Vietnam will deserve at least two...

..because so far it's been overflowing with ridiculous, and I've only been here a four days. But it's been an adventure since the moment we left Phnom Penh in a shared taxi, and actually, even that was an adventure: After sitting in the parking lot with the engine running for a full hour while we waited for our car to fill up (and then for all of our passengers to return to said car after some of them decided this was actually the time to go out and take care of a little last minute fruit-shopping, no matter that everyone else was waiting in the suffocating stickiness of an overcrowded compact vehicle in the 90 degree heat) we finally set off. And by "we" I mean me, Charlsea, and 7 Cambodians. In a four-door sedan. So that would be 9 people in a car made for 5, and the only way that works is when the driver actually shares his seat with the pregnant lady, so that he's leaning sideways into the center console and craning his foot to even reach the brakes and just ignoring the sideview mirror concept altogether. There's potential for a harrowing journey here, but don't worry: we stopped so many times for no apparent reason, we actually got lapped by an oxcart.

After Mr Cambodian Toad's Wild Ride for 4 hours, we got out and stood twenty feet apart from each other just to remember what personal space feels like, and then we had lunch and hopped on a couple of motorbikes headed for the Vietnamese border. The ride was one of the highlights of my trip thus far, it was just such a stunning rice paddy wonderland (rice, as it happens, is one of the greenest plants I've ever seen--who knew?). Add that to the cinnamon-colored dirt roads and the women in bright dresses walking buffalos down the path, and perfect clouds and wind in your hair, and it makes for quite an enjoyable journey.

Anyway we crossed the border (they made a big fuss about us putting our measley luggage through the X-Ray machine, but then they realized that the X-Ray machine didn't actually work, so they let us take it off and go around. Oh, the satisfaction of the petty bureacrat thwarted in his pettiness!) and caught our next ride: a minibus to a port town 3 hours away. They charged us a lot more than everybody else and did so blatantly, like it was just the obvious thing to do. As soon as we realized this, we decided we would not go silently into the night, and so proceeded to make a fuss for about the next two hours, which we did using our phrasebook to compose the following hate letter in my journal:

"Hello. This bus price 100,000 Dong. We pay 400,000 Dong. We like our 300,000 Dong back please. We like a refund now. Thank you."

I showed it to the bus assistant lady, thieving extortionist that she was, and I know she knew I was right by the way she giggled and wagged her fingernails at me, but she clearly had no reason to care. I didn't give up. I tried reading my letter outloud to shame her, but the tones in Vietnamese are tricky and I don't think I made myself understood at all. I was about to stand up and ask if anyone spoke English and would come to our rescue when the bus driver (who had remained neutral thus far) reached back over his shoulder and earnestly thrust a bottle of water into my hands. A small one, like the kind they give you on airplanes. "Here," he seemed to be saying in his scratchy Vietnamese way, "I know you overpaid by the equivalent of 17 or 18 dollars, but take this 25 cent bottle of water, and let's just call it even." And, inexplicably, it seemed like a reasonable enough solution at the time. I drank my two swallows of tainted bribe water gladly and took a little nap until we arrived, and that was that. Vietnam one, Molly zero--but then who's really keeping score?So that gets me to the end of that day, and that's where I'm going to stop for now. Play by play of my subsequent transport adventures to follow shortly.