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Published: March 28th 2018
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Hi,
The idea of writing about my travels started in Ecuador 10 years ago. To begin with I just sent a group e mail which then became a blog once they were easy to use. Recently I have got out of the habit of doing it and this is partly because it is sometimes easier to post on a Facebook.
I am now in SE Asia and have a three part trip and this post is about the first section , a trip to Cambodia.
Wanting to see Angkor Wat has been on my bucket list for 10 years, punctuated by Chris telling me how fabulous it was. He is back in the U.K. Recovering from knee surgery, and making very good progress . Hopefully it will mean we have many more trips together.
So without Chris I decided to join a tour for this trip and a chose a relatively cheap option with Intrepid Travel. We met in Bangkok and early next morning set off on a long bus journey from Thailand to Siem Reap. The border crossing was relatively straightforward and we got to our destination about 5pm.
The trip was pretty full on
and the next morning we headed off to Angkor Wat at 4am and as we approached the site the magnificence of the main temple started to emerge in the early morning light. What a sight! We stayed to watch the sunrise and it was magnificent. We then spent nine hours in total visiting other temples and this is where the downside of an organised tour really hit home. I had set aside 5 nights on my own version of the trip but it was all done in one day. Next day I did a fabulous Cambodian cookery course and loved learning about how to maximise the flavours.
The next day we took a public bus to Kompong Cham on the banks of the Mekong and stayed in a pretty flash hotel. We cycled to a local village enjoying seeing fabulous exotic fruits on the trees, the jackfruit were the size of basketballs. The return took us over a very wobbly bamboo bridge. That evening we had a great dinner in a local house with so much flavour.
The visit was really short and next day we set off for Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and a name
that many associate with the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. It was a long day and after the journey we set off to the killing fields and S21, the latter was the interrogation centre. It was all pretty chilling and moving. Man’s inhumanity to man. Setting off on the visit at 3pm in 36 degrees was maybe not such a good idea and I felt wiped out. The hotel in Phnom Penh was pretty grotty but as it was booked as part of the trip I had little control. Our tour leader Peak was disinterested when I said how grotty it was. I knew this was a “basic” trip but that doesn’t mean it has to be dirty. What it did mean was there were days when we were free to do our own thing and the next day I was up and out and at the central market by 7am. It was a slightly disappointing building but the next venue was the Royal palace which made up for it.
Cambodia has three million visitors each year and one million are from China, as you know my favourite tourists !! Our group was ten people from the UK,USA, Canada
and Australia and six female, four male and a mix of ages. Later that day we headed off to Chombok for a home stay, this was one of the features of the Intrepid trip that appealed to me. We stayed in two village houses in a beautiful peaceful part of the country. We were five to a room on mattresses on the floor with fans and mosquito nest and the bathroom was a squat toilet and “Mandy” shower which we shared with the family. We had a delicious meal cooked by the local people and were then entertained by the local girls dancing.
Next morning we went to breakfast on an cart pulled by an ocean, a Friendly local lad called Leng took us on a short walk and it ended with swimming in a lovely cool pool below a waterfall. Reluctantly we headed off to Sihouanville a coastal town. It was a huge disappointment, the local beach was small and dirty and there was a massive amount of building work going on, funded by the Chinese, to create big hotels with 24 hour casinos. The group did a snorkelling trip but I went to visit a charity project to understand a bit more about the local people. I was very grateful to an ex nurse David, from Canada who spent time explaining about the place. The project also ran a training restaurant for young people in the town and I had a fabulous tasty lunch. I made a donation in memory of an old friend Kevin who died recently and who worked in community development. The next morning it was back to Phnom Penh and after along bus trip there was only time for a quick trip to the local tourist market before we all went to dinner together. The final day of the trip was ten hours from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh city, including crossing the border order into Vietnam. This was the end of the trip for some but for me just a change of group and leader as the second part would be a trip to Vietnam. By this final day six of the group had varying degrees of stomach problems and it emerged that one girl had been ill most of the trip, so potentially she could have been the source. It made the last night meal a bit flat as two people were too ill to come and our leader chose a random restaurant that was very touristy.
So that is Cambodia done and looking forward to Vietnam.
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