Cambodge

Hello.

At the moment I am in Cambodia!
It is an.....'interesting experience'.

After leaving Perth I flew to Melbourne, wich should have taken me 3 hours instead
of 12. We were trapped in the plane for about 6 hours without food.
After spending a 1.5 day in Melbourne I went to Sydney where I took the plane straight to
Singapore!
I expected a very clean, boring city without a soul, but I got a very clean, interesting, asian city!
I really like it, to my own surprise! I myself stayed in Little india. It is crazy, it is really like India, but
somewhere else. I mean, all the indians have the exact same look on their face when they see a white girl,
they have the exect same clothes (dark blue trousers and white shirt) and in the streets you smell the cardomon, massala and cury all over! I enjoyed all this by drinking a big lassie.
I met some german girls and together we visited the raffles hotel, clarke quay,... we even (tourists as we are)
went onto the 'flyer'(big wheel, like the one in London). So we had a good view over the whole of Singapore!
I also met a Singaporean couple who wanted me to taste some real 'singaporean'food. While I was eating some black noodles with weird seafood, they were digging into their 'franfurter bratwurst'! They bought it from the only austrian guy in the whole of Singapore, who sells his wursten in the middle of Chinatown.
Crazy, but the singaporeans love it!

After Singapore, i found a cheap flight to Cambodia, so that would be my next destination!
I arrived in Phnom penh (the capital) at night. I didn't really know where to go, but I immideatly hooked
up with some Irish guys, who showed me the way. We just arrived, but got straight away soaked up by the crazyness of the city! At night we went out to take some beers, and we ended up later in some kind
of club with a bunch of 15 people... This was my intoduction to Asia....

The next day, I felt this crazy feeling of my brains shrinking at very hight speed. I thought it was the heat,
but then I realised, we must have had some drinks the day before... It didn't bother me, to still visit some
highligths of phom penh!
Pete (uk) had the same plans, so we both hopped on the back of a motorcylce and off we went.
We visited the killing fields. The place where in the seventies more than a million people were killed by the
Khmer Rouge! Only 30 years ago. I felt ashamed that I didn't know anything about those cruelties.
It was as bad as the holocaust! They killed almost all the intellectuals ans wanted to start from zero. Only farmers could stay alive! We visited the museum as well and saw a documentory. I felt very small and could now more understand the present situation of cambodja..
At night, we met the Irish couple Shane and Ann again (who I met the night before) and had more quiet evening.
The day after that we visited the royal palace, and some more temples and pagoda's and in the evening we discovered a bar 'with 35 girls and 3 ladyboys'... It is fun for three minutes, to see all these girls, but then you start thinking of their real purpose and you want to run away as fast as possible.. Sex tourism is a big issue, specially in phom penh. It is disgusting to see how many old white men, having dinner with their 16 year old 'wife'....
The next day we all left together to Kampot, a little town near the sea. Except for the heavy rain we had there, it was good fun! We met oscar, the very funny spanish guy! We were hanging around some days because of the rain, but then decided to go anyway for the tour to Bokor National Park! It was raining like hell and we were all (10 of us) sitting on the back of a 4wd truck! Oh man, soaking wet, but we had a lot of
fun singing scouts songs.... After some days there we left to the Costa del Cambodja, where I am at the moment : Sihanoukville! It's very strange here. I don't really like it. I feel too much like a white walking dollar. It's so strange. There is like imaginitive line between the town and the tourist area near to the beach. Near where the backpackers is, there are only white people on the street, and all the cambodians are here because they have a tuk-tuk or a moto to transport you. If you walk to city, you're not normal, and you'll have at least 15 drivers asking you if you really don't need a ride to the town 1 km away!
But once you're out of the 'white area', you're completely helpless. The people in the chemist just ignore you, when they don't understand what you want...You can't just walk in the shops 'to have a look', because they follow every move. And if you find like a normal supermarket... it's full of white people again!
So you're somehow trapped in the system. Anyway, It's only here in sihanoukville that I had this feeling...
Tomorrow we are leaving for Siem reap to see the temples of Angkor Wat! I'm really looking forward to this architectural and religious wonder!

hasta la vista!

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