Trip to Phnom Penh
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
57
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Anyway, we were up. The complimentary breakfast consisted of a choice of bread with jam, omelette, omelette with bread, or club sandwich. The only food that seems to be consistently available throughout Asia is the omelette, and we've had enough to last a lifetime. Catherine ordered the bread and jam, I went for the club sandwich.
The "club sandwich" was bread, served with an omelette. I questioned this, but he insisted it was correct. A Finnish girl on our table had ordered the same, and when she asked what the difference was between "bread and omelette" and "club sandwich" she was told that with "club sandwich" you had to cut the bread (yourself) differently. So they were the same.
On to the slow boat for the rest of the day; we should arrive in Phnom Penh at about 5.30pm, in 9½ hours time. We were too mean to upgrade to the fast boat, but boy did they try to sell it to us. We popped over to floating fish farm, then on to see a village of local folk. Then on the river for the rest of the day. A bus was due to take us the last hour of the journey.
Although he hadn't been on the boat yesterday, we saw a familiar face boarding the slow boat. It was Beau, the Ozzie lad who had been on the nightmare bus ride from Vientianne to Hanoi with us. He was a good bloke, and had made us laugh a few times on that bus journey, and we were glad to see him. Alarm bells rang however. After a series of bad, bad bus journeys (the nightmare one, the night bus one, the one where we had to walk through the floods), Kyle and Stephanie felt that Catherine and I were cursed, and that no bus journey with us on would go smoothly. Well here we were with another one of the twelve westerners that had been on that bus. What if he was cursed also? The boat was surely going to sink.
It wasn't the most comfortable of boats, sitting on hard wooden seats, but the water wasn't choppy, and we made our way up the Mekong, against the current. If someone stood or moved to the opposite side, the thin boat leant over unnervingly. The guide arranged us all so the boat was reasonably evenly weighted, to stop this from happening.
At noon we reached the Cambodian border. We had to get off the boat and wait for our visas for about an hour. This went reasonably quickly and then onto another boat on the Cambodian side.
This second boat was thinner than the first, with long wooden benches running its length at either side. It was good enough though, and the scenery was interesting. We slowly worked our way upstream until about 4.30pm. Then we landed, and boarded a minibus for the last hour of the trip.
After about half an hour, the driver pulled over by the roadside. He got out, and walked around the bus, looking puzzled. He got back in, and started to drive again. Less than two minutes later he stopped. Why hadn't we thought earlier? Our curse only applies to bus travel, the boat was always going to be safe. Now we were in a bus of sorts, and within thirty minutes things are going wrong.
He spoke to the Cambodian man in our group who explained to the rest of us that the front left brake on the bus had seized. He started to drive again, very slowly, with his head out of the window looking at the offending wheel. Within five minutes he stopped again, walked down to a lake and came back with a bottle of water which he threw on the brake. Steam billowed out.
Catherine and I explained to the group that, in a way, this was our fault, and we should have warned them against travelling with us. We sat there for 45 minutes before the driver inexplicably thought things were OK now (having done nothing to fix the problem itself) and we all piled back in, and on to Phnom Penh.
The traffic was getting heavier and heavier as we approached the city. We were told that there was a big festival on. We got to about 6km out of the city, and a police roadblock. No large vehicles were being allowed into the city due to the festival. The driver spent half an hour trying to get us around on an alternative route but to no avail. By this time it was pitch black.
There were a few tuk-tuks around. We approached them to ask them to take us into the city centre. Each of them refused. The hasslers had become the hasslees,but they weren't biting. Four of us; Myself, Catherine, Beau, and a Russian lad from the bus, started walking together.
We walked through crowded streets, trying to work out exactly where we were, carrying our heavy bags with us. There weren't any "proper" buildings around us, just single storey wooden shacks, and it was hard to believe that we were even near to a city. After about a mile, and many refusals, we finally managed to stop a tuk-tuk. It took us about 3km, through traffic heavier than we'd seen in India. There was a carnival atmosphere and the children of large families all squeezed onto single motorbikes waved and shouted "Hello" as we passed each other.
Halfway through this 3km journey we had reached another roadblock. A bribe by the tuk-tuk driver to the policeman had seen us through this with no problems. But now we'd reached another roadblock, and we weren't getting past this one.
We paid the driver and started to walk. We were still a good few km from where we wanted to be. The streets were packed. Beau said that in all his life he'd never seen as many people in a single place, and I'd have to agree. It was like the crowd when you're leaving a big stadium, but it went on for miles. It was busier than that night in the Muslim quarter of Mumbai, but this went on and on and on. The few photos I took don't begin to do justice to the size and density of the crowd.
At times we were standstill, the crowd was so thick. We stuck our heads in at each of the few guesthouses we found but they were too pricey or had no rooms. We were exhausted, we 'd been carrying our bags through the crowd for a few miles, we'd been up since before 6am, and the last meal we'd had was a tiny lunch of noodles at noon. But the crowds were fun, people shouted greetings at us in English. Whenever we stopped to look at our maps and try to work out where we were, we were approached by English-speaking Cambodians eager to help. We were a bit of a novelty, and in the literally millions of people that must have been out that night we saw only two or three other Westerners. The Foreign Office website recommends that Westerners avoid crowded places when in Cambodia. This was, I'm sure, the most crowed place in all the country in all the year. We felt welcome, and never felt unsafe.
After over an hour of walking through the crowds we finally found a place with rooms. "Fancy Guest House" it was called. Terrific. Bags down. Shower, food, beer, bed.
