We landed in Bangkok and immediately wondered if we accidentally had been taken to the Bahamas. From what we could tell in the immigration line, we'd landed in a land promising swaying palm trees and afternoons sipping boat drinks. Which, actually, Thailand does offer, and we had arrived during full-throttle high season, bringing with it throngs of European travelers with a month or so off of work and big plans for the beach. After spending several months surrounded by backpackers who have the same dim sense of time, day and season that we do, we were clearly surrounded by people in holiday mode. This was the first of many shocks in our first few days in Southeast Asia. When we entered Bangkok proper by taxi, we found ourselves marvelling at the presence of sidewalks... and people using them. But, more than anything, it seemed like the city could have been an advertisement for some sort of household cleanser. In our India-clouded eyes, Bangkok appeared to be glowing it was so spotless and new. And, then, as we searched around for a guesthouse (being high season, beds are a little hard to come by, especially later in the afternoon), we were surprised by all of the "backpacker" places with big posh eating areas and swimming pools. To further confuse us, because we needed to get some up-to-date travel information fast, we had decided to stay in the Khao San Road area, a longtime backpacker haunt that often has the words "infamous" or "notorious" connected with it. Thus, we had expected something seedy - a backpacker slum - but, really, it was Ft. Lauderdale. We wondered pretty quickly how we would adjust. We'd gotten pretty used to hard, gritty travel, surrounded by people trying to outdo each other in their cheapness, such as with quantity of street food eaten or grimness of guesthouses chosen.
We spent about four days in Bangkok, getting our bearings, eating lots of Thai food and continuing to marvel at things like quiet, undisturbed afternoons spent in nice green parks. It's sort of funny, actually, because most people we meet consider Bangkok to be a crazy, noisy, polluted city - but, at least for a little while, it seemed perfect to us. We took off, though, once we settled on a general Southeast Asia travel plan (head to Cambodia and Laos first and save most of Thailand for the end of our trip). We couldn't help but be tempted by some beach time, so we decided to make a short visit to Koh Chang, one of the Thai islands on the way to the southernmost Thai-Cambodian border. It didn't end up going as well as we'd hoped. For one thing, bad weather rolled in about the time we got on the ferry. Then we had some run-ins with the realities of visiting a fairly popular island during the height of tourist season - overinflated fixed prices for shared taxi rides, comparatively high-priced accomodation, lots of tourists who didn't seem to have a care for where their dollars/euros were going... And then Koh Chang was so much more developed than we had expected - coffee shops, Italian restaurants, cutesy ocean-themed bars. It's not that we don't like these things, it's just that they are luxuries for short vacations. We found ourselves out of our element, mainly due to poor judgement. So, we stayed a short time, cut our losses, and headed for the border.
We arrived at the border in a mini-bus of fellow travelers and were stamped out of Thailand. We then headed over to the Cambodian immigration hut, interested to see how the stamping in/visa issuing process would go. We had read online on a traveler discussion board that this border was notorious for overcharging for visas. We had confirmed several times that the cost was $20 per visa, to be paid in dollars, and it was the same no matter where you entered Cambodia. Despite this, travelers had been reporting being asked for either $25 or 1,100 Thai Baht (which is more like $28) at this particular crossing. Sure enough, the first border official asked us for 1,100 Baht. We politely told her that we would prefer to pay in dollars and had our $20 bills in our hands. She said, "Oh no, 1,100 Baht." We still insisted with a smile that we would like to pay in dollars and then said something about having been told the visa cost ($20) by Cambodian Embassy officials in Bangkok (which wasn't true, but, what do you do?) She said we could talk to her boss, a big, surly guy sitting down at the end of the table. He grabbed our passports, and Jeff told him again that we had asked the embassy and been told the visa cost was $20. He barked at us something like "You have embassy phone number?? We call them right now!" Jeff told him we had gotten the number off of the internet and didn't have it. So, Boss put our passports down with a glare, ignored us for awhile, and processed all of the other foreigners in line (who all dutifully paid their 1,100 Baht). Once they were all out of the office, he took our $40 without a word, threw it on the table next to him, slapped the visas in our passports and we were on our way. (Later, we calculated that each person working there may make around an extra $35,000 per year from this overcharging, which is a staggering amount in Cambodia.)
We spent one night at the border and then got on a boat the next morning headed for the beach town of Sihanoukville. We had made friends with an Australian woman named Alix, so the three of us hunkered down together for the four-hour trip. The boat was nicer than we expected - individual, padded seats rather than benches that were completely contained inside the boat (we were basically expecting a roofless speedboat, so we hadn't set our expectations too high). The first three hours were pretty uneventful, but, as we entered more open waters during the last hour, we started getting tossed around by some pretty mean waves that had even the locals looking around with a little concern. We never felt REALLY in danger, but were pretty happy when it was over.
We arrived to Sihanoukville expecting to stay a night or two, but ended up really liking it, so we stayed for five nights. It was much more of the beach scene we had been looking for - not that many people, unassuming thatched roof restaurants, a cheap place to stay just off of the beach - and we were having a great time hanging out with Alix. Sihanoukville is one of the tourist hotspots of Cambodia, though, and had its downsides, mainly the steady stream of visitors on the beach: persistent little girls (with really impressive English) selling bracelets and fruit, older women offering manicures and massages, a fair number of beggars (lots of land mine victims, a huge problem in rural Cambodia), people selling books, women selling spring rolls in baskets or huge shrimp on platters... In general, though, we found the Khmers (Cambodians) to be happy and easy-going, considering their often unfortunate circumstances and the country's recent brutal history, so we really have no right to complain about anything.
We only had so much time to devote to Cambodia, though, so we eventually had to move on. We left Alix and took a shared taxi from Sihanoukville to the small town of Kampot, located about 2 hours east. The taxi was a smallish car like a Toyota Camry, but, in the "there is always room for one more" thinking that we have seen around the world, we had to put four adults in the back (and all of us foreigners, which means big people), while two Khmer ladies sat together in the front passenger seat. Since there was still room around the gear shifter and on the floor around the ladies' feet, the driver brought along three fighting roosters, which, at least, all had their own transport bags. But we got to hear lots of squawking during the two hours (not to mention the passing thoughts about bird flu...).
Kampot was great - a sleepy riverside town filled with tired colonial buildings and big trees. Not that many tourists go there (compared to most of the other places we went in Cambodia), so it had a very authentic and welcoming feel. There isn't a lot to do around Kampot, so we just spent a few days walking around and visiting the local market (which is a really fun experience - lots of tiny low-ceilinged stalls selling everything from lotion to cookies to clothes to hardware, then an area of vendors selling noodle soup, gelatinous desserts, meaty concoctions with rice and more, then another area filled with fruits and vegetables, and then there are the gold shops, which also act as moneychangers). Our first night, we happened to roam past an English class and were waved in by its outgoing Khmer teacher. We ended up staying through the end of that class as well as his next hour-long class to help with conversation. The students were mainly in late high school and were incredibly nice and inquisitive. The teacher (who we had started to realize operated more like a drill sargeant than a coach, even with us - he kept reminding us of Kahn from King of the Hill (though Kahn's from Laos...)) asked us to come back the next night for his other class, so we did. The kids were just as nice as the first night and gave us rides back to our guesthouse on their motorbikes after the lesson.
From Kampot we traveled north to the capital, Phnom Pehn. It was getting close to Christmas, and we wanted to be in a busy enough place where we'd have options for how to spend the day. We also had planned to meet back up with Alix there. For the most part, we really enjoyed being in Phnom Pehn. Like most capital cities we visit, they are big enough and busy enough where we can enjoy a certain degree of anonymity. The longer we have been gone, the more we have tired of the dollar sign tattoos on our foreheads (so to speak), and big cities allow some relief (not everyone you meet deals with tourists day in and day out, meaning they are more likely to treat you like a normal person and less likely to overcharge you). Phnom Pehn provided this to a certain degree, but a twist of travel in Cambodia, which we particularly noticed in the capital, was that it was incredibly hard to find out fair prices for things travelers need. Normally (i.e. in other countries) guesthouses are good resources for information like prices of bus tickets and rides around town (slight tangent: there are no taxis and few rickshaws in Phnom Pehn - you ride on the back of a motorbike, which is pretty fun and probably safer than it sounds). But the guesthouses all sell bus tickets themselves (at a mark-up) and funnel tourists into the hands of their brother/cousin/friend who has a motorbike ("Oh, moto to waterfront will be very expensive tonight..."), so we felt we couldn't trust any information they gave us (and more than once actually found that we had been blatantly lied to). We were frustrated. We moved out of our first guesthouse because the place seemed to have arranged to have moto drivers "work" in their restaurant and at the front desk in order to allow them full-access to try to schedule tours of the city and rides to further-flung sites. We spend too much time dealing with them on the street to want to eat our breakfast with them...
But, aside from that, we had a good time just walking around the city, taking a look at its fairly pretty waterfront (Mekong River) and alternately eating noodle soup like locals in the big markets or enjoying perks like coffee shops and big western-style grocery stores. Phnom Pehn was also a good place to learn more about the country's recent history. It's a long and complicated story, but from its independence from France around World War II until the mid-1990s, the country was in pretty constant political turmoil. Things really went bad in the 1970s when, first, the country was more or less indiscrimately bombed by the US for harboring North Vietnamese and then (one could say partially as a result) went under control of the radically oppressive communist Khmer Rouge regime. The Khmer Rouge wanted to completely destroy all foundations of Khmer society (including family structure and any form of individuality) and replace it with a huge agrarian cooperative. People were hauled from the cities out into the rice fields, forced to work ridiculously long hours with only rice gruel to eat and often shot on the spot for perceived laziness. In Phnom Pehn, we visited a notorious former prison called S-21 (which actually had been a high school before being appropriated as a prison...). Suspected dissidents were brought to S-21 to acquire torture-induced confessions prior to being transported to "killing fields" outside of the city, where they were blugeoned (didn't want to waste bullets) and thrown into mass graves. We were told that out of the 17,000 people brought to the prison in 4 or so years, the only survivors were a handful that were clinging to life in the prison when it was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979. The prison/high school has been converted into a museum, much of which consists of thousands of photos of prisoners taken by the Khmer Rouge itself - every prisoner was photographed when they arrived and many were photographed post-torture. It was chilling to see all of the faces of men and women, young and old (children included), nearly all of whom ultimately died. One of the more strange things about the Khmer Rouge, and significant to S-21, was that its leadership became increasingly paranoid and started purging itself of comrades that were suspected of not being radical enough - many, many of the people imprisoned there were once Khmer Rouge loyalists. Altogether, it is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed up to 1.7 million people during its short reign, which is about 20% of the country's population. Following its overthrow, it continued to wreak havoc through guerilla warfare and planting of land mines into the 1990s. If you want to know more, check this out.
For Christmas, we ended up getting together with Alix at the place she was staying (which had a big deck over a lake) and the three of us and two friends she had made in Thailand all chipped in to make our own Christmas dinner. We headed to the aforementioned big Western grocery store and bought fixings for a good salad and a cheese platter, good bread, a big bar of chocolate and a bottle of vodka. As the night progressed, we ended up being joined by some other travelers who drifted in, probably also looking for some Christmas camaraderie. It was fun and memorable, all of us probably would have chosen to be back home for the day if it could have been managed.
That's all for now. We'll have part two of our Cambodia report soon.
31 votes 
This is a top pick!
