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Published: October 27th 2010
This is a blog that spans two days in real time but as far as our travelling adventures go it only spans a very small time. The reasons for this are twofold, one we are for only the second time back in a city we have been in before, Phnom Penh and as such what there is to say may have already been said, and secondly we have done almost nothing of note in this two days other than board a plane and leave Cambodia for Thailand.
I suppose I should document our time in Phnom Penh, although it pains me to do so…..
I have no love for this place, and it was with some joy that I got up from the room that we were staying in with no natural light and headed for the Thai Embassy to try and arrange a Visa for the country. We arrived passports in hand to discover that despite the Visa being free the waiting time for the visa of four days was far from good. We enquired about an express service and it would have cost us $15 each to get the passports back the same day. Far from a fortune but we got the impression this was an under the counter price not over the counter and as such didn’t trust it too much.
We agreed (after some debate) that we would forgo this fee and instead fly into Thailand to get our 30 day visa as opposed to the 15 day version which is available if you enter overland.
With this decided the next part of the plan was to find a decent internet connection and book the flights and a reservation for the arrival night. We headed for the riverfront area and sat and drank tea, and used the computer. We moved on from our first stop to a second for more of the same and a bite to eat for lunch. We then returned to the hotel and continued to use the internet for the rest of the day only broken by a brief interlude for dinner which consisted of an Indian meal.
Our flights booked early on our main focus turned into the hunt for a hotel - not such an easy thing when you don’t know the city, what a good price is and are trying to work in Thai Baht a totally new currency, being converted into either GBP or USD or both. Sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. We retired for the night having totally failed to book a bed for the next night and being thouroughly fed up with this city.
The next morning dawned, not that we saw any sign of it in the room we were in. There was no light until I switched on the strip light on the ceiling. We had another unsatisfactory breakfast and then I went to print the confirmation for the flight from a small internet café around the corner. After that our day consisted of sitting about in the hotel, a taxi ride to the airport and some more sitting about there. We left the country 5 minutes early, a refreshing change on a flight!
Our flight was akin to taking off from Guernsey and touching down at Heathrow, both in timescale and size. Cambodia’s capital’s airport was everything Thailand’s wasn’t - diminutive, quiet, almost tranquil. None of which could be attributed to the behemoth that was Bangkok’s airport, we had to taxi for 10 minutes to find our berth and then had another 10 minutes in a bus to get to our door!
After clearing both immigration and customs with not so much as a raised eyebrow, we then mooched about the airport trying to find a bookshop, as Lou can’t seem to enter a country without the corresponding Lonely Planet, which as the publishing houses around the world will love, has to be the original at full (if not overpriced) price as opposed to the cheap photocopied version available at a snip from every street vender in the entire SE Asia region! By the time we got on the Airport express bus we had wasted a good hour and it was getting to the point where we were both tired. It took us nearly 10 minutes before we noticed that in Thailand they drive on the correct side of the road (the left) a fact which may have made it feel more like home and easier to adjust to at a subconscious level. Once we had noticed this other things started to come into focus - the logos we hadn’t realised we had missed but noticed with glee on our journey - who knew a shell or esso sign could create such a warm feeling?
The bus arrived at its destination the main train station, and we disembarked with a plan to walk the short 1km to the hotel, but after a short distance Lou wasn’t liking the look of the neighbourhood, and we hailed a taxi, in retrospect it was a good call as no sooner had we got into the taxi than it started to rain big style. The journey may have only been a couple of minutes but we got soaked enough exiting the car to know that had we been exposed for any longer soggy would have been such an understatement it would have been like calling the seven star hotel in Dubai an ok place for a weekend break!
The hotel we had arrived at is a 4 star one called the Twin Towers, we have a first night rule where we agree that we can spend a little more the first night in a country, yet oddly this place although far more upmarket than any other we have stayed, was actually as cheap if not cheaper than some of the hostels we were looking at! We were both too tired and too intent on first night rules to leave the hotel for dinner, and so we went to one of the 7, yes seven restaurants in this hotel. We had a decent dinner, followed by a beer in the lounge area where there was a Thai gentleman singin easy listening classics which I have to say was a genius touch and we were both laughing so hard on the inside it was painful. All that was needed was Vic and Bob adding a bit of club style to make it perfect!
We retired for the evening, one of our latest for a long time, tired but happy to be in Thailand and I certainly was glad to be free of Phnom Penh.
I would like to add that we have for the first time failed to take a single picture in 2 days so this is a purely text based entry, which you will have noticed if you have gotten this far! We are continuing to enjoy ourselves, our blogs, and the messages that people are sending us to let us know that they are enjoying them, but there is no reason why anyone of you can’t comment on the blog directly on this site itself!
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lisa
non-member comment
Thought id be the first to comment! Hope Thailand turns out to be great look forward to seeing some piccys soon take care lise x