Kingdom of Cambodia

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Again huge apologies for being extremely late on the blogging. Funnily enough I am back in Siem Riep, the location of my last blog. I have however travelled the rest of Cambodian, Vietnam, Laos and South Thailand since then. So once again I'll split it up, seems best to do it by country so this covers the rest of Cambodia. Enjoy!



As a result of meeting 3 new travel companions in Siem Riep, we decided to extend our cambodia visit to include sihanoukville, a beautiful beach town on the south coast. It was very backpacker party orientated with an extremely cheap night out, as a result quite a few buckets were consumed here! One of the bars did a booze cruise where they take you out for a little bit of snorkelling and a little bit of jumping off the boat and a little bit of drinking, it made for a very pleasant and relaxing day. We felt we didnt actually do enough snorkelling though so rented a longboat for the day after, for us and our new friends. Some of the coral was awesome but didnt quite compare to the barrier reef and was a little bit foggy in places.

Sihanoukville was also where we found out how ridiculous Cambodias road etiquette is. It is actually more dangerous to stop on a red light that carry on, because people will ram into you from behind. When going through a green light on an intersection you actually have to slow down more to watch for people running reds, meaning that essentially a red light gets right of way. It is also perfectly fine to drive on the wrong side of the road, as long as you stay near the kerb, and drift across to the correct side only when an opening appears.

After sihanoukville we did head to Phomm Penn. This was an extremely dirty city with not much fun. By that I mean the main attractions were the killing fields and S-21, the auschwitz-birkenau version of Polpot's Khmer Rouge dictatorship and genocide between 1975 and 1979, during which he killed 2.2 million of an 8 million population and soldiers killed the babies of "traitors" by swinging them into a tree in an effort to save bullets. A pretty depressing day and I marvel at how the Khmer Rouge were acknowledged as the rightful rulers by the UN all the way up to 1993.

Hoi Chi Minh City (Saigon) was our next stop, and our first experience of the nightmare that is Vietnam's moped scene. There are 30 million mopeds in vietnam for a population of around 80, crossing the road was tricky and the only way to do it is to stroll casually across and they go around you. We found a good tactic was to wait until a local was about to cross and cross behind him. But thats all for next time.

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Photos

Otres
The beach near to sihanoukville, hassled a lot by cambodian children and women to start with but once they worked out we weren't buying anything we were free to relax

Beach Road Hotel
The view from the door of our room. We could walk 10 metres to fall into a lush pool, where we could also order and eat food. Cost us 10 dollars per night!

Snorkelling crew
Hiring a longboat for the day. We ended up bumping into the girls all the way through Vietnam and met one of the guys in Bangkok