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Published: November 20th 2007
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Phnom Penh was a bit of a shock to us after a sleepy southern Laos, so it took us a while to adjust to the touts, beggars, pollution and traffic. We spent a great few days in the city visiting the City Palace and the chilling Tuol Sleng museum (S21 Security Prison) where 100 victims per day were executed by the Khmer Rouge. We also spent a day by the pool at a posh hotel and watched the kings birthday fire works on the Mekong river from the Foreign Correspondents Club (we call it the FCC) Walking around the city is not an easy task, the pavements are full of stalls, gaping holes, mopeds, low hanging branches and the traffic lights have no meaning so it’s a case of looking in every direction and hoping for the best!
Our next destination is 220km North West to Siem Reap. The bus doesn’t go far before it gets a puncture but this is easily fixed by a man (plus several hangers on and observers) on the road side. We arrive to serious amounts of tuk-tuk drivers where one offers us a ‘free’ trip to our chosen guest house, we guessed this may
be the commission scam where they charge if we don’t stay at the guest house, which is fair enough. We drive round the corner and the driver’s ‘brother’ gets on - now we realize the scam is not about commission when the ‘brother’ gives us the hard sell insisting that he will be our driver to visit the temples the next day. When we tell him that we plan to hire bikes and several times ask him politely to be quiet and just take us to the guest house, it all turns a bit nasty and we didn’t think we would make it into town - not a nice first impression of Siem Reap.
The next morning we got up at 4:30am and cycle in the dark with head torches on, for our dawn raid on the amazing Angkor Wat. A fantastic setting we will never forget but we were surprised to see so many tour groups already out so early, as the day went on however, we realized that sun rise was relatively quiet in comparison. Our bikes just about took us around the ‘big loop’, taking in all the major temples including Ta Prohm and Ta Son,
both over run by jungle with tree roots holding up buildings, crumbling Preah Khan and finally the Bayon with 216 stone carved faces staring at you. By the end of the day we were exhausted and all templed out, but a brilliant experience. Siem Reap has some really modern cafes and cool restaurants, we spent a great evening in the Dead Fish Tower - a converted warehouse restaurant with different seating levels and a crocodile farm! Cambodia certainly seems to be a country of huge contrasts with ultra modern cafes, big cars (mainly Toyota Land Cruisers) for the very rich, next to rustic farms and the seriously poor (sharing a Toyota Camry).
An early start took us to the boat landing for our trip South West to the rustic riverside town of Battambang. The 5 hour boat trip which actually took 7 hours, turned out to be very scenic passing through floating villages with waving children and fishermen. Sitting on the roof of the boat was definitely the most fun, ducking under bridges and branches but the baking sun left us very burnt and ready to finally arrive. Battambang was a place to wonder, looking at the beautiful preserved
French period architecture that lines the banks of the Slung Sangker River. We hired 2 ‘Moto’s’ (moped taxi) for the morning and had great fun negotiating the unmade, dusty road to the Phnom Sampaeu - an old temple used as a prison by the Khmer Rouge and 2 chilling killing caves. We hired a local lad to be our guide and it turned out to be more interesting to hear about his family, how he lives and his hopes for the future (from what we understood). We also had a ride on the Bamboo Train, which is basically a little wooden platform on wheels powered by a motor and goes unbelievably fast - a lot of fun! That is until you meet someone coming the other way and you have to break, get off, lift the wheels & platform off the rails and start over again! It is still used by locals though to transport live stock.
It seems in Cambodia all roads lead to Phnom Penh, so a 220km, 6 hour journey South East took us back to the now familiar ‘Spring’ guest house for a quick stop over before heading South to Sihanoukville the next day. A
fairly uneventful 175km journey with Cambodian karaoke CD’s playing the now familiar tunes took us to ‘Costa Del Cambodia’. We were certainly ready for a bit of relaxation on the beach, but Serendipity beach although a pretty spot was not peaceful. Full of local kids and ladies selling bracelets, books, offering massages, manicures & pedicures - there was no hope of relaxing, but the people watching was great. We decided to hire some electric bikes the next day to tour the area and visit some quieter beaches. The bikes were great fun, they have a range of 40km and you peddle to get up hills, so a little bit like mopeds really without the noise & pollution, we decided that everyone in Cambodia should have one. We stayed in a British run guest house called the Monkey Republic, complete with luxuries such as imported British food, a Play station room, 25p draft beer and great music.
We could have easily spent a few weeks here but 3 days was our limit before a short hop 40km East to the laid back town of Kampot, mainly for a trip to the Bokor National Park. The French hill station was twice
abandoned, first in the 1940’s and again in the early 70’s. So the road is horrifically bumpy, it took a 4 wheel drive monster truck 2.5 hours to get to the cool misty summit to see the abandoned hotel and casino, it had a real ghost town feel about the place. Unfortunately a lad in our group got sick so we had to cancel the waterfall and boat trip and get back down ASAP because it looked quite bad. A day later we headed 40mins up the road to Kep, a seaside town famous for its fresh crab. We stayed in a great bungalow perched on the hill side with amazing views and our most rustic yet, complete with outdoor bathroom and a range of creepy crawlies. We spent most of the time enjoying our veranda and hammocks, we also had a lovely seafood meal of crab & shrimp with Kampot pepper from the nearby plantations. ‘Mr David’, a young lad who befriended us from the moment we arrived at the guest house, arranged a bus for us back to Phnom Penh for the 3rd time!
We arrived at our usual guest house to be told it was full;
the city now seemed generally much busier so a bit of a struggle to get a room for the night, we definitely have the feeling now that it’s getting into high season for tourists and will be a lot busier everywhere from now on. Finally we managed to get a room and it’s really nice to return to a familiar place. We have grown to love Phnom Penh and Cambodia, it’s such a busy, mad place with 6 people on a moped, ladies walking around in pajamas (still not entirely sure what that’s all about), the tuk-tuk drivers shouting ‘you want tuk-tuk sir/madam?’, kids shouting ‘you want to buy book?’ all seems so natural, funny and almost normal to us now. We spent our last day in Cambodia looking at the central market, seeing the last few sights and organizing our trip into Saigon in Vietnam, before enjoying another posh meal at the FCC.
After our most official overland border crossing yet we made it to Vietnam, we are currently in Ho Chi Min City (HCMC or Saigon) where we plan to spend a few days before making our way North towards Hanoi.
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