Sunday May 31st 2009 4000 islands

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Sunday May 31st 2009 4000 islands

Another early morning as we loaded up and headed for our boat to the mainland and left our four thousand islands chapter behind us. A minivan picked us up on the river bank and for once it was just the 2 of us but this was only for the 45 minutes drive to the Cambodian Border. It probably could have been a quicker drive if the drier didn’t stop off so she could pop into mass for a quick pray on the way though. We pulled up at the boarder and got pretty ripped on exchanging the remaining kip we had, didn’t actually spend too much in Laos in the end, and proceeded to get our passports exit stamped. I think we are supporting the local official’s rice whiskey habits with the little “fees” they charge you to stamp passports. Every single counter you have to go to you leave with a dollar less in you pockets.

We successfully got our new visas and happily had survived another country on our trip, now for the Cambodian fun.They put us on a coach at the boarder which wasn’t too bad at all actually, even the air conditioning worked and the roads seemed decent enough quality. All was going until we decided to take a turn off the lovely main road onto a dirt track and traveled through the Cambodian countryside. The track was lined with pretty large villages who are all logging the local forests. Their houses were a pretty impressive sights all wooden built and very traditional Khmer in style. From that point on I thing they decided to turn off the ac and the journey just seemed like it wa never going to end. Darkness fell and we still weren’t there, it ended up being about 10 hours sitting on a sticky bus and just drained us completely, long bus journeys are for nighttime in the future I think.

The dirt track finally led us into Phnom Penh and as always we were for no reason dropped off in the middle of nowhere outside of the centre. We teamed up with John and Sarah from South Africa and decided to share a tuk tuk into the city and find somewhere to live. It was 9.30 by this time and we were all starving and not in great form after our bus journey. Arriving at night makes everything so much harder to sort yourself out in a city. Especially a large capital city, we let our books guide us and picked somewhere for the tuk tuk to bring us too. Ladened down with four adults and four giant rucksacks the vehicle chugged its way over a big bridge almost rolling backwards at one stage and brought us into a pretty seedy dark looking area. Our books said it was 2 blocks from the royal palace and central tourist areas and the hotel looked alright so we checked in. We hit the dodgy streets to find some food and the city didn’t give the best first impression. Our first local greeter were two rats that could eat a small dog and a couple of cockroaches who would probably have a good go at the rats so holding our breaths we wandered through the dark rubbish lined streets for a little bit to no avail and finally took a tuk tuk to find somewhere. We actually found a nice place and had some good food, not too cheap in PP though.

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Comments

[Paul]

train the cockroaches to ride the rats and you may have a nice side line to fall back on?