Monkeys stole my trousers, and other tales from Asia

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March 16th 2007

Published: March 16th 2007

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Adele and Rob

Welcome to Cambodia

We weren't too sad to turn our backs on Vietnam

As arrivals into new countries go, this was not the most auspicious. We were about 10 miles into Cambodia when our bus's engine abruptly died and refused to be coaxed back into life. The random pile of belts the driver salvaged from the engine bay suggested that we were going nowhere fast. And so it proved: minutes stretched into hours, the shadows grew longer and we repaired to a bar down the road with our fellow passengers, the better to watch the sunset. There was no point in getting stressed: we'd done enough of that at the border crossing from Vietnam, which involved more paperwork than your average mortgage application.

At last a replacement bus turned up. It didn't look like much, but it was hard to tell in the dark and anyway, beggars couldn't be choosers. We clambered on board, sweaty, dirty and gasping for a kip. The bus lurched off at last. But hang on a minute, what was that dreadful noise? And why were we going so ball-achingly slow? There were murmurs of disbelief from the back of the bus as it dawned on us: we were towing the original bus. In the dark, in the middle

Bus stop

Er... welcome to Cambodia

of nowhere, about 100 miles from our beds. Welcome to Cambodia, everyone.

Back in Blighty letters are written to MPs over less than this. Over here, people just start laughing; well, we did anyway. After all, everybody should experience what it's like to be aboard a fully-laden and fairly knackered bus while it tows another bus with a rope made from knotted blankets on rutted dirt roads in the pitch black at least once in their life. It turned out to be quite good fun - even when the tow rope snapped and we were briefly overtaken by the original bus, well out of control, on the approach to a narrow bridge. The look of terror on the driver's face as he sailed past us will stay with me for a long time. The downside of all was that an eight-hour journey ended up becoming a 14-hour odyssey, but you don't get entertainment like this on the National Express, that's for sure.

In spite of - or perhaps because of - this, we were charmed by Cambodia right from the word go. It's only about 150 miles from Saigon in Vietnam to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, but

Midnight at the Tow-asis

No they weren't pulling our legs, just another bus

there is a world of difference between them. Phnom Penh feels much more welcoming and relaxed, even when you're bumbling around the backstreets at pub closing time with your rucksacks weighing you down. There is less traffic, less pushing and shoving, and an eerie hush descends on the place at night, although it still felt safe to wander around. And the people smile so much that you'd never guess how appalling their recent past has been.

Cambodia is still in recovery mode after the horrors of the civil war and Khmer Rouge takeover in the 1970s, when the population was decimated while Pol Pot attempted to turn the country back to 'Year Zero'. Although it is a democracy of sorts these days, everyone tells you that corruption is rife, with only a fraction of foreign aid actually making it past the politicians to the people. The weird mix of luxury 4x4s and people sleeping on the streets seems to bear this out, but equally Phnom Penh seems to have regained much of its pre-Khmer Rouge charcter. Magnificent buildings like the Royal Palace and quirky Russian Market have been restored to their former glory, and the big wide boulevards make

Heavy case load

New country, same bonkers bike loads

this a beguiling place to spend a few days. It's hard to believe that the city was a ghost town during Pol Pot's reign of terror, when its residents were driven out into the countryside to work in the fields - if they were lucky. We visited Tuol Sleng or S-21, a school turned Khmer Rouge concentration camp that has been left largely unchanged since it was liberated by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979; and the 'killing fields' at Choeng Ek where prisoners were executed and flung into shallow graves. Chilling places and even more horrific to think that all this happened a mere 25 years ago.

After a few days in Phnom Penh we headed out west to the town of Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor. Siem Reap is a pleasant enough place that has grown rich from its proximity to the Angkor temple complex: a 50-mile sprawl of temples and tombs flung up in a 300-year building frenzy by the kings of the ancient Khmer Empire. Everybody talks about Angkor, but nothing can prepare you for the scale and ambition of the place. Some of the temples, like the showpiece Angkor Wat, have been

Phnom Penh

Lounging like lizards at the Foreign Correspondents' club. Very civilised...

carefully restored, but others have been left to the jungle and are now a riot of giant tree roots and huge lumps of rock - real-life Indiana Jones territory.

We spent an action-packed three days at Angkor, getting up before dawn every day to beat the tour buses with our 'remorque-moto', which is like a motorbike with a trailer on the back and about as comfy as that sounds. The early start also gave our driver Lurch - possibly not his real name - a head-start on his bloodthirsty peers, and boy did he need it: the poor lad was the slowest, least confident motorcycle rider we've ever come across. But no matter: seeing the temples in all their glory made several days of bouncing around on unmade roads well worth the pain.

After Angkor, we reluctantly headed for Bangkok, where all roads in south-east Asia seem to lead, with the intention of catching a flight to India. But first we had to confront the 'boulevard of broken backsides', the hilariously rough road between Siem Reap and the Thai border. There is an urban myth that a Thai airline bribes the Cambodian government not to repair the road.

Phnom Penh

A culture not even the Khmer Rouge could destroy

We thought this was a load of hot air until... oh, about 50 metres into our journey, when we hit the first of the many jacuzzi-sized potholes we were to encounter and collectively head-butted the roof of our bus. For the next four hours we endured the vigorous juggling of our internal organs while our grim-faced driver attempted to negiotate the lumps, bumps and holes via the age-old medium of driving really fast and ignoring the howls of protest from his passengers. However, in the blink of an eye the horror vanished as we reached the Thai border. Our transport turned from beat-up mini-bus to air-con comfort coach, and potholed dirt track changed to a ribbon of silky-smooth Asian motorway (the first we'd experienced in two months). This, however, was the only respect in which we were glad to be leaving Cambodia. We're definitely going back, and next time it will be for longer than eight days.

Back in Bangkok, our plans to hot-foot it to Delhi were knackered when we discovered it would take the thick end of a week to get an Indian visa. We were secretly pleased, because it was the excuse we need to take

Tuol Sleng

Torture cells

a few days' break on the islands and beaches of southern Thailand. Except that 'a few days' quickly turned into two weeks. We rocked up on a beach called Hat Ton Sai, cut off from the mainland and hemmed in by 200-metre limestone cliffs on all sides. The water was warm, the surrounding beaches beautiful, the sunsets epic and the 'vibe' seriously laid back... it was awful, you really wouldn't have liked it at all. We stayed up on a nearby hill in a shed with an outside toilet frequented by frogs, began a routine of eating and drinking too much and not doing much at all. I didn't even really mind when half of my trekking trousers went missing from our balcony - most likely nicked by the troupe of monkeys on whose manor we were staying.

Our plan was to hop between a few of the local islands, but we didn't get beyond our first stop, Ko Phi Phi. This was one of the places really devasted by the 2004 tsunami; it's back on its feet now, but unfortunately this means sprawling, expensive developments which lure the hordes of the worst of Western holidaymakers. By day, it's

The Killing Fields

1000s of skulls - every one fractured, to save on bullets

all big bellies, tattoos and sunburn (and that's just the ladies); by night, thumping beats and buckets of booze. This is a shame, because the surrounding coast and beaches are postcard-perfect, notwithstanding the fact that visiting them is like being on the Kop End at Anfield during the Merseyside derby. We fear they won't stay like this for long: not if the people who were on our boat during a day trip around the islands were anything to go by. One of them looked positively offended when Adele suggested he might not want to feed the fish his discarded fag butts. Knobbers, the lot of 'em.

We did spend one brilliant day there, though, diving off the coast as part of our 'advanced' dive training. This entailed doing some elementary maths at a depth of 30 metres and a lot of messing about with eggs and chillis (no, we don't know why either), but there was loads of amazing reef and wildlife to see too, including a giant turtle and two-metre long leopard shark which swam around us in a big lazy loop. But Phi Phi itself left us cold, and we scarpered back to Ton Sai at the

Angkor Wat

Just amazing

first available opportunity. This time, though, we resolved not to be so lazy.

The huge cliffs make the surrounding area a climbers' paradise, and as a result the place is full of daredevil types with bulging biceps, ripped six-packs and wild, fearless eyes (and that's just the ladies). In this company our attempts to climb were a bit like turning up to race a grand prix in a hire car, but we resolved to rectify this by signing up for a three-day intensive course to hone our feeble rock-hugging skills.

Bloody nora! This was the most knackering, soul-destroying, cloth-touchingly terrifying experience of our travels so far, but also the most exhilarating, and rewarding on the rare occasions when we got it right. After the first day, my arms were so stiff that they woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me so by spasming excruciatingly. We quickly acquired cuts, bruises and pain in parts of our bodies that we didn't know existed. Zak, our instructor, displayed Zen-like patience as we sat whimpering on rock faces while juveniles scampered past us, but by the end of the course he had succeeded in teaching us to

Ta Prom

It's strictly roots

successfully 'lead', 'rappel' and 'multi-pitch', as well as taking us on a 50-metre abseil down onto the beach from a cave in the cliff-face. However, after three days of this level of punishment we could do no more. As they say, the body is weak but the spirit is gagging... once we regain the use our arms again, that is.

It is sorely tempting for us to stay on Ton Sai. From where I'm writing this, all you can see are huge clumps limestone rising out of the turquoise waters of the Andaman Sea. If I wasn't so bruised it would be pretty damned close to paradise. Which makes it (a) a huge wrench that we're leaving this afternoon to go back to Bangkok and then out of Thailand but (b) the best possible way to finish off our three months in south-east Asia. Next stop: India. Gulp.

Take care,
Rob and Adele x

PS This is the funniest joke we have ever heard
Q: What did the inflatable headmistress say to the inflatable boy who brought a pin into the inflatable school?
A: 'You've let me down, you've let yourself, you've let the whole school down...'