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Published: December 31st 2011
Phnom Penh
Its Xmas time and for the first time in 4 months I found 100 Plus drink - my favorite I am sitting on a very comfortable chair, on the terrace of Garden Village Guest house in Siem Reap, with music in the background, Polona is opposite reading a book and we are both just trying to re-charge our batteries.
Re-charging our batteries has been the theme of Cambodia so far. It seems the last couple of months caught up with us. In between we have also set a return date 😞. Since then we have slowly started thinking about where to live, updating our LinkedIns and all the rest of the threatening stuff like that. But before that there is still loads to see. Both of us are very much looking forward to Sri Lanka, which we somehow included in this trip on Burma's expense and then India where we are meeting Habibi and Iva – good times ahead.
Entering Cambodia It took only about an hour on a fast boat to reach the Vietnamese Cambodian border. Most people on the boat got the tour guide to sort the Visas for them, except the two of us who wanted to do it ourselves and not pay extra
Phnom Penh
What is not allowed in Ljubljana works fine in PP – much easier said then done. The visa costs 20 USD and the guy on the boat charged 22 USD to sort it out for you. It's only a bit of paperwork and a few minutes so we decided to just do it. We got the forms, we added the requested passport photo and the border officer goes “you pay 21, OK?”. And we did.
Welcome to Cambodia, a land of poverty and corruption where the GDP per capita is lower than my monthly wage!
Phnom Penh A few more hours and I could see Phnom Penh in the distance. I was here six years ago and I could notice the change immediately. During my last visit the lake area was the main hub for all backpackers – it's gone! Not the area, the whole lake!!! The government sold it to a foreign company, which filled the lake with sand and it's now a construction site. Construction cranes everywhere, loads of bars and a tourist area over-run with tuk-tuk drivers, children selling books, flowers and so on. It almost feels like Saigon, just that instead of grown-ups it's the children following you around and trying to sell
you anything you need. The sad part of it is that these kids are “employees”. Where do they get the books, flowers? Why do they all use the exact same lines when selling?
30th of December, Chiang Mai, Thailand Right, where were we? I wrote the top paragraphs while still in Cambodia – over two weeks ago!! Since then we have moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Back at Giant's guest house, where the theme remains the same: doing nothing! It seems we were really in a need of a holiday (on holiday) and I hope during the Xmas break you can appreciate it. We are staying in Chiang Mai for Xmas and then taking a night bus to Bangkok from where we fly to Sri Lanka.
All-right, back to Cambodia. We visited two sights in Cambodia, both dedicated to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime. First stop was the S21 Prison. S21 used to be a high school, but after the Khmer Rouge took over the country and “emptied” the city, it became a prison.
Out of around 18.000 people held here only a handful survived – all the others were executed, after they admitted
to their crimes of which they were accused of. The confessions were a result of torture and cruelty! A photo was taken of every prisoner who walked in, and now thousands and thousands of faces are displayed in the museum – all victims of Pol Pot's regime.
We had an honour of meeting Bou Meng – the last living person to be held in the prison. He was a painter and that saved his life. He was asked to paint portraits of Pol Pot and other “leaders”. We left the prison shocked (I visited it before and knew what to expect, but still) but there was more to come.
The next day we visited the killing fields. An area about 10km out of the city where thousands and thousands of bodies are burried. This is the place where the Khmer Rouge executed people – not using bullets as they were expensive, they used farming tools and anything else that could be found. Babies were smashed aginst the trees.
Kratie Our next stop was Kratie, a small town on the Mekong River famous for fresh-water dolphins (Irrawaddy dolphins). We had to return to Phonm Phen in 5
days to collect our passports from the Indian embassy, so we – yes, you guessed it – just chilled a bit. We met some nice people: Victoria (zzz American!) and her Australian husband Peter kept Polona company on her biking trip (they left at 7AM so I didn't join in). All of us did go on a short trip to the island on the river, where we rented bikes and did a loop around. When waiting for a boat we met another couple from the most amazing country in the whole wide world, SLOVENIA! 😊. David and Ana joined us the next day when we the plan was to see the dolphins. We rented a boat for an hour and we were lucky. We saw a few of the “penis shaped” animals. Ana and David are both biology graduates so they were over the moon and I just like animals enough to find it amazing.
The four of us had a blast learning our election results. Nobody was too happy about the winner but all of us loved the fact that the party (name not worthy of our blog) who was clear favourite to win ended in second place.
We returned back to the capital, collected our passports and headed to Siem Reap the following day. Ohh, if you do go to Kratie take a mini-van. Our trip back was over in under four hours, while the bus trip there took eight!
This is it. Polona will add a blog about Siem Reap (by then we will probably be in Sri Lanka). I wish you all a very happy 2012! Our 2011 was amazing, two-thirds were on the road 😊. I am sure that 2012 will be amazing as well, if nothing else I will get a chance to see my friends again AND it's a leap year and I have the privilege to celebrate an actual birthday – my 8
th.
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