9th day

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Just to remind you Pol pot came to power inn 1975 and the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, so a heck of a lot of damage for 4-5 years.

Moving on. Last night we went for a tuk tuk ride into town. We went to the Independence monument. It was very pretty, all lit up for Khmer New Year celebrations. We then walked along the boulevard for a while. Phnom Pen can be a very beautiful place. There were lots of interesting things look at on the streets with heaps of people everywhere. Its very hard for an Ausie to appreciate the idea of “heaps of people. It just packed no matter where you are. Street corners, footpaths, roads, parks. Etc. The previous day we went for a cyclo ride around town. I really enjoyed it. A cyclo is a bicycle that has had a seat mounted on the front.. You sit in it and they take you around the city. It looked like really hard work for the men that did this for a living. Making a living in Cambodia is a challenge I suspect. For instance nothing that you do allow you to sit back and just wait for the business. It is incredibly competitive no matter the activity. So if you are a cyclo rider you need to be harassing everyone to give them a ride. The other methods of transportation around the cities of Cambodia is motorbike and tuk as well as taxies. There are thousands of motorbike riders that are constantly trying to take you to another place. The locals use all of these modes of transport constantly. So if you are a local you simply flag down a motorbike, jump on the back, agree on a price and off you go. The roads here are something else. The death toll in Cambodia is four per day. I am totally surprised at how low it is.

Yesterday we saw a guy transporting a huge pane of glass on one of these motor bikes. So he must have flagged down a motor bike and then just put this pane of glass which was about 1 meter wide and say 3 meters high between him and the driver and off they went.

A lot of the vehicles are not registered here. So the cops try and catch those that are not registered to get them to pay a fine. The fine however goes to the cop and not the government so whenever the cops try and catch someone they try to escape. Yesterday we saw a cop grab the handlebars of a motorbike to pull it off the road so the rider hit the cop and escaped from him in the traffic. While there is a lot of poverty around here, there a quite a few very wealthy people too. There are lots of Mercedes and range rovers around the place. Corruption no doubt pays.

Along the way to our restaurant last night we stopped off at a park to see the locals “exercise”. It was totally lame. They all stand in a group and dance to the direction of a guy at the front. This guy supplies his own speakers and stands at the front showing the moves just like an aerobics instructor. The music is generally dance modern dance music and there are all ages there. They apparently pay 50 cents to the guy and can dance all night. I guess looking at the crowd it was good clean fund for young people. The music was almost unbearably loud as each of these guys is in competition with the others so they try and drown out the music of the competing dance business. They all had huge speakers that were totally distorting the sound due to the volume they were running them at.

They also had a fountain that was very beautiful and the colored lights and the way the strums of water shot up were choreographed to the music that was blearing. It was very cool and I could have watched it for hours.

I really think I could live here. It would be challenging but the people are all very nice and life is cheap. As long as you stay away from the foreigner tourist places, you can live here very cheaply. Phnom Penh is more interesting than Siem Ripe as it is significantly bigger. There are obviously lost of foreigners making a living here both working for others and also running businesses. There was an ad in the paper for a manager to work for the Abc network here.

The restaurant we went to was the fancies we had seen yet. The service was crap!. I had a deep-fried whole fish with tamarind sauce and Lisa had a green curry. The food was good.. We have gotten used to good service here. Every restaurant is massively overstaffed. Guess employees are very cheap here so for instance at lunch we had almost the same number of waiters at tour table as were of us. The restaurant for dinner still had a heap of people booth they just stood around chatting without working. Dino our guide used to be a manager in a restaurant and mentioned how by brining in western management techniques he lowered the staff by 50% but got them to work a lot harder and better.

This morning Lisa and I went back into town. We were only leaving for the boat at 11am so got a tuk tuk to the river and sat in a very nice café and had breakfast while reading the paper. We have been reading about the problems in Bangkok and we sure got out of there just in time. We were very fortunate with out timing.

Right now we are on a boat from Phnom Pen to Chao Doc in Vietnam. It is a very fast boat and it is speeding down the Mekong. Not sure we can really call our rivers, rivers, This is massive. We are still a long way (as I hundreds of km ) from the mouth and there are huge tankers and ships everywhere. No wonder these rivers are so critical to live here. The fishermen make a living from it, the population gets huge amounts of fish from it and there are millions of families that depend on it daily. It has gotten substantially bigger since we left Phnom Penh. It must b over a km wide now.

It’s getting really bumpy no so I will get back to this later.

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