Phnom Penh

5 nights in Phnom Penh. Fantastic place, although I'm getting particularly tired of two things. Firstly fat ugly Western men with young Cambodia's (this is worse than in Thailand!), second (and this one is just sad more than annoying, and is an important indicator of where Cambodia is and can move to) the constant barrage of children coming up to you to sell things (books generally) - which you shouldn't buy because it doesn't hep them get off the streets, and their selling items puts them at direct risk - and the chorus of "you want tuktuk. Go killing fields, s-21 (torture/prison place under pol-pot now a museum), shoot gun". Athough I think seeing these things is important (not the gun shooting), and I'm very glad we went to them (maybe more on that another time, athough there's not much to say, they were of course very sad to go to, but absoloutely worth a trip), I find it sad that to make a living tuk tuk drivers market a dark part of their very recent history to often ignorant tourists. On that front, I was shocked at how little I knew about the recent history, and just recent it is (late 90s) compared to when I thought things had really come to a general end (late 70s) and so on. Moving on to Kompong Chnang tomorrow (where we dont expect to have internet...it's a small fishing town, also famous for making clay pots for water storage), and then Battambang before going back to Thailand. See http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2349135&l=a0765&id=197800857 for photos.

Siem Reap

So, after our epic bus journey we spent 4 nights in Siem Reap at a very good hotel/guest house called Earthwalkers. For $10 each we got an ensuite a/c room, breakfast included, and the place had a nice swimming pool. It was about 1km out of the centre - but hell who cares, we had a pool :D and the staff were very friendly and helpful. Having a fairly limited time (and the first night being spent relaxing and recovering from the taxi ride) we decided we'd spend our first day walking around Siem Reap, the second at Angkor, and third on a boat trip tour. Siem Reap was a very nice place to walk around, with two good markets, one very touristy but quite dead and a bit lacking in atmosphere, the other selling local and tourist items. The latter was much nicer if with a few more shouts of 'hello sirrrrr. You buy something. I give you good price'. We think that making english not tonal proves quite hard for some Cambodians, so the high tone in questions turns very whiney for most, which gets a touch grating after a while. There was also a very touristy but very nice night market which we went to once. The park in Siem Reap is lovely, and although the streets and in particular the restaurant streets are lovely to walk round, the amount of Western restaurants is somewhat annoying. Khemer food is fantastic, so to have offerings of (bad) pizza, and english breakfasts as the sole choice in quite a number of places was pretty galling. i particularly enjoyed that in the (Western, and only) mal in town, the sign outside the pizza place read 'you can almost taste it' - a sentiment I can well believe.

To get out to Angkor we hired a tuk tuk for the day ($15). He picked us up at 5am so that we were at Angkor temple itself for sunrise. This was something of an anticlimax due to the cloud coverage - however, once the crowds who had gathered for similar purposes had disapated to other Wats it was remarkably quiet. I won't say much about the day really, because I think the pictures will do it much better. It was well worth the $20 day ticket (steep though that is in Cambodia) and I hope that the temples are preserved, and the site is improved itself over the next few years.

The final day we went on a river boat. Now I know some advocates of the Rough Guides series. However, they're wrong. The way the maps are organised is annoying. They omit useful information (like prices). i like how lonely planet organise eating places by type (Western, Thai, etc.) Anyway, on this occasion the problem was that it implied we could go to the lake, and walk around, and perhaps see some floating village from there, and hire a boat for $10 per hour. Instead we were taken by our tuk tuk driver (same bloke, $10 this time) to a ticket office which charged $20 each to go on a long boat from the river - because you cannot get to the lake via road at this time of year (thanks rough guide). $20 is A LOT of money in Cambodia, particularly for a 1.5 hour boat ride. Fantastic though it, and the journey by tuk tuk to the river were in terms of views, and seeing how people live, I'm skeptical as to the value of the trip really. My other problem with this trip was that on our return to the docking place, the boat went past a floating school (it moves over a period to teach different kids). I thought we'd get away with not going in, but the guide was very insistent that the boat driver should circle back and take us in. Now interesting though it was to see this room, which can (apparently) take up to 60 pupils, (it had about 15 in there then and the teacher) i feel the same about this as I do about going in to an orphanage as a tourist - it isn't appropriate, I wouldn't give money directly through that means, and I don't have skills to offer, which essentially makes the trip voyeuristic at best. Incidentally, in phnom penh we've been offered trips to orphanages...oh dear :s.

Bangkok to Siem Rep

The trip from bangkok to siem reap was one I was very thankful I had notes for. We got up at 3.45 in order to get a taxi at 4.30. Bidding our comfortable, but expensive, residence goodbye we got into the taxi to go to the bus station - wondering if he really understood where we wanted to go literally until the moment we arrived. Thanks to the advice i had we easily found the first class ticket booth for aranya prathet (known as aree (phonetic local abbreviation). The bus was comfortable with a toilet on board and a slice of coffee cake (how did they know?!) and a drink too. We arrived in 4.30 roughly. We then jumped into a tuk tuk to get to the actual border crossing. Although he tried to drop us at some place we didn't want to be ("We stop here, you get visa. Visa here 1000 baht, 1200 at border") we were insistent that we wanted to continue to the border. So he dropped us right at the end of the road to the border where some bloke with an official pass got us to fill in some visa documents, and asked for 1000 baht (which incidently is about $33). I refused (again) and we walked down the road with our forms. Got stamped out of Thailand (and were mildly scared by the sign reading "We no longer issue visas at the border") and then continued through to the Cambodian side. The Thai side had a TV and fairly official if formal guards. The Cambodian side was outside at portable tables. At the visa point the man was firm that he wanted 1000 baht. A Canadian who was with our group of people insisted it was $20 (which it is) and refused to pay. We were directed to the actual visa point where for $25 we got a visa each,. I had to pay an extra 100 baht (about 1.40 pounds) because I didn't have a passport picture. I think he just wnated to get rid of us in case other people twigged that they didn't have to pay 1000 baht despite the lies that the rules had changed and this was now required. Oh incidently, none of the forms the bloke with the official badge had given us up the road were of any use during any of this process.

Anyway, we left there and jumped on the free bus to the 'transport depot'. Others did not, believing this to be a scam - a suspicion i can well understand. After a bit of haggling we got the $80 first offer down to $60 - much closer to the government pre-assigned $40 that the poipet to bangkok trip should take, but still outrageous for the trip. We were somewhat concerned by the fact the taxi driver stopped at what I think was a shop - but when we realised he was opening his boot to put a bag in rather than to take ours out we were a bit happier. Similarly, we were pretty miffed when he stopped at his house to drop said bag off, although we were less annoyed when we saw how miffed he looked at his wife (we assume) getting him to put some boxes in the boot too). The rest of the journey is indescribable for two reasons - 1) I cannot convey how crap the road was. I believe mounds of money have been allocated to this road improvement, but much has been lost, allegedly linked to thai airs monopoly over the basngkok to siem reap air route, and thus their obvious intertest in keeping that as the most sensible route to travel. Secondly just because it was fairly uneventful. It was interesting to see very poor places and some clearly more wealthy places. It is evident that the average income would be round $400 (which it certainly was), and its interesting to see - but less to describe really.

So now I'm sat in our new guesthouse place in siem reap, abouty 30 min walk to town centre, or a tuk tuk ride. The place has a pool and our room is ensuite. And I have a beer... Tomorrow we go to angkor wat, and the day fter to the lake. Then we move on to phnom penh, cutting Kompong Cham and Kratie from our trip as a result of the awful transport links.