James Bond — or Doctor Evil — would have appreciated.

The War Remnants Museum. This one goes under the category of not-fun-but-necessary sightseeing. The small, partly outdoor museum is about the Vietnamese War (the Vietnamese call it the American War, for obvious reasons), as told from the Vietnamese perspective. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff: Photographs of little girls burned by the napalm bombs dropped by American planes; testimony from the massacre at My Lai; photographs detailing the ongoing birth defects attributed to the American use of chemicals like Agent Orange and Dioxin. It's awful. Most of the tourists here are not American, but I did meet one American girl whose father had been a GI during the war. She remembers him telling stories about how horrible it was to be there. The humidity and mud; the booby traps placed by Viet Cong guerrillas; watching his friends die. What an awful, pointless war.

That night, Stevie and I went dancing at a nightclub called Apocalypse Now. It is, as is the eponymous Francis Ford Coppola movie would suggest, Vietnam War-themed. Barbed wire coils around the ceiling, sandbags line the patio; there's a "Charlie Don't Serve" sign by the bar; the tables are made out of faux toxic chemical barrels.

My first reaction was how tasteless could this possibly get? My second reaction was a little more upbeat: There I was, in the middle of a dance floor, dancing to thumping techno with 700 Vietnamese kids. We were all sweating on each other, laughing, singing along to the words. A Vietnamese boy bought us shots of Jim Beam. The music was too loud to hear what anyone else was saying anyway, so we all just smiled at each other, clinked glasses and kept dancing. In between songs, we'd give each other thumbs up. Ah, diplomacy at its best.

At about 1:30 in the morning, Bryan Adam's "Summer of '69" came on. In the summer of 1969, about half a million of my mom's and dad's generation were in the jungle just north of here, killing and being killed by these people's moms and dads. Maybe 30 years from now, my kid will go dancing in Baghdad. Maybe.

Good morning, Vietnam

Our attempt to cross into Vietnam was hilarious and ill-fated. We were in a hired van, but our driver got lost along the way, somewhere on a single-lane dirt road with nothing but fields and palm trees as far as we could see. Our driver spoke no English, but communicated via Cambodian pop music, which he blasted at full volume from the van stereo. After about three hours, we realized we were lost. Worse than lost. We didn't even know what country we were in. And no one had a map. And even if we did, the streets had no names.

The situation was funny until it became clear that someone in the back of the van needed a loo. So we pulled over in front of someone's three-room hut, built from palm fronds, bamboo sticks and mud, and asked to use the toilet. The woman of the house — a sturdy, smiling woman with a child in one hand a basket in the other — welcomed all 15 of us inside. (Can you imagine a van-load of tourists showing up on your front lawn and asking to use your loo?) The dirt floor had been recently swept, and a hammock, hung in the middle of the room, constituted all the furniture in the whole place. A family of pigs was asleep in the kitchen. After letting us in and motioning toward the bathroom (a hole in the ground by the kitchen sink), the woman of the house sat on her dirt floor and began speaking to us in rapid Khmer. Neither Stevie nor me, nor any of our fellow travelers, speak the language, but she seemed to take our smiling silence as shyness, because she went on talking. Occasionally, she'd laugh at one of her own jokes, slapping her knee and grinning.

Outside, two little girls ground sugar cane through a metal grinder for us. The juice was delicious. Kind of sweet, but not artificial sweet. Kind of like lemonade, but without the lemon taste, and with a consistency that's almost milky.

After another bathroom break (and more than a few pit-stops, during which the driver handed wads of money to loitering officials), we eventually made it to a border crossing. Just not the border crossing we were aiming for.

This border crossing was in the middle of nowhere. There was no town, no pavement, no parking lot. Just a little kiosk, where a Cambodian border guard was sweating in the shade. He seemed confused — completely flummoxed, even — by our request to cross the border. Evidently, no foreigners actually cross here. So the guards — they began to crawl out of the woodwork after a while — didn't know what to do with us. It took us about 3 hours (and making sure those officials' palms were nice and greasy) to get by.

An Australian man explained to me later that in Cambodia, as is the case in many developing countries, bribing officials isn't quite as mafioso as it seems. The police don't make enough to support their families, so asking a few sun-burned tourists for a Jackson or two seems logical enough.

When we finally got through, there were no buses or taxis to take us to a town, so we climbed on two local guys' motorcycles, pointed at a restaurant listed in our Lonely Planet, and rode into Ha Tiem. Good morning, Vietnam!

How many does it take to hack open a coconut?

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia — It's a beach town a few hours south of Phnom Penh, and, evidently, a sister city of Seattle's. It was a much-needed respite for Stevie and me.

We went out on a boat with a bunch of tourists — Canadians, Brits, a French couple and three Russian guys. The best part was when our German "guide" (he's this 19-year-old kid who's paid to hang out on the beach with us) tried to open a coconut with his bare hands. Hilarious. We eventually got hold of a Swiss Army knife and determined that, while the Swiss thought of almost everything, they'd really dropped the ball by not including a coconut-opener on the standard knife.

After about half an hour, we managed to hack it open. Picture this: Three Russians, two Americans and a German sharing a coconut on a beach in South Cambodia. Thirty years ago, who'd have thought that would have ever been possible?

A T-shirt with butterflies, a reminder of who's buried in a "killing field"

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh (in Cheong Ek) are bigger than the ones near Siem Reap, but still, the whole place is no bigger than a single baseball diamond at Woodland Park.

A checkerboard of car-sized holes in the ground. I always imagined mass graves to be in long lines, like ditches. But here, they're not. They're just twelve-foot by twelve-foot holes, maybe seven or eight-feet deep. Weeds grow up the sides. Cigarette butts and empty bottles line the fence, where cows graze. It's quiet except for the distant sound of children screaming gleefully at recess at the school nearby.

Thirty years ago, people from all over the countryside were bused here to be killed. The Khmer Rouge got pretty efficient, managing to murder 300 men, women and children a day, once they hit their stride around 1976.

Most of the mass graves have been excavated and the bones interred in a pagoda in the center. This pagoda's bigger than the one at Siem Reap. You can walk into this one and see all the skulls arranged on different shelves, according to age group and sex.

Here are the women, aged 14 to 24. There are the men, 60 and older. On the bottom shelf, there's a a heap of the victims' clothing. One girl was wearing a T-shirt with blue and red butterflies on it when she died.

UPDATE: PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — After seeing the killing fields, neither Stevie nor I spoke to each other. We were silent, horrified, sick to our stomachs.

Why were we forcing ourselves to see this? What was the point? Couldn't we just read the section in our Lonely Planet Guide about Khmer Rouge and the killing fields and call it a day? Are seeing these horrors up close and personal different from just knowing they happened in some abstract place, in some abstract time?

Now we've seen the skulls. We've felt the warm earth where these people died. We've touched their clothes. Maybe there's something in that. Maybe this is our legacy as human beings.

Later, we met up with the same British couple we'd met in Siem Reap. Had bottles of wine (too many) at the Foreign Correspondents Club ("The FCC," for people in the know) in downtown Phnom Penh. It's an impossibly colonial-feeling, open-air rooftop bar and restaurant overlooking the river.

It's where the journalists used to hang out and write in the 60s and 70s, before they were driven out by Pol Pot's henchmen. The brave work of photojournalists lines the walls.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Another depressing entry. Sorry, everyone.

Went to visit an old Khmer Rouge prison called S-21. It's the creepiest place I've ever been. It used to be an old high school before Khmer Rouge turned it into a place to torture people. In each classroom, there's a bed with chains attached to it, and a host of metal tools — pokers, sharpened knives, whips. In case that's not fodder enough for your imagination, the curators of this now-museum have blown-up, black-and-white photographs of actual victims lying — convulsed, starved, bloodied — on those actual beds. You can tell it's the same classroom by the patterns in the chirpy orange-and-white checkered linoleum floor. Barbed wire lines the hallways where teenagers gossiped and reapplied lipgloss in 1973.

The other classrooms are lined with row after row of photographs of the victims, which were taken by the Khmer Rouge just before their deaths. Men, children. Women holding babies. They're all lined up against a wall. A number pinned to their T-shirts. Most of them look terrified.

I couldn't stop staring at a photograph of one girl in particular. She looks about my age and she's wearing a Hang Ten T-shirt with little footprints across the chest. She's got a short bob and bangs. Her mouth isn't smiling, but her eyes are. It's not a happy smile. It's rueful, hateful. A few days later, she was murdered.

A two-dollar cup of coffee and sunrise over a wonder of the world

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — The temple complex at Angkor Wat was recently chosen as one of the "New 7 Wonders of the World" in an international, internet-based election.

It's obvious why: The place is magical, expansive and beautiful. It was built in 802 AD. it's part royal palace, part Buddhist monastery and part Hindu temple.

We got up at 4 a.m. to watch the sunrise over the main temple building, which is topped by 5 skinny-pineapple-shaped towers ("prangs"), each of which represents one of the mountains in the Hindu universe. The center one is Mt. Meru, which is where the gods live.

In the dim, expectant light before dawn, we joined a crowd of tourists that were gathered alongside a row of little red children's chairs. A handful of Cambodians were selling coffee for $2 a Dixie cup (highway robbery in a place where a candlelit dinner is $7), but most of us forked over the green with no regrets. With a view like that — the sun, ringed red, then white, peaking over the roof of elegantly carved ruins, a spoonful of instant coffee in lukewarm water is practically a delicacy.

A tiny pagoda is a huge reminder of what happened in this "killing field"

CAMBODIA — For those who are, as I was, a bit hazy on recent Cambodian history, here's the quick and dirty: During the Vietnam War, parts of Cambodia were heavily bombed by American forces. Between 1975 and 1979, a genocidal dictator named Pol Pot and his party, the Khmer Rouge, murdered between two million and three million people. In 1980, there was a massive, nationwide famine.

The first day we were in Siem Reap (the first major town you encounter on the aforementioned Dancing Road), Stevie and I visited one of the "killing fields" where Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered and buried civilians.

You think "killing fields" and you think it's going to look like Gettysburg. It doesn't. The killing fields here aren't really fields at all. They're just a few patches of dirt, interspersed with trees, about the size of a soccer field. Houses — three-walled structures made of corrugated metal and cardboard — lean into each other around the outside. Kids play in the trash heaps out in front.

One of the reasons why historians know that Khmer Rouge used this place to torture and murder people was because in 1980, they found 75 maimed and decapitated bodies that had been shoved down a well. When we arrived, there were two boys playing along the rim of that same well, balancing and goofing around. Life goes on, I guess.

The only indication that this ground was once wet with blood is a tiny pagoda, maybe 20-feet tall. It has four little stair cases on each side leading up to a plate-glass window, stretching floor to ceiling. Inside, it's full of skulls. Victims' skulls.

Our guide, Chea Bunat, told us that his father's skull is in there somewhere. He doesn't know which one. All he remembers is that one day, when he was eight years old, a bunch of men with machine guns rolled into his tiny village (Kleang Village, it's called) outside Siem Reap, and started going door to door, hauling anyone who was educated out into the street. They took Bunat's dad, who was a math teacher, but left his mom, who was a housewife. He remembers that the soldiers interrogated his mom about their neighbors. What did they do for a living? Did that guy go to school?

"And you couldn't lie, they knew everything. It was test to see if lying," Bunat says. "If lie? Then, bam." He mimes holding a machine gun, then hits himself in the forehead. "Right there on the street."

Six hours on the Dancing Road: "Terrifying and incredibly fun!"

CAMBODIA — The best way to get from Thailand to Cambodia is to take the Dancing Road, a deeply-cratered one-lane dirt road, stretching from the Thai border into the dusty expanse of northwest Cambodia.

It's named the Dancing Road for the way that people jitterbug around their cars while hurtling at top speed over potholes large enough to hide an entire cow.

It takes roughly six hours to negotiate 150 kilometers, from the border to the next biggest city, Siem Reap. But the potholes, craters, dirt moguls and ATV-style jumps (really, our bus got at least two feet of air over some of these) are hardly the biggest obstacle. Every kilometer or two, the road just ends.

There's a little orange "Detour" sign, written in the elegant Cambodian script, behind which is a 20-foot cliff. Cement drums are piled up on either side of the road at these junctures, indicating that the man-made gorges will, at some point, be filled in as drainage ditches. But, for now, they're just another reason for the bus driver to pull the e-brake, crank into a four-wheel drift and skid around a hairpin turn, all the while narrowly missing the herds of cows, auto-rickshaws ("tuk tuks"), motorcycles ("motos"), stray dogs and throngs of children in impossibly white school uniforms who crowd the sides of the road.

It's part terrifying, part incredibly fun.

Stevie and I first experienced the Dancing Road on a public bus, and, while none of the other passengers really spoke most of the time (it was nearly impossibly to hear over the deafening creaking of our 70s-era school bus), everyone on the bus leaned into the aisle and peered out the front window, just to watch the show. To scream. To pray. Sometimes, the whole bus would break into hysterical laughter after narrowly avoiding broadsiding a cow, or swerving to avoid a man on a bicycle carrying over 400 mangos in a fishing net on his back, or after the driver slammed on the brakes and all of us smushed up against the seat in front of us, our luggage skittering down the center aisles like skipping stones.

But for anyone who's ever ridden in a developing nation — or on the streets of Rome, for that matter — the Dancing Road would be old hat. It's chaotic and death-defying, sure, but it's what's on either side of the road that makes it unique to Cambodia:

Thatch houses balance on stilts (not because of floods, but to keep the home cool) as its occupants sleep in hammocks underneath.

Impossibly green rice paddies unfurl in every direction, the water flashing silver in the bright sunlight, and then end, abruptly, and the landscape turns into the dusty yellow-red of desert. Palm tree forests dot the landscape, looking like something out of Dr. Seuss. Kids wear blue surgical masks with their blue-and-white school uniforms, to avoid the dust. Billboards remind children not to touch landmines. Craters from American bombs still pockmark the fields. Men with no arms, no legs and no faces beg at rest stops, their livelihoods stolen by the landmines that, 30 years later, still lie in wait in these rice fields.

"Gas stations" — old 2-liter bottles of Pepsi, filled with petrol — simmer in the sun. Ranch-style gates, the kind you might see in Texas, line the side of the road, leading to temples ("wats"), too far down the dusty paths to see.

Thirty-five men cram into the bed of a single pickup truck (really, 35 seems impossible; it's not), red-checkered cloths (a traditional Khmer cloth) wrapped around their faces.