Monday morning in Phnom Penh was devoted by to checking email and such things at the internet cafe just down the road, where we overheard other English-speakng tourists trying to work out how they were going to get home now that they couldn’t fly through Bangkok, and discovering unfortunately that they would be flying 4 or 5 days later than they were supposed to.

Which suddenly made our little trip over to Thai Airways look worthwhile.

News from the world was that the hotels in Hawaii were happy for us to move parts of our trip around; but the airline, having fewer spare space, wanted $250 each to move the flights. We didn’t have $250 at all, let alone each. Added to that, although the whole trip was a prize, to which one typically attaches the word ‘free’ we had been required to pay the taxes on the flights. To which one attaches the word $750. So in the the choice between pay $500 (which we didn’t have) and receive $750 (which we really needed), we chose the latter.

But that required some phone calls, so by midday or thereabouts  was all sorted out and we knew, sadly, that we weren’t going to Hawaii for a week. In short, there was to be no cherry on top of our 4-month long cake.

If we had moved our flights by a couple of days, I would have been in the air on my birthday, which wasn’t really what we wanted either. It was sad, but it’s not like we were never going to go to Hawaii in our lives. OK, we were probably never going to go to hotels that nice, but it just didn’t work out. And we’d get to go home, which some people in Phnom Penh were having a bit of trouble doing at that moment.

After a shower we sat in the hotel room feeling a bit like nap time and thinking about what else we might want to do in Phnom Penh. One thing we wanted to do; get on down to the Malaysian Airways office, who were supplying our new ticket home, and ask them if they still had space for us to pick out comfortable seats. The Royal Palace and National Museum looked interesting but not that interesting, and we’d been to Wat Phnom, to the riverfront, to a Kickboxing tournament courtesy of Nak, been for a tuk-tuk ride in torrential rain, been fleeced on a perfectly straightforward trip to the hotel, been to Friends restaurant, lounged in comfortable chairs drinking beer, and seen the carnage left over from the Water Festival.

We were pretty much done, and with not very long to go between Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, the homesickness was starting to get to us. But the Friends charity runs a shop as well, so we wanted to get on down and have a look at that, but first spent a little longer sorting photos and doing some writing for the website, which was shockingly out of date. Also there was some rumour in the Intrepid book of a photography show in town, one exhibit for which was near the National Museum.

Down on Monivong boulevard we encountered a pizza restaurant and could resist no longer. It was a pretty late lunch but by 4pm we had found the Malaysian Airlines office in town, which was probably a bit busier than usual for a Monday. So the guy takes our bits of paper and twiddles through the computer and it turns out that not only can we still have the two seats on their own right at the end of the plane, which are further apart, the only seats left on the flight from Phnom Penh to KL are in business class. We’re flying business class to KL! Ohh… but it’s followed by an eight-hour wait in KL airport, then we get on the plane at 11.30pm for the 9 or 10 hour flight to Sydney, on which we have the exact seats we wanted.

Nice. Except for the eight hour wait.

To get to the Friends shop you go back past the Central Market, make a right down a street I can’t remember, and step around the usual street chaos for a couple of blocks, e.g., motorbikes and beggars and garbage in the gutters and so forth. The shop is brightly decorated, so you can’t miss it; the outside was actually painted by kids from the foundation. Inside they sell a lot of useful things, a lot of beautiful and well-made things, and also a lot of things to which amazing creativity has been applied. For instance; a beaded necklace where the beads are made out of rolled-up strips of paper glued tight, but made so that they are circular beads. Or a perfectly ordinary wallet, made of clear plastic but with old Khmer newspaper in between the plastic sheets. Many of the display shelves in the shop were old busted fridges converted for the purpose.

And no shortage of cool T-shirts.

We restrained ourselves a bit, buying a necklace, a wallet, and a hand-decorated card for our faithful travel agent Emma. (Note: we would later lose this card and end up not finding it for a while, resulting in us having to hand over a Christmas card in May. But she wasn’t in the office that day, so we couldn’t explain ourselves).

The sun was just fading when we left the store, but I wanted to see if we could discover the photo exhibition so we stayed on the same road, walking south, and came out on one edge of the Royal Palace, which is surrounded by a pretty high yellow wall. I remember the Kremlin having an even higher wall, but I don’t think it was yellow. The National Museum is right next to the Royal Palace, on our right, and to the left a neat little park where kids played on bicycles and girls texted persons unknown. We sat down in the park and watched the sun set over the National Museum, and having noplace really to be, and no time to be there, made things seem right.

Maybe we’d just stay here and teach english, or go work for a charity, and then save the money to go to Mongolia on the way home.

On the street right behind us, on the other side of the park, we did find the exhibition but it was hard to tell whether the building it was in was being rented cheap for the ‘Fight Club’ ambiance or whether they’d just moved into the nicest abandoned place they could find. Sometime, in the past, it would have been a glorious building. Now, with a thick coating of funk, and some floor boards missing, and the lights going out every now and then in the rooms which the generator reached to, and candles in the other rooms, and French people hanging around with very modern laptops, it was all decadently declined. The gallery was spread around five or six rooms, some with a few large photos, and others with many small photos just propped on the floor, against the wall, with a candle in front of each. And this makes the whole room art, as well. And the venue itself, a two-story former-palace, now crumbling, in Phnom Penh, which we discovered almost by luck? Definitely art.

And the photos were magnificent. And they handed out brochures for the exhibition-proper, of which this once-colonial palace was only site. So that takes care of the ‘what are we going to do tomorrow?’ problem.

Then the generator went off again. Followed by assorted French cries of sacre this and sacre that.

Out on the street we went looking vaguely for food but weren’t really hungry enough for dinner, and we’d spied a chocolate shop on one of the various forays down to this end of town. Our flight on Wednesday morning was at 11am, so we’d have to be getting up kind of early; if we were going to stay out a bit and maybe just have chocolate for dinner and do what we felt like then it would be better tonight than Tuesday night.

So we spent about ten minutes trying to chose chocolates from the delectable range, and had ourselves a nice little supper, at our cane table in front of the shop, and perhaps we even started to realise that we would actually be going home. And there would be no more living out of bags and trying to figure out how much per day we could spend and no more. We had a little bonus from cashing the last of our traveller’s cheques, which were supposed to be for Hawaii, even though we didn’t have the amount left that we were supposed to have for Hawaii (not sure how that happened…. * whistles innocently *). Which made this here chocolate pretty sweet.

On the way across Norodom Boulevard I noticed that you could see the Independence Monument a few blocks away, so I wanted to try and get a photo from that different angle. Problem being, the best view was in the middle of the road, and to get the photo right at night needed about 10 seconds of exposure, or a bit less if I was lucky. I’d need to put the camera on it’s mini-tripod, which is about six inches high. I’d need to have a quick look through the back to check focus. I’d need to be more or less lying down in the middle of the road for this ‘photo’ to work. I explained these problems to Alice, who helpfully volunteered to stand behind me so that the people driving the cars would see her and hopefully in dodging her not run over me.

It wasn’t that busy a road, really, but it was still a fun stunt to pull. With a 10-sec exposure the camera takes a while to generate the preview, so it’s just sitting there doing it’s thing, we’re standing in the middle of the road, and I’m crouched on the painted lines waiting to check the resulting picture for any signs of the tripod having been bumped or otherwise rendered unsteady. Like, I don’t know, lots of cars driving past? We didn’t want to have to do the picture again, and thankfully didn’t have to, which was good because the security guard in his booth on the corner (not sure what he was actually guarding; there was some institute or company building on that street) had begun to shake his head.

And in the hotel room we had a close look at the photo and toasted our success.

Greg

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