Back to Phnom Penh

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I very nearly miss the bus tback to Phnom Penh thanks to the TutTut driver dropping me at the wrong bus stop! I hijack someone elses TutTut who is going in the direction of the bus station and make it with 5 mins to spare. I notice seats 3 and 4 on this bus also have very little leg room but this time I'm not sat there. In fact I have seats 5 and 6 all to myself with lots of leg room. My stomach is playing up again but I have filched a whole bog roll this time and attempt to use an Asian toilet at our only stop. Quite how you are supposed to use them I can't work out but I manage it somehow.
Back on the bus I notice it has a loo on board but get this on the door is written in english 'PISS ONLY! PLEASE' no shit that's what it said.

We get back to Phnom Penh 20 mins ahead of time and I ring Savanna to come and collect me. While I'm waiting another TutTut driver comes over and starts to talk to me 'Where you fro'?'England 'Where in england?' Hull 'Áh Hull City 2 years now in the English Premier League'- that he'd even heard of Hull was amazing let alone knew about their exploits in the Premiership. English football is big over here - they see every game and read about it too! The World is becoming a smaller place in a lot of ways.

I drop my stuff at Daves and head off to the FCC for a beer. sitting on the veranda on the second floor overlooking the main street along the river I observe what is going on. There is a corn on the cob seller who has a manual oush cart with a pot to boil the cobs and a griddle to finish them off on built into the top of the cart and bags of stripped yellow cobs ready to be cooked hanging from the roof - these are very popular here and pretty 'safe'street food even for delicate stomachs like mine! He keeps changing sides of the road very 15 mins for no reason that I can see. Other food sellers pitch up at various points with their carts selling fresh sugar cane juice - the raw cane is oushed through a mangle several times to extract it. there is a coconut juice seller who cuts the tops off green coconuts pours the juice into a plastic bag then scops out some of the flersh and puts that in the bag too with a straw to drink it with. Then a dried squid seller with cleaned and flatten squid hanging from a rack on the cart servered with salad and chilli sauce. Then ther's a fruit seller who peels and chops the fruit and serves it on a wooden skewers placed into plastic bags - pineapples, melon, apples, mango, papaya. Then a baguette seller with a choice of fillings - a mobile sandwich shop! It struck me that this mobile trade would be cheaper than buying a shop and you could change your location according to where the most customers are at any particular time of day - maybe this is the reason why they move about every 15 minutes.
40 or 50 years ago there were mobile carts selling things on the streets of all the major British cities - sadly no more. The little guys have been pushed out of the market place by Food health and hygiene regulations and competition from the big guys and brands like McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, Pret A Mange. You cant buy a peas and mash, jellied eels, or even hot roasted chestnuts from the street sellers anymore - progress? I think not it's a bloody carve up by the big chains and an excuse to create more jobs for small minded beaurocrats hell bent on telling the rest of us what we can and can't do! Red Tape!

At 16:45 the elephant I saw last week appears again and walks slowly along the river front. The traffic builds up and the TutTuts amass on the street corner waiting to take people home. Rush hour Phnom Penh style.

I'm off to Eastern Cambodia in a couple of days for a week and I suspect internet access is limited. They only have electricity between 6 and 9p.m. at night in many places too so if I don't post anything during this period don't worry about me I will 'reappear'on or around the 22nd or 23rd Dec.

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