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January 15th 2009

Published: February 3rd 2009

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TeamWAR

Lazy Beach

At it's busiest.

After spending new years eve in Bangkok we headed for the Cambodian border at Trat and after getting ripped off for our visas were soon on the road to Sihanoukville, a beach town on the south coast. Our main reason for going there was because we had heard about a place called Lazy Beach. It’s on an island called Koh Rong a few hours boat ride off the coast of Sihanoukville with nothing but 10 bungalows a bar/restaurant and a beautiful ‘lazy’ beach. We managed to get a cancellation booking which turned out to be pretty lucky as the place was booked out for weeks in advance. So the next morning we were on the beach with all of our stuff waiting for the boat to take us over. The boat couldn’t get too near to the beach so all the bags were loaded into a massive Esky (cool box to you and me) and floated over to the boat. I was thinking to myself that I was gonna have to get into that to make it there myself but Steve heroically offered to give me a piggy back over!!
A couple of hours later we arrived at an amazing beach

Lazy Beach

YES - this was the place where I proposed!!! Good innit?

which was to be our retreat for the next few days. Our hut was made out of wood with a nice balcony with hammocks and inside just a couple of beds and a small bathroom. The sunset was shaping up to be a good one so Steve suggested that we get a bottle of wine and go down to the beach.
.....little did I know that he was planning to propose!!!

So that was it, I proposed to Kelly on a deserted beach at sunset over a bottle of wine and a tube of Pringles!

It was such a shame to have to leave a few days later, but it was time to move on. The morning we left the island I could see in the distance the white water of the wave breaking out in the open sea and I was not looking forward to the two hour boat journey back to the mainland.
I was right to be concerned. The first ten minutes of the journey were fine and then we hit the open sea. The waves were massive, the boat rocked and rolled over at times dropping what felt like ten foot, I thought we

On the Sea

Our way back from Lazy Beach, such a quiet ride at this point....

weren’t going to make it, the life jacket went on and then I started to feel sea sick and started to panic about throwing up over the side in front of load of people I had only known for four days. Luckily, after about an hour the waves calmed down a bit and we made it back to the beach in one piece. We were very glad to see land again, but I have to say the beach was well worth it.
With our new boating buddies (one of whom works for the UN and lives in Cambodia) we made for the capital city Phnom Penh for a couple of nights.

Phnom Penh
There are a couple of major ‘tourist’ sites in Phnom Penh; The S-21 Prison (Toul Sleng Museum) and the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. S-21 was originally a high school, but taken over by Pol Pot and his security forces and turned into a torture prison (you can find out more info on-line about Pol Pot and his Regime). The prison has been kept more or less the same as when it was abandoned. On the downstairs floor there are rooms with iron beds in them

The Killing Fields

Literally hundreds of skulls fill the monument.

and photographs on each wall of the prisoner that was found in there when it was eventually discovered. The next rooms have rows and rows of photographs almost like mugshots of the people who were tortured and killed - men, women and children. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge only 7 people survived incarceration and torture at this place. The rest were either tortured to death or sent to Choeung Ek outside the city centre and bludgeoned to death with various assortments of weapons into mass graves. At the memorial site you can walk around the mass grave sites and in the centre they have built a massive tower which houses hundreds of skulls from the victims and piles of discarded clothes at the bottom that were discovered in the 80’s when the land was excavated.

Siem Reap
After a couple of days in Phnom Penh we wanted to go to arguably the best collection of temples in the world - Angkor Wat, so we booked a bus north to Siem Reap.
After checking into our hotel we called our tuk tuk driver, Mr Bunthy, whom our friend from Phnom Penh had recommended. Mr Bunthy gave us a

Angkor Thom

Welcome to Bayon!

good price to drive us around the sites for two days and we arranged for him to collect us the next morning for sunrise at Angkor Wat. Mr Bunthy arrived promptly at 5am and we made our way. We waited and waited at Angkor Wat for the sun to come up along with the hoards of other tourist just to get that one shot with no one else in - which finally we did.
The rest of the day Mr Bunthy drove us round a selection of different temples including Bayon which has the iconic stone faces that you always see in tourist Cambodia shots and Ta Prohm probably the most famous as this is where some of the film Tomb Raider was filmed. (They love Angelina in this part of Cambodia, there is even a bar called Angelina’s in town)
We the next day we did much of the ‘same same, but different’, we did more temples and sights, although we didn’t get up as early, we did go to the original temple site of Phnom Bakheng to watch the sunset, apparently a great place to see Angkor Wat from high up too. We arrived nice and early about

Ta Prohm

I was the first person to discover this site... amazing eh!

4pm as we’d heard the place gets very, very busy with tourists at sunset. We sat around and waited, we had good seats but as the sun was coming down to set, a line of clouds covered the horizon and it disappeared. Some might say we wasted our time... I say we still got a good view of Angkor Wat - always the optimist!
Later that night we went into town (Siem Reap) to get dinner and have a few beers in one of the more popular bars ‘Angkor What?’ - geddit?!!? And we had our feet massaged by hundreds of tiny fish - they swim around your feet nibbling off all the dead skin. Lovely!!!
After that we went on a knackered old bus back down to Phnom Penh. We got our visas sorted out for Vietnam and chilled in a lovely hotel pool that the public can use and finally spent our last night in a restaurant called Romdeng. The restaurant which is run by a children’s Cambodian charity, takes young homeless children off the street to work and build a better life for themselves. The food really was fantastic, my favourite was the fish amok, a kind

Vietnam

Old lady crosses the road. The traffic works it's way around.

of fish coconut curry that is very mild and tasty - highly recommended if you are ever in town.

Vietnam
After a six hour bus journey and a one hour wait at the boarder we arrived into Ho Chi Minh city, or also known as Saigon. To say the town is busy is an understatement. Apparently there are eight million inhabitants and around three million motorbikes. They are teeming on every street. They come from all directions and are very noisy hooting their horns and weaving around people crossing the street. Crossing the street is a mission in itself, traffic lights are rarely seen so the way to cross, when there is about one hundred motorbikes and cars flying past, is to just step out into the road and continue to walk slowly - not stopping or speeding up - just a constant slow walk. It’s amazing as all these bikes, cars and buses slow down and drive around you. It’s not as if they are all coming from the right either, the bikes generally go any direction they like on the roads, so it’s best to look around and just walk. The Green Cross Code man would have

Ho Chi Minh City

I WANT TO LICK YOUR FEET

a fit if he saw it!!
We were met by a man as soon as we stepped off the bus who took us to his guest house just down the road in one of the small streets. We were very enthusiastically welcomed by his wife and grandmother and the pet dog, who was tiny and tied to a table most of the time. The dog, for some reason had a thing with peoples feet and at any given moment would come over to lick your feet?!

Our first stop in the tourist trail was to visit the region of Cu Chi which is where the Viet Cong dug an underground maze of tunnels that stretched all the way to the Cambodian border. The Viet Cong, lived and ate in special underground rooms and used the tunnels to burrow into enemy territory to fight then burrowed back again so that they were never seen. These tunnels eventually helped them to defeat the Americans in the war. To say the tunnels we small would be an understatement! They were definitely designed for the slight of build Vietnamese and not for westerners, there is a section where you can go underground and

Cu Chi tunnels

Boy it's hot in here.

see for yourself. After the distressing caving adventure in New Zealand I opted to stay above ground but Steve went down to see for himself. He did three sets of tunnels each one going deeper and deeper, the deepest was 6 meters underground.
Later in the day we were treated to a snack of steamed tapioca (root like vegetable) and tea which is what Viet Cong pretty much lived on whilst hiding out in tunnels.

The next stop was to see the war remnants museum. Both of us were not really clear what happened during the war and what involvement the Americans had, and to be honest that was still the case when we left the museum. But what we did see was endless pictures of Vietnamese being tortured and killed and photos of the effects that Napalm and Agent Orange had on civilians. It was pretty horrific.

So, to lighten things up we went back into town to work out a plan of what we would do next. After checking our bank balance and looking at what we wanted to achieve for the last month, we realised that we didn't have enough money to do it all,

Vietnam

Fantastic choice of street food.

so we decided it best to head back to Thailand to sit on a beach for the remainder of our trip - to make sure we came home nice and brown. So we spent the last few days looking around town and visiting the local markets and eating the fantastic street food. We then bought a flight back to Bangkok. Looks like we'll have to see more of Vietnam another time :-(

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