Matt and Kylie

Back to Phnom Penh and on to Thailand (Finally)

On returning to Phnom Penh from Sihanoukville we stopped at a completely different bus stop to the one we had when we fist arrived from Siem Reap. This threw a bit of a spanner in the works since I usually like to know where I am and where I’m headed so that we can at least pretend to the throng of eager tuk tuk drivers that we know what we are doing. Having no idea we decided to just take a ride from one of them… as soon as we started looking more came up to us and even though they were all holding the same sign for the same guest house competition was still some how fierce. We eventually got in one tuk tuk and set off to the underwhelmingly named “Okay Guesthouse”. Luckily it turned out to be more than just ok… it was actually a nice cheap place… something of an oasis of cheapness in what we were still finding to be a fairly expensive country.

The next day I was feeling like crap again with another bout of my flu which flared up after after being relatively dormant at the beach (I still kind of have it – not getting any worse though so I’m not worrying about it) but we still managed to stagger down to the Royal palace and the Silver Pagoda before calling it a day and chilling out with a movie.

The next day we had a cooking course booked across the road from our Guest house where we were going to cook some yummy Cambodian food. I’m not sure if it was my lingering sickness or just a general brain fart by both of us but for some reason we decided to have breakfast before going to the course… big mistake… how exactly we expected to cook awesome food and then expect to fit it is still a mystery to us both. Anyway I cooked a Fish Amok, which tasted great but I’m 100% certain I will not be able to recreate it accurately due to weird ingredients and a few missing steps that were not covered. Kylie cooked a chicken, mango, cashew dish and then we both sat down and attempted to stagger through the meal. The course included two dishes so we decided to cook spring rolls next instead of full mains due to our fullness, we made about 40 spring rolls though so there was no way we were going to get through them. We gladly left them with the kitchen staff for their lunch after sampling a few and rolled back across the road to pass out.

The next day we were leaving Cambodia for Thailand which was a relief after not being able to get to Bangkok the first time. Our tuk tuk driver was a bit of a character and his motorbike looked like it might have had a pretty hard life. It had a blue plastic bag where the Speedo should be, a piece of wood as a stand and a water bottle as a gas tank. He tried about 30 times to kick start the bike before asking me to get out and give him a push so he could crash start it. It was a relief to get to the airport but the on going getting to Thailand fiasco still had more to offer – on trying to check in we discovered that Air Asia doesn’t allow more than 15Kg of checked luggage per passenger… we had about 36Kg between us so after a long confusingly drawn out stupid fight with the check in staff who didn’t seem to know what they were doing we ended up having to pay US$25 in excess baggage charges. Add in the sneaky US$25 per person departure tax and the “cheap” flight was no longer cheap… we should have just told Air Asia to shove it when they wouldn’t give our money back in Vietnam and just taken the bus. I guess we were mainly just annoyed at them with the way they handled the Bangkok closure, they didn’t give refunds – just company credit and not for the full fare amount we had paid. We also couldn’t use the credit to book online and had to ring them on an international toll call – not that they ever picked up the phone.

It was a bit of a crappy ending to a good time in Cambodia, we were both left fuming at Air Asia and have vowed to never fly with them again, but by the time we touched down in Thailand we had calmed down a bit. I would definitely like to get back to Cambodia – especially Sihanoukville – in a few years to see how it all turns out.

Sihanoukville – The beach bum’s life….

After spending a few more days in Phnom Penh checking the place out and taking it slightly easy after coming down with some kind of crappy tropical flu (I’m pretty sure it was malaria and I have such a good immune system that it didn’t really affect me ha ha) we decided to head down to the coast and hang out on the beach for a bit.

We weren’t really sure what to expect of Sihanoukville as we hadn’t read too much about it and hadn’t seen any pictures etc… well… now that I’ve been there I can honestly say its my idea of paradise! Well close anyway… but a nice white sandy beach, with clear blue water gently lapping at the feet of your sun lounger whilst being waited on by the friendly folk of one of the many on beach bars puts it at about a 9/10 in my book… it loses a few points for the constant roving beggars, many missing limbs etc and the general lack of waves (the ocean is just a bit boring without them). On the other hand the 50c beers and plentiful eye candy push it up a couple of points again (just got whacked over the head by kylie).

So that was pretty much our lot for the 5 nights we stayed there… good food and drink, lounging around and swimming when the 35 degree heat got too much, feet in the sand watching the sun go down, eating diner literally on the waterfront with he waves lapping over our feet, before wandering back up the road to our beach shack guest house.

We stayed in our own little bungalow at a place called Monkey Republic which was pretty cool… cheap at US$7 but with pretty basic facilities – cold shower, no air con – it was all we needed though and we finally had an excuse to use the mosquito net we bought in NZ and had marched around half the world without ever opening. The first night we had a few unwelcome guests in a couple of behemoth cockroaches which Kylie didn’t really appreciate the presence of and some bloody weird noises outside which we later discovered were the bats that lived in the garden outside. A can of Raid the next day got the roaches to move out and things were pretty comfy for the next four nights. 

In fact things were so comfy that I thought that this sort of thing could be a pretty good life, running a humming little guest house in a place like Sihanoukville I mean… we actually saw an ad in one of the local advertisers listing a turn key guest house business for US $25,000 – pretty tempting, of course I don’t really know enough to just jump into something like that, but if life ever got boring enough… who knows…

The best and worst of Cambodia

We have now arrived in the Capital – Phnom Penh after a 5ish hour bus ride from Siem Reap where we spent 5 nights.  The trip was good, with lots of interesting scenery and sights along the way. We travelled on the Mekong Express Limousine bus which whilst not quite up to the standard of an actual limousine was nice and comfy and came with free snacks, water and an attendant who cleaned the toilet on the bus at least 15 times during the trip (seriously!!).

Before we left Siem Reap we of course visited the Temples of Angkor which were pretty amazing. The tuk-tuk driver we had decided to hire the day we arrived turned up at 8am like planned and we set off not really knowing what the hell we should try to see. There are sooo many temples and because we didn’t really know much about them or have any in particular we wanted to see first we decided to just do the typical tourist trail which is made up of two circuits called the small loop and the big loop.

Starting with the small loop we headed straight to Angkor Thom and explored the many structures inside its walls. We saw a few more temples before visiting another of the famous ones called Ta Prohm which has trees and jungle growing all over it. This was also the place that they filmed some scenes for the Tomb Raider movie. We spent quite a bit of time at this one and Kylie ended up making friends with a few of the local kids as we came out one of the gates, playing naughts and crosses in the dirt with them. One little girl in particular was pretty funny. She was trying to sell Kylie bracelets and for a constant 5 minutes repeated over and over and over “one dollllaarrrrrhhhh ooookkaaaaayoooo, one dollllaarrrrrhhhh ooookkaaaaayoooo”. After Ta Prohm the next big temple we saw was the most famous and well preserved – Angkor Wat. Unluckily for us it had scaffolding all over it so we couldn’t get to the very top of the central area, and it didn’t impress Kylie to have scaffolding in her photo’s but it was still amazing none the less. We also saw some more monkeys and even had one try to come and say hello, which we promptly ran away from.

The second day we did the big loop and saw many more temples, not being complete temple nerds we got through this loop in half a day and were pretty much templed out by this stage, we both decided that we probably could have just spent one day but we were glad to have seen as much as we had anyway.

Back in Siem Reap town many more hours were spent in pub street, where I found the US $0.50 beers and great choice of food too tempting to pass up despite the fact that we are finding things in Cambodia really expensive, we can’t keep up the lifestyle we enjoyed in Vietnam sadly. I guess we figured because Cambodia is poorer than Vietnam it would also be cheaper but its just not the case… a meal each plus dessert and a couple of drinks each in Vietnam might cost $12-20 NZ Dollars with $20 being a damn good meal. Here in Cambodia on the other hand the same sort of food would cost $25-40 NZ Dollars. No worries though we are just going to rein our selves in a bit and hope for cheaper food in other countries. Another interesting thing is the level of service you get in the hotel for the money you spend US $10-12 still seems to be a good spot for us and gets a nice looking room but at our Siem Reap hotel the rooms were not really serviced and it was a bit of a struggle to get soap and toilet paper… could just be the one place, we will know after a few more weeks I guess. The staff at our Phnom Penh hotel actually do seem more on to it so far.

In Phnom Penh we have this morning visited some of the sights of Cambodia’s dark past. We first headed to Tuol Sleng Museum which is on the site of the infamous S-21 prison/torture camp. We spent around 2 hours there and viewed the massive array of grisly photo’s and depressing stories before watching a 1 hour documentary telling the story of a couple during the Khmer Rouge reign who were both eventually killed. After that we caught our tuk tuk out to the Killing fields of Choeung Ek where the prisoners from S-21 where taken to be executed after they had a confession tortured out of them. It was pretty eerie walking between the pits which seemed far too small to contain the 100’s of bodies found in each of them. The central memorial tower built on site is particularly chilling as it contains thousand and thousands of sculls piled on top of each other. It leaves you wondering how something like that could ever be allowed to have happened.

Super Siem Reap! (Yes it’s kitsch… indulge me…)

We arrived in Cambodia at 4.45pm to 27 degrees and Siem Reap is a little charmer!  We were promptly swept up into the short queue for a visa and within 5 minutes had breezed through the practically non-existent customs and in to the outside world!  At the airport, they have a fixed price vehicle system for a ride into town.  The local Cambodians we encountered were incredibly polite and spoke perfect English

Our handy driver ‘suggested’ a hotel to us which was a bit more than what we wanted to spend per night for 5 nights (USD$20).  They told us they could discount it to $17… we saw the room (pretty nice, A/C, cable TV, balcony etc) and were still weary at the price… we told them thanks, but we were looking for something in the $12-15 range… the price made it down to $15 but we decided to not take the first room we saw and headed back to our waiting taxi.  The hotel staff then came running out yelling ‘OK, OK….$12!’   Room sold. 

Our driver also offered to be our driver and guide for the three days we will spend at the Ankor Temples for a fixed price.  We told him that we wanted to try and take a tuk tuk instead – handily, his brother is a tuk tuk driver – so we have decided to hire him for 2 days.

We headed out for dinner, on the way managing to buy the new (August 2008) Cambodian Lonely Planet and a flag patch for USD$4…. Matt is VERY excited about its good quality.. you can hardly tell it’s a copy!  We tried out the local Khmer cuisine for dinner which was really yummy, Matt’s came served in a coconut!  During dinner a boy come up to us, wanting to know where we were from and if we would buy his book.  When we told him we were from NZ, he named the capital, human and sheep population, the North, South and Stewart Island, and that we had a new Prime Minister, but the old one was Helen Clark.  He looked about 8.

After dinner we managed to wander into an ice cream parlour (fancy that!) and then we found Pub St.  Pub St was fantastic!  An eclectic mix of cultures and tastes, pounding out good music serving cheap drinks to the throngs of South East Asian backpackers.  We are having an amazing time and LOVING Siem Reap.

Some stats on Cambodia (according to Lonely Planet)

- Population: 15 million

- Life expectancy: 58 years

- Infant mortality rate: 9.5%

- Bombs dropped on Cambodia: 539,000 tonnes

- Number of Psychiatrists: 20