6 days in Cambodia...

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Reluctantly, I bought a direct ticket from a shop on The Khao San Road. If the Lonely Planet is anything to go by, they recommend that you don’t do this as there are always hidden costs involved. They travel company will always advertise the ticket for cheap, in my case it was 350 Baht (about £7). I didn’t have a Cambodian visa so I expected that I would have to pay a premium when I got to the border. Heading for my second country in south-east Asia, Cambodia, or as I now know why some travellers call it Scambodia.

The minibus picked me up at 7.30 and by 11am, I was at the border. Well, that is not entirely true. I was about 200 metres away from the border at the bus company’s office going through exactly what the Lonely Planet advised. A visa from the Cambodia embassy costs $20. I was in Bangkok over the weekend so I wasn’t able to get one, and my Thai visa only had one more day left on it. So, hence having to pay the premium. I ended up paying about £20 for a Cambodian single entry 30 day visa. I didn’t have any photos either, so I had to pay an extra 150 baht fine. The costs were rolling in. I gave my passport to the guide from the bus company and he sent it off with a guy on a bike into town to get my express visa. I had thirty minutes to kill until my visa arrived back. I started to plan how long I had left of my trip and where I still had to visit. One of the other guides, realising from my passport was British came across and introduced himself. He was called Souk and was from the coast of Cambodia, but came to the border to work as there was no work in his town. As soon as you mention that you come from England/London, then any street vendor on the Khao San Road, or guide on the Thailand/Cambodian border will always give the same response. Lovely Jubbly, maybe even a gov’nor thrown in for good measure. They think everyone is England drives a three-wheeled yellow van, hails from Peckham and has a Campari and Lucozade after work to wind down. After chatting to Souk about Cambodia and telling him a bit out London, my passport arrived back and he told me that he would walk me across the border to the other side where I would pick up the bus from Poipet that would take me to Siem Reap.

The exit border post for Thailand was only 200 metres away, but by the time I arrived my clothes were a new shade of damp. I got my exit stamp and met Souk outside to walk across to the Cambodian entry office. He warned me to keep an eye on my belongings as there were thieves around. I felt that was a little hypocritical, as his company has robbed me no more than 30 minutes previous. I got to the Cambodian side and was greeted with a queue of people waiting to get their passport stamped into Cambodia. The queue looked hard work and with only fans cooling people down I didn’t fancy queuing at all. Souk told me that he could pass my passport to one of the guards on duty and I wouldn’t have to queue. This would cost 150 Baht (£3). This type of ‘it costs money to have now’ policy is prevalent throughout Cambodia, and this wasn't going to be my first experience of it. The problem is 150 baht to the average westerner is a tall vanilla latte at Cafe Nero, but to a Cambodian, that is a day’s wage. Morally I didn’t want to pay some guard who is doing this and is probably earning a small fortune on the side, but on the other hand, I would have a 45 minute queue before I could board the 6 hour bus journey from the border to Siem Reap. Another trick the travel companies use is to stretch out the journey as long as possible so when you reach Siem Reap you are exhausted and will stay at the hotel they take you too. From this they will receive a little kick back from the hotel for bringing in customers. It hurts me to say I paid the 150 baht, and had my passport back, with my entry stamp in within two minutes. I grabbed a drink and boarded the bus from the border which would take me to the bus station so I continue the journey to Siem Reap.

On the bus I met a Canadian girl who was living/working in Bangkok, Jacqueline who was also heading to Siem Reap but was going to book a shared taxi when she got to the bus station, which does the journey in a third of the time. Souk, my guide explained that the taxis normally cost $12, but as I had a bus ticket bought through his company, he could do the taxi for me for $7. If that saved me 4 hours on a slow bus then I was all for it. My moral compass had been truly shattered paying the border guard for a stamp into the country. I paid the extra $7 and true to word, I was in Siem Reap in two hours. I still had lots of Thai money left, so I exchanged it at the border, and immediately I was a Cambodian millionaire, which changing that sort of money draws much unnecessary attention. The wad of Cambodia Riel I got back only just fit into my pocket. I gave myself about 20 minutes in that taxi until the driver pulled over and 4 of his mates were going to drag me out, give me a good old fashioned kicking and take my new found millionaire wealth off me. I tipped Souk 100 baht and I was on my way to Siem Reap. Jacqueline and I found a hotel after checking out three of four hotels previous which were awful. We had a pool, which in the heat of Siem Reap was welcomed immensely. Our tuk-tuk driver asked us if we had transport for the temples, which we planned to do the following day. He hired him to pick us up at 5am the following day.

5am, and it is still dark. I didn’t even get us this early when I worked in London. Jacqueline and I met our driver, Pear outside the hotel so we can buy our one-day pass for Angkor Wat on the way to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. As soon as we arrived, there were kids around our tuk-tuk trying to sell us books, guides, maps and coffee. ‘Do you want coffee’ asked one boy. My instinct reaction was no, but then I realised that at 5.30am a coffee would be quite nice. The coffee was a dollar each which meant he was taking the shirt off my back, as the coffee was awful. After one mouthful I almost felt compelled to sell the rest back to him for 50 cents, just to get some form of return on the awful black liquid he had just sold me.

‘Ha, ha, you Obama my friend’ the child says to me.

‘Why thank-you you little scamp’ I replied. The sunrise was good, but with any tourist attraction like this the only thing that spoils it is the amount of tourists that are around you trying to scramble for a seat. We left Angkor to explore other temples and as we got back into the Tuk-tuk, we saw the kid who sold the coffee to me and his friends.

‘More coffee Obama’ he asked me. I just laughed at this. Maybe Michelle would like some more I said point to Jacqueline.

‘your friend is not Michelle, Michelle is no light skinned' his friend replied.Both Jacqueline and myself started to laugh as we left to explore the other temples near to Angkor Wat. Pear told us his family owned a restaurant, no 34 and we were to meet him there after we had looked around. I was hungry so we got some breakfast from his restaurant. As we sat down, we were surrounded by about 6 Cambodian kids running their routine on us.

‘Beads, two for a dollar’

‘Books, buy books from me, I have books to sell’

‘Bead, three for a dollar’

The calls were coming thick and fast. After they realised that we had no use for beads then they started to talk to us. They took an interest in me because I was from England. In unison, they said they could tell me the name of the queen, the name of the Prime Minister, the population, the capital. I duly quizzed them and they spoke very good English for young children. Any country I asked them to name the capital, they did. The only one they didn’t know was the capital of Somalia. We explored the temples all morning, and by 12.30pm, we headed back to the hotel as it was too hot to be walking around temples, especially when you hotel has a pool. Our drive came back to pick us up at 5pm. We headed back to Angkor to watch the sunset and then he brought us back. The whole day cost us $15 for hiring Pear to drive us around. We gave him a $5 tip and also some tee shirts from my rucksack. I had planned on giving away everything when I got to India, but I decided to give a bit away at a time. Jacqueline was speaking to Pear whilst I went to visit a temple and she found out that he earns $40 a month. I found it hard to visual having to live on that amount of money.

Jacqueline and I booked our tickets to Phnom Penh for the following day. She was staying with a friend in Phnom Penh, so I found a hotel in the Boeng Lak district of town. A room with a fan with a riverview (my room was actually above the river), two double beds, shower and a toilet for $4. I found it impossible to try and bargain the owner down from $4. As with my tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap, I hired the one in Phnom Penh for the day after to take me around all the sites in Phnom Penh.

As I was walking back from breakfast my tuk-tuk driver, Mr. Phyro beeped me and drove me back to the hotel to pick up my camera etc. First on the agenda, the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. There is a memorial here in remembrance of the 17,000 men, women and children who were executed here by the Khmer Rouge between 1975-1978. Encased within the memorial are around 9,000 human skulls which have been found here. There are several mass graves which are marked out, and throughout the Killing Fields you see literature which tells you how people were killed here. Hearing the sounds of school children next door which you see human skeletons encased with old clothing reinforces the contradictions of Cambodia today. From here I visited the Tuol Sleng Museum, otherwise known as Security Prison -21, or just S-21. This used to be an old school, the Tuol Svay Prey High School. In 1975, Pol Pot’s security forces turned the school into S-21, the largest centre of detention and torture in the country. Almost everyone held here was later executed at the Killing Fields. During the first part of 1977, S-21 claimed an average of 100 victims a day. When you walk through the three different buildings of Tuol Sleng, all with their checked floors and cream walls it is hard not to imagine that this place was once a school. A rusty bed and gruesome photos are all that is left to remind people of the atrocities that once happened here in the not so long past. Some rooms have examples of the weapons that were used by Pol Pot’s army. Visiting Tuol Sleng is instrumental for people to understand Cambodia’s past, but for a tourist like me it is hard to walk through the small wooden cells where people were chained up and beaten. In one of the buildings there are photographs of some of the victims of S-21. All the pictures are in black and white, which makes them look more harrowing. S-21 demonstrates the darkest side of human spirit. I left the Tuol Sleng museum to pick up my passport from the Vietnamese Embassy as I needed a visa for my two week trip to Vietnam. Once that was all sorted the next place on the agenda was the National Museum. Over a thousand years of Khmer art work in open air galleries spread throughout the museum. I visited this place as it was on the ‘list’, but I am all museumed out from South America so I didn’t spend long here. I actually spent more time feeding the fish in the courtyard than I did walking around the exhibitions. That is no reflection on the works that were on exhibition.

Next on the list was the Grand Palace, which is the residence of the King of Cambodia. I turned up at the gates and admission was a jaw dropping $6. The rest of the other admission charges for the day had been around $2 and were linked to the Pol Pot era of Cambodian history. This was three times more and it was just to see where the king lives. The tour doesn’t include the whole of the Palace either, only selected areas. I decided not to go to the Grand Palace. Bribing officials on the Thai/Cambodian border pushed my limits, but lining the kings already flush pockets whilst no more than 2 metres from the entrance you have kids as young as 6 selling water to tourists, and families begging it seemed the wrong thing to do in my mind anyway. I got my tuk-tuk driver to take me to the Central market and we had dinner whilst he told me a bit about the history of the Khmer Rouge and how it affected his family.

Sihanoukville was recommended to me by a couple of travellers, which is about 4 hours south-west of Phnom Penh. It is a beach town, and somewhere to go for a couple of days after you've done Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh. I got there about lunch time, had a walk around and headed to the beach. After spending only 5 minutes on a sun lounger I had my first beggar approach me. In the two hours on the beach I must have been interrupted about 50 times by beggars (both children and victims of Cambodian landmines) asking for money. One of them could see I was lying down, started shaking my sun lounger. About 10 minutes later I booked my return ticket to Phnom Penh for the next morning. The beach was nice, but far too many beggars looking for handouts.

I head into Vietnam on 14th March for 2 weeks, working my way from Saigon/ Ho Chi Min up the coast to Hanoi. From there I have a flight to Singapore, where I am spending two days and then it is on to my final destination, India for ten days. The dream has almost come to an end.

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