Highway to hell (a.k.a. Phnom Penh)

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Dear blog subscribers, here be a warning to you all: the blog you are about to read contains a tale that is not for the faint-hearted. Those of you with a weak bladder, look away, and just be glad you weren't doing this ABOMINABLE journey with us. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

What can I say about our terrible, terrible trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh? I have, in the past, been told "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" but I have always summarily ignored this advice, and will continue to do so. Let this post be evidence of this. Q.E.D.

We got up at a horrible hour (7 something a.m - yes, a.m: in the MORNING) because we were supposed to be picked up at the hotel at 8:30 and we needed to check out, and eat breakfast etc. We got to the lobby, waiting, with time to spare. And we waited. And waited. Finally, after the hotel had called the bus company several times, our dude showed up. Our dude did not speak English. However, we were optimistic because we had been told that our hotel was the last stop for their pick-ups, and so when we were the only people on the minibus, save from a really nice French guy from Reunion Island, we thought we were lucky. But, our hotel may have been the last HOTEL stop, but we then proceeded to pick up all manner of people from all manner of dives (well, I say this, but really they were all much the same: squalid guesthouses with suitably squalid guests). Then we were dropped off in a dank little room with no air-conditioning, and wet seats (I had to persuade a fly off mine, which wasn't easy; I practically had to sit on it to get it to budge). And we waited some more. Finally a bus turned up and we got on. I thought we could lounge about on the very back seats, but they were all broken and sitting on them was an impossibility (Sherlock Holmes might say it was an improbability, but he'd be wrong. He'd have needed to see the seats). The bus was OK though, but we were taken to the main Siem Reap bus depot where we had to transfer to the actual bus (this we had to GATHER, since we still hadn't encountered an employee who spoke English). But the bus we moved to was nicer, with bigger seats, and these were allocated.

Well, we thought that things were looking better. But no. This new bus had screens in it, which were inaccessibly to us in our seats at the front, and so the first 1.5 hours of the journey were spent attempting to sleep through so much foreign screeching and screaming that I thought I was being driven insane. Then the program changed, and instead of screeching, we were confronted with bangs and booms. I decided that this could not continue, and I ventured down to the driver to have stern words, but he didn't understand this so instead I just had to frown exaggeratedly and gesture downwards and at my poor battered ears. He turned it down. But the volume didn't stay down, and throughout the trip we had to remind them over and over to turn it down. The man from Reunion Island came up trumps when he berated the bus man, saying "This is not a disco bus!". But even with my headphones in playing my own music, I was still distracted by the noise bellowing forth from the bus speakers.

At one point, around lunchtime, we stopped off at a shack for lunch. The hot food was sitting around in the heat, and was almost certainly unsafe, and despite the fact I was hungry, I refused to buy any food or drink, on the grounds that I hadn't wanted to stop for lunch and wasn't aware that we would be. Mike bought a pack of little biscuit sticks filled with chocolate, and I had a couple, and they were pretty good.

The horror did not end there. More than an hour from Phnom Penh our bus stopped without explanation (well, of course there wasn't an explanation, since we STILL didn't have a conductor or official bus person that spoke even basic English). We, and the 3 other English-speakers on the bus, figured out the cause of the stop from the stench gushing from the engine. One of the other rosbifs said, "That doesn't smell like it can be fixed" and so we had to get off and retrieve our luggage and, appropriately, lug it through the dust to another bus, this one in terrible repair. It was horribly bumpy for the rest of the way, which was really hurting my back, so much so that I could barely move to get off the bus when we finally reached Phnom Penh after our journey on a minibus and 3 separate buses.

Our journey was not over though. Because of the move to a new bus, we ended up in Phnom Penh, but in a totally different place to where we had expected to be, which meant that we were unable to explain to the hoards of tuktuk drivers how to get to our hotel. Mike had a lightbulb flash above his head though, and called the hotel, so that the receptionist could explain in Khmer. In the process of seeming not to be amenable to a tuktuk drive, we managed to get a really good price to the hotel. We arrived without further hassle, checked in, and then totally failed to get to the market before it closed (unsurprising since we didn't get further than our hotel room, what with our indecision). Eventually though, I ran a bath to help my back and also because I was feeling icky from the journey, and we went to a Japanese restaurant called Origami, where the food was OK but the tamago nigiri was disappointingly lacking in flavour, and my salmon nigiri was loaded with so much hidden wasabi that I thought I would vomit right there in the middle of the restaurant. Somehow I managed to swallow, and things got better from there after I had almost my entire Asahi beer. We went to the Foreign Correspondents Club on the way back. Apparently an institution in Phnom Penh, I was expecting a grand gentleman's club type place, like the Reform Club, but it wasn't at all like this. There was a little staircase leading to an unremarkable bar area, with lizards crawling all over the open walls.

When we got back to the hotel, I was extraordinarily pleased to get into bed after such a tiring day travelling the 350km across Cambodia.

Sayonara suckers
xxx

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