Cambodia

21.10.2007 - 28.10.2007 29 °C
View RTW part 1 on denlou's travel map.

Hi all!

So since we last wrote its has been nothing but adventure!!! First things first Denis got pretty sick the night before we left Chiang Mai for a while there we thought we may have to miss the flight back to bangkok, but we struiggled thru. We both thought it was food poisioning so having not eaten the same i though i was safe enough.
no such luck by the next evening i was also in pieces! it toook about 2 days to get over and it was by my standards the most unplesant 2 days sick i have ever spent.

So 2 days later and barely recovered ( 2 stone lighter and afriad to ever eat again ) we headed off to phnom penh. so as soon as we arrived at the airport we were followed around by airports guards until we got visas sorted! then some other guy wanted us to fill out forms for customs.... but we played dumb and kep walking!

Phnom Penh, getting to where we wanted to go was ok only $7 for taxi to backpacking area. Driving through the city we realised how differant this place is, in a completely differant league to Bangkok!The taxi driver abandoned us at the top of a laneway and pointed in a vague direction but at this stage we were surrounded! tuc tuc men, guest house owners, beggars, book sellers- backpack = red rag to a bull!! it was an experience to get to the end of the road but we made it to Simon 2's guest house in 1 piece! French style villa house with a view of the Tonle sap to the back and only $7.50 a night! Seemed completely out of place tho with make shift houses made from wood, galvinised roofs seemed to be the norm in this area! the guesthouse and the people were lovely but as we soon discovered once you went outside the gate everything became "önly $1 dollar sir, opium, massage, book, bracelet...."u name it they sold it!
cant even begin to describe how bad this really was but you can imagine!
spent most of the first day avoiding going outside the gates! Next day bargained a loacl tuc tuc guy to bring us aroud to the Tuol Sleng Museam and the Killing fields of Choeung Ek, of course he showed us this super pimped up tuc tuc when bargaining and then came back with one that was barely moving! all part of it!

Dont really want to say much about the museum and the killing field, they are pretty horrendous. By the time we got of the museum I knew the killing field were going to be worse. And they were bits of clothes still coming up through the ground tour guides showing you the trees that they called the "baby killing tree". You really do get such an eerie feeling around here. All in all im glad I did go to these places cos it helps you understand why the country is the way it is today.The thing that really scares me is that all this torture happened only 40 years ago.

That evening our guesthouse lady organised for us to get the bus to Siem Reap the next day.So of course we almost missed the bus, as a result didnt get to have any brekkie! Not an ideal situation to be in at the start of an 8 hour bus journey!Anyway the Cambodian coutryside and seeing the way people live kept us entertained, as well as some thai version of a Johnny Logan wannabe Kareoke dvd playing over and over and over! ( people were actually singing along ) Funny for the first song and then we were praying our iPods batteries would last!! We stopped about an hour in where as soon as you got off the bus you were surrounded by all sorts of little kids either begging or selling!we bought some pineapple which caused huge ructions between the sellers! We decided against trying the blackened massive creepy crawlies! we stayed on the bus for the next stop although it didnt seem as manic!Ths bus journey was not actually as bad as we thought it would be!

Arrived in Siem Siem Reap 3 days ago.It is So completely differant to Phnom Penh. Our Guesthouse had given away our room when we arrived so our wonderful driver Chang took us to an Australian/ Khmer run house,"Enjoy Guesthouse" its lovely, our Australian host craig is very willing to help us out any way he can even if he dose seem to be on a differant planet most of the time! So next day we set off to do what we came here to do with Chang our ever happy to please tuc-tuc driver!

The temples of Ankor are breathtaking, I'm not sure what i was expecting to see but the whole place is amazing. I could go on about all the temples we saw but i would bore you all to tears, In the first day I'd say we say about 10 definitely the most impressive being Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and the one that really stood out was the Ta Phrom - well worth a visit - this absolutely enormous tress growing out of everywhere, and it really gives a feeling of being in the middle of the jungle!

So it rained for sunset, we climbed the mountain that you are supposed to climb anyway to get 'the view'but didnt c much! We were supposed to go the next day for sunrise but it rained non-stop all night so there was no point even though our dutiful driver showed up at 5 on the dot!He came back a little later and we headed off to explore some more! was way too hot for us today tho...so we saw a few temples but didnt last long.