The following day we caught our Asia Air (Thailand's Ryanair) flight down to Phnom Penh, and booked into a grimy guesthouse in the centre of town. Cockroaches were crawling over the bathroom floor, the sheets were dirty, and the air conditioning unit didn't work because of an alleged power cut in the area (we later discovered that it wasn't working due to some underhand cost-cutting by the landlady). We discovered when we'd arrived at the guesthouse that we'd left our South East Asia Lonely Planet book (or the LP as we refer to it) in the taxi. This proved to be a blessing in disguise though, as good quality blackmarket copies of the Lonely Planet books are in abundance in Phnom Penh. This meant we could upgrade from our On-A-Shoestring version of the South East Asia LP, to the more upmarket LPs for each of the countries that we are visiting on the section of our trip. The individual books include more upmarket hostels, so with a little bit of luck we'll be able to avoid any further cockroach-infested guesthouses.
We had a great time in Phnom Penh. We hired a car for the day so as to see as much as we could in the time we had. Our first stop was a shooting range north of Phnom Penh, where Gaz took up the opportunity to fire an AK47 (although opting for just a sheet of paper as a target, instead of the goats and cows that we're on offer as live targets). We then visited the sombre sites of the Killing Fields (where Pol Pot and his cronies murdered many thousands on innocent victims), and Toul Sleng (the jail where the victims were tortured prior to their deaths). We were also involved in a car accident, when the lady behind crashed into us as she was focusing on her mobile phone instead of the road in front. Fortunately nobody was hurt and hopefully that will be the only road collision that we experience during our travels. Our final stop was the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, after which we decided we deserved a beer. What then proceeded was one of the more obscure nights of our trip so far. The bar was owned by an alcoholic Irishman called Rory, who'd fallen in love with an older woman whilst travelling in Cambodia and had married her (most probably the only instance of a young westerner marrying an older Cambodian woman). He was trying hard to drink his profits, but as pointed out to me, "its very (hiccup) hard (dribble) to drink your profits (burp) when 24 cans of beers cost $4". The other friend that we made in the bar was an Irish mercenary, who'd been hired to fight in Cambodia 14 years previously and had never left. We lost track of both time and the weather whilst talking to these two characters in the bar, and it wasn't until we tried to leave the bar that we realised the street outside had flooded up to our knees. We decided to drink another couple of cans whilst the water subsided, but it just kept rising. Eventually we had to bite the bullet and wade through the knee-deep rain and sewage. The road to our hostel was flooded up to our waists' though which made it inaccessible by foot, but a plucky Tuk-Tuk driver managed to find a route through the floods (and half way round the city) for just $2.
From Phnom Penh we caught a bus up Siem Reap. We'd undertaken a few shorter bus journeys in China, but this was our first long haul journey by road. The LP reported that the road between Phnom Penh was well tarmacked, but I think this is a relative term and is a comparison only to the other roads in Cambodia. After six hours of bouncing along at the back of the bus, we were both quite glad to be getting off. Our friend Jeremy (you may remember him from our China posts) met us at the bus station, and from there we made our way to the floating village in Siem Reap. We'd heard mixed reviews about the village, but we were all amazed by it. The village is in the middle of a large lake called Toule Sap, and has everything from floating Churches to floating pig pens. Our accommodation in Siem Reap was the best that we've experienced so far (The Siem Reap Hostel if you are ever in the area), with multiple communal areas, a swimming pool and large comfortable rooms. As well as Jeremy we also met up with Steve and Meghan (our Yangtze River cruise compadres), and had some great nights out Siem Reap. The Angkor What bar and Warehouse bars were our a favourite haunts, but the town is full of good cheap restaurants and bars. Whilst in Siem Reap we visited the Angkor Wat temples which were breath-taking, although we're becoming somewhat blase when it comes to temples as we've seen far too many of them in the past few weeks.
From Siem Reap we caught a flight to Luang Prabang in Laos with Jeremy only to discover that it was full of more Wats (temples). So we decided to take to the countryside on a tour. The first part of the tour involved mountain biking 15km along winding, hilly and muddy tracks to an Elephant Lodge. From the lodge we caught a boat to a waterfall and then hiked for two hours in the baking midday sun to a mountain village where we became the evening entertainment for the local village children. After a few well earned beers we adjourned to our sleeping quarters, which was the floor of a wooden hut with a mosquito net overhead. On the second day, we hiked back to the lodge and went on an elephant trek through the jungle, before getting into a Kayak to paddle four hours back towards Luang Prabang. Tara and Gaz started off in one kayak, but the tour guide decided our pace was too leisurely so Jeremy and Tara swapped positions. This was when things all started to go wrong. The bung had been removed from the back of Jeremy and Gaz's kayak, so when we hit the first set of rapids we started sinking fast. Our tour guide had paddled off downstream with Tara so was unaware of the trouble we'd gotten into. Two local fisherman tried to help us get the boat afloat again, but they were unsuccessful. After 20 minutes of fighting the current, we eventually gave up and left the kayak to float down river without us. We'd lost our flip-flops in the current so after fighting our way out of the river we had to traipse along the rocky river bank barefoot. By the time we reached Tara and the tour guide they'd managed to collect most of our possessions from the river (with the exception of Jeremy's flip-flops), and fix our kayak. We were exhausted by this point though, and we still had another hour and half of paddling until we got back to the town. Somehow we managed to make it back to town, but we were all wrecked from the experience. We treated ourselves to fillet steaks in the best restaurant in Luang Prabang and some strong gin & tonics that night to help us get over our ordeal.
Tomorrow we head off to Chiang Mai in Thailand aboard Lao Airlines. They are reputed to have one of the worst air safety records, so wish us luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment