Bye bye Cambodia, hello Vietnam. We meet an American with a Harley handled moustache, on the run from America and its cars. He wore a motorcycle chain round his neck to emphasise his point. He was going to do 'Nam, do Laos and do whatever else that got in his way.
Cleaner women welcomed the girls at customs with squeezes of the cheek. The American was led away, he didn't make it through, he wasn't going to be doing no Nam.
We made it and were on our way to Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, a place with two names.
The Lonely Planet tells me that the average wage in Vietnam is 350 bucks a year.
The city has shop after shop, selling safes as big as doors. How long would they take to fill? But this is a city doing things on the black - you don't have to be Einstein to realise that.
The Tiger Cup is on, football. The Ben Thanh market is packed, people using motorbikes as arm-chairs, rocking chairs and beds. These bikes are pushing Asia on. It finishes 1-1, no mayhem in the streets, no red and yellow star party. But the girls are mobbed, cheered and squeezed for showing allegiance to the flag in their Vietnamese tops.
We're staying opposite a police station, in district one. People bring registers to be stamped all night long. Everyone knows where everyone is. It's the third safest place on the planet, I've been told. But who told the man who told me?
Anyway, we're looking at the police station when women are lead into the back of the caged police truck. A screaming crowd watches. A father shakes his child, the child's howling the blues for his mama. A righteous woman shoots an imaginary syringe into her arm, nods at me and does it again. Drugs. I guess that's why they're being taken away. The crowd hollers.
These police are men from the north, the conquerors, the winners, Napalm slayers. War and fighting, Vietnam rising. The South Vietnamese don't trust their northern hearts.
But what do I know? I know I've crawled in Cu Chi tunnels and got out, fired an M60 that nearly took my chin off. Three winning shots got you a key ring. I just about held the mother. The noise was as scary as the kick. My guide was an ex-South Vietnamese vet. He reckoned white women turned into water buffalo after having kids, but his women stayed tight and slender. He wasn't PC. Vietnam was losing good women to Taiwan.
We've been inspired by our Dutch, language-gobbling machine, friend. We take lessons at the university. I want to be able to say, I don't want nothing. The girls sponge it up: they're on past tenses and irregular verbs; I know the numbers one to 10.
We go to the market, take our new language out for a walk. They see you, they want you to buy, buy anything. Hats, T-shirts, hairbrushes and clips. Lemons, carrots out of ears, pineapples on heads, how much can I carry?
Bags swinging from my mouth, tied to my ears, rope strung around my neck, hanging silks, hanging pots, lacquered blocks, nail something to my skin. An old man comes up to me, taps my shoulder. Hey mister you want glasses? I just about turn, everything swinging. Ray-Bans, he says, raising them in the air. I tap the glasses I'm wearing and the six pairs under that. Ray Bans, he says, in his GI English.
Yeah, but I've got glasses, I say. He shakes his head then shouts, come on. I laugh, he goes. Next a man selling alarm clocks out of tortoise backs sees me as a man who might want one. How much money and desire for things do they think this whitey's got?
Ho Chi Minh doesn't stop, traffic, smoke to the sky, noodle soup, beef on top. The Tiger, every spot taken by a man chasing his Dong.
It's breakfast time. We're on the balcony looking at the goings on, eagle view. The police station, the hustlers, the busted, the walkers, the sellers, the coconuts, the in-and-outers on their bikes. There's a scream, a man's in the road, shaking, having a fit. He's bare footed and cabbages have fallen from his cart. Froth from his mouth. We watch. People start to help, a spoon is put on his tongue. I get him some water, a man wipes his head. He has a sign that tells the world he is epileptic and that he is mute. He won't take my money, so I buy some cabbages. He pushes on.
We're sad, but the sadness doesn't last long. We go to Dam Sen waterpark. The Black Thunder, the Kamikaze Run, the things you do with kids. The place is empty, our family and one other and newlyweds having pictures taken by slides.
I've been hot-cupped. A woman came in and did it. I ordered it from the street. People cycle around shaking a rattle. I thought I was getting a massage, I've got right into them, but this time it came with a twist. The woman got me on my front and took out a flame thrower, she heated small glasses and stuck them to my back. I didn't know what I was getting and my girls laughed. I now sport a spotted hyena's back.
Later that night I take my girls and my back for dinner. An eight-year old gum seller befriends us. He eats with us and we buy a pack of gum. He smiles and draws Etta love drawings. Billie says, he can't really be working can he? It's late and he's smaller than me.
He is darling, I say.
A man walks past and picks up Billie's shoe, starts pumping in numbers, he's turned it into a mobile phone. The gum seller laughs, I pull a dollar from his ear, his working day is over, he beams.
Etta's take.
She got a little stick dipped it in some oil and then she lit it and then she stuck them on. She pulled the cups down and put them at the bottom of daddy's back. It went in a lump. It made me laugh. I'm not writing any more.
Billie's take.
They offered me a seat when I arrived in Vietnam, they talked and looked at my skin. What's so amazing about it? They taught us thank you and hello.
Saigon is busy. We walked out of our hotel and there was a police van with criminals or who knows what they are, walking into the cage without anyone telling them. They looked like lions in a zoo. It's sad to see them. What have they done wrong? But maybe they had.
Food is crap, I'm fussy as hell and I know I am. It looks alright but I don't like it. Mummy and Daddy say, I'm up to here now, pointing to their heads. It doesn't make any difference.
Learning Vietnamese was funny. Toi gin tuoi, I am nine years old, and stuff like that. Daddy makes things up.
I was waving to little children who were at school in the house next door to where we were staying and looking at Saigon's crazy people when I heard a scream and more screaming. It was a man in the middle of the road having a epileptic fit, finally some nice people lifted him out of the road and onto the pavement where they talked to him and tried to stop him swallowing his tongue. He eventually came to and we realised that he couldn't speak, so he was mute and maybe deaf. Daddy gave him some water but he didn't want it so the man who helped said something in sign language and we gave him some Dong. Daddy was really upset. It shows how nice people can be.
Dam Sen waterpark was great. The Kamikaze wasn't very good. I was going so fast, I couldn't see a thing. I dropped over the edge and at the end I got shot out and it pulled my swimming costume open at the crotch and shot up my other end, thankfully no one saw.
We went to the zoo as well. Daddy doesn't like us writing about stuff that he didn't go to but I can tell you one little thing with out him knowing, the animals were in very, very, very poor condition.
We were eating dinner in this atrocious place with a lovely deaf woman who fell in love with me and Etta. And this little boy was selling gum. He was eight and his name was Muy. Don't worry if you can't pronounce it. We offered him food, he ate some, Mark, daddy joked with him and he flirted with Etta and I, especially Etta. On the walk home we gave him a dollar and you should have seen his wonderful face it was so lovely. It lit up and he showed it off to everyone on the street.
Tracey's take
Compared to Phnom Penh, Saigon's fast. We go walking, no room on pavements, just bike room. Pedestrians in the gutter, take your chance with carts, bikes, motorbikes, cars and buses.
We have a lesson at the University with Dao. Billie is a model student, Etta's good too, Mark makes us all laugh with his lousy pronunciation.
A fine French meal, the girls eat well. Mothers feel good when their kids are eating. It's so painfully tedious trying to feed Billie, she's getting worse, thinner too.
Walk on the wrong street and it's constant bombardment. Off I go, no I don't want a hammock, a handbag, a ride on your motorbike, a three-course meal or a cyclo tour of the city, just a baguette and a tin of tuna.
Billie and Etta are learning compassion fast. The working children, the mangled beggars, the cart sellers walking the streets from dusk until dawn, the caged creatures in the zoo.
