Ready to go home...?

After a few more days in Phnom Penh where we met some nice expats from Germany, USA and England I flew back to Bangkok for some final shopping (I treated myself to a battered used Sony PSP and a Nintendo Gameboy Micro VERY cheaply already in Phnom Penh - it's really great that the US-Dollar is so weak and the Euro is so strong! ;-)
Last night I met Sue again, one of Sarah's friends i had first encountered in may. We had an awesome chat and I probably learned more things about the asian/thai mindset than in the 6 months before! Thank you, Sue! ;-)

I did send a 6kg-parcel containing mainly my Terry Pratchett trophy book-collection home just an hour ago, so I have enough space to fill up now with souvenirs! ;-) Khaosan and Panthip Plaza, here I come!
I'm not sure if I look forward to go back, I guess it will be quite hard to adapt to a normal life again after such a long time travelling... I certainly look forward to a few things, especially people, but the weather is supposed to be rather cold and bad, which will be quite a shock for me I guess...

Shianoukville & Kempot

We did go for a few days down to the coast to check out Shianoukville and Kempot on the way back to Phnom Penh. There's not much to do and see in Shianoukville during off-season, and it sure rains a lot there. But judging from the bars and hotels this place should be quite lively during the main season.
Kempot is even smaller, there's a total of two pool tables in town (one of which is used as an office desk while they do some work on the place). You can go up a mountain and see an old catholic church and a casino that the French built when they were there. Because of frequent rain we decided not to go there and went to some nearby caves instead.
It was a really interesting trip, we had a total of seven guides, none older than 12 years (for a total of $4). They really did a good job in showing us all the interesting rock formations and "encouraging" us to climb down the more scary slippery ledges in the cave by making chicken sounds! ;-)

There are some dripstones that look alot like elephants, and there is a small very old temple inside the cave that is overgrown by dripstone.


We especially liked the trip to the caves, which went right through rural Cambodia, so we took alot of pictures..

Killing Fields: Horrors of the Khmer Rouge

There are some tourist attractions in the world that are not really enjoyable to see, but people go there nonetheless. Maybe it is for the shock value, maybe it is just to get a better understanding of a country's history and a glimpse into what horrible deeds humans are actually capable of once they've been brainwashed enough. What the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia certainly qualifies for one of the most horrific regimes ever on the planet, what they did to their own people was even worse than Hitler or Stalin...
First we went to the Killing Fields just outside Phnom Penh. They have built a big tower there with 9000 skulls of all the people that they have dug out so far from the mass graves (there's alot of unopened mass-graves left). There was even a mass grave for women and children, and there's a tree they smashed babies against to kill them... When you walk through the graves that have been opened you see pieces of clothing sticking out of the ground, it is quite creepy.

The ironic thing is that the whole place is really nice and idyllic with nice trees and a lake nearby. One could say that like this it is pretty much like a graveyard, but then again this isn't anything like a final resting place, because all these thousands of people weren't just buried, but also killed there.


Just thinking that the Khmer Rouge people who worked there probably had a normal life, going drinking with friends, going home to their wives after having killed 300 people every day is quite impossible to imagine...


Afterwards we went to the S-21 prison where people were "questionned" and detained before being brought to the Killing Fields for execution. They have thousands of pictures there that the Khmer Rouge took of the detainees, it is really eerie, just imagining that all the skulls we had seen before actually are all that remains of the people you see on these pictures. Some of them even smile, and there's very many children, too...


They have tiny 2 squaremeter cells where they kept the "better" detainees, the normal ones were just chained to a big bar in one of the bigger rooms. There's no beds in the whole place so everybody had to sleep on the floor and also piss and shit there.
The numbers vary a bit, but there was anything from 14.000 to 20.000 people in S-21, and only 6-14 of them made it out alive. And this is S-21, so there were at least 20 other facilities like this all throughout Cambodia...

Phun in Phnom Penh

While Shianoukville was a nice cozy town with a decent nightlife, Phnom Penh is on a whole other level. It's by far the biggest city in Cambodia, and it shows. There's alot of stuff to do and see during the day, and at night you have an abundant choice of places to go to. Even though it's not at all enjoyable, you should nonetheless still go to the Killing Fields and S-21 prison, it is something one has to visit to understand Cambodia and its history. You can visit several markets and museums (there's a national museum and a mine-museum) and the Royal Palace.

Beauty salons are spread thoughout Phnom Penh central market. Seems surreal to me: Go to the market to get a pedicure!

We stayed on the lakeside where most of the guesthouses are in a really nice place called Grand View, there's a place called Carambodja nearby run by a Swiss couple, and I've had the most amazing meal there in a long time: Beef filet steaks with whiskeysauce and Spätzle - yes, they DID find proper beef somehow!
David left us to go back to Austria, so Reto and me travelled on to Shianoukville.

Cambodian Specialities

On the way to Phnom Penh we were treated to a Cambodian speciality on some reststop. Deep fried tarantulas - I shit you not!


And for those that prefer it fresh, you could buy live ones to fry yourself at home:


No thanks, that's one local dish I don't feel like trying out...

As I've learned later (luckily), some of the Cambodians on our bus did actually buy live ones!... Creepy!

Later on I learned that there's another yucky Cambodian speciality: half-bred eggs with chicken embryoes - for that extra crunchiness! Argl, what is it with this asian fancy for bones?
I have to say I quite like the condiment made of Cambodian pepper (the best in the world I've been told!), salt and lime-juice they serve with pretty much everything.. Sometimes they also add some garlic, very yummy!
And this Cambodian dessert is also very interesting, it's all kinds of fruit with crushed ice on top, topped off with a raw egg and some Milo (cocoa)..

(funny coincidence: I've seen this very plate on Kho Pha Ngan before, and took pictures of it because of the hilarious Engrish on it. You can't see it in this picture, but it says: "Tomatoes - Refresh your feeling" - What??)

Asian Traffic

It's really amazing to see and understand traffic in the various countries of Southeast Asia. While in Malaysia it's basically like in Europe, in Thailand traffic laws are more regarded like a guide of conduct - You CAN follow them, but you don't really HAVE to, but if you do, it works out okay. Motorbike riders frequently jump red lights in Bangkok (the only city i know with 5 minute red light intervals) when they don't see anything coming, and cabbies just turn the opposing lane into an extra right-turn lane when they see that the opposing traffic has a red light. On highways with separate streets for opposite directions, you quite often see vehicles that go the opposite direction on the stopping lane on the side of the street.
In Bali, there's only one law: The bigger vehicle has the rightaway. Other than that you can pretty much do whatever you want.

Cambodian traffic is pretty special though: As with most other things in Cambodia, there just seems to BE no regulation whatsoever! It's pretty much complete anarchy, you'd be hard pressed just to find a traffic sign here (there are some, but only very very few!) and quite a few cars drive around without any license plates (!). People just drive however they want to, a red light isn't much more than a suggestion to maybe stop. Only in Cambodia you can see people going straight AND people from the opposing lane making a left turn (crossing the ones going straight - Cambodia is one of the few asian righthand driving countries) at the same time, crisscrossing eachother like the finale in a Chinese acrobat circus show - without any accidents!

One thing seems to be very important in most asian countries: Always make extensive use of the horn. Mostly to show other drivers and people on the side of the street that you're there. When we drove from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh the driver must've been honking his horn for almost half the whole trip in total (that's about 3 hours). And it was a VERY LOUD horn. Overtaking in Cambodia just seems to work so much better if you constantly honk your horn while doing it. A vehicle here is only considered disfunctional when the horn's not working! ;-)

Update: I have gotten confirmation by locals that there really WERE no traffic laws or regulations whatsoever in Cambodia until last year! They're working on getting them established though..

Holiday in Cambodia *) - Siem Reap

So I finally made it there, about a month later than originally planned. The trip to Siem Reap was quite an adventure. The street, even though it is one of the most important in the country, linking Cambodia to Bangkok, is nothing but a very very bumpy dirt track. And if that wasn't enough, it was pouring down with rain that day, too. So all the vehicles you saw on the street were covered in dirt like hardcore rally cars, it looked like one giant Colin McRae tribute. It took us over six hours for 160km.

There are rumours that Bangkok Airways, "the boutique airline" and the only one that flies to Bangkok from Cambodia, makes sure the money that every year goes into improving this road disappears somewhere along the way in the system of happy corruption that is most of Southeast Asia.
Cambodia itself is really nice though. The people here are very friendly, and like Malaysia, sometimes enjoy chatting with you or merely greeting you just for the sake of it, without trying to sell you something. This is maybe because almost anyone here speaks at least English, some even really well. Little four year old kids that can talk English, this is even better than Malaysia! Quite a few Cambodians even speak multiple languages, we've met a cambodian painter trying to sell his works that spoke English, French, Japanese and some bits of German and Spanish! This is quite amazing when you realize how young tourism is in Cambodia compared to Thailand, where after 30 years of tourism you still meet a very large number of people that don't even speak a single word of English, and quite a few of them even work in the service sector, e.g. restaurants or as cabbies.
But this also has its downsides: A lot of -mostly very young- hawkers are relentlessly trying to sell their -mostly identical- souvenir merchandise almost anywhere here, but then again the temples here are THE main attraction in Cambodia (not only for tourists!), Angkor Wat is actually on the Cambodian flag itself. The children entrepreneurs used to be begging kids (run by pimp rings) not too long ago, but with great effort various organizations got them off begging and onto education, so I'm trying to support this by buying some of their merchandise every now and then. They're not only good in languages, but also in geography, wherever you come from - they can tell you the capital and the number of people in your country!


Cambodian kids - they're relentless entrepreneurs, but you gotta just love 'em!

Things can take quite a bit longer here, Cambodians never seem to be in a rush. It may happen that you wait for 10 minutes in a restaurant for your change or 20 minutes for your (quickly made) food. It's a bit cheaper here than in Thailand, in some areas even quite a bit. You notice almost anywhere that tourism is still fairly young in Cambodia, there are huge building projects everywhere, and building proper streets and a nice communications/internet infrastructure is currently underway.
After what the USA has done to Cambodia during the Vietnam War (Christmas offensive, Ho Chi Minh trail carpetbombing) it is the ultimate irony and pretty sad to see that these days the US Dollar is the dominant currency in Cambodia, with the Cambodian Real mostly being relegated to the role of a substitute for US coin change. Cambodian ATMs give you Dollars, and even if you pay in Dollars, you get mostly Dollars back in change.
At the moment I'm travelling with Reto from Switzerland and David from Austria, two really nice chaps i met on the Bus to Siem Reap. We also met Martin from Sweden on the border, who is coaching Cambodian kids in football.
We checked out six temples the other day, Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom, the one where some scenes of Tombraider were shot and three more. It was interesting because they were all fairly different:


The main temple in Angkor Tom had loads of amazing spires with faces on them


The Tombraider one was loaded with huge trees that grew their roots all around the stones to find some soil. I call this the "Davy Jones Tree" for want of the proper name.


Angkor Wat is the one that feels most like a Palace, it used to be the center of the Khmer Empire some 1000 years ago.

Siem Reap, being the second most important city in the country besides Phnom Phen, is fairly touristy with most of the nice bits i enjoy (24h supermarkets, ATMs, vibrant nightlife, cheap accommodation and (riksha) Tuk Tuks at any time you need them, while still retaining a bit of that "smalltown feeling", with a fairly modest "townscape" and not that many tourists around hell-bent on partying all the time - which is probably also due to it being the low season right now.

We hang out in the Temple Bar on Bar Street every night, which is a great place with free pool and fairly cheap drinks ($5 for a bucket, $3.50 for two cocktails).



From left to right: David, Reto Mario, Martin

Dinner is usually consumed at one of the various food stalls near Bar Street for very small money, and I'm delighted to say that it was there where I finally found (for just $0.5!) what I've been looking for all over Asia for ages:


A Jackfruit shake! THE mother of all shakes, pure delight!

*) A Song by DK - Dead Kennedys! ;-)