Landing (4th December)
Somewhere over South Australia I woke up (again) just as we were about to make a big left turn, catch the jet stream, and land in Sydney in a very short time indeed.
Breakfast was being served, but it was still dark. With the toilets right behind us it wasn’t too hard to work out a good time to get up and go, which I rather needed to. I don’t sleep that well while flying, and they bring past a tray of water or orange juice about every half hour because the air conditioning is so dry. I think the longest I was asleep in a block was maybe two hours.
We were on the left side of the plane, and had a little peek out the window, although everybody in the plane was still officially ‘asleep’. It was dark but edging towards twilight. We were flying towards the sun; less then 10 minutes later sunrise had finished, and we floated above soft white clouds.
The wind was behind us and we sat cheerfully in our seats, counting down the minutes to an early landing in Sydney. Underneath the clouds it was raining a little bit, and we came in from the North, over Glebe and Ultimo, and played ‘Spot Your Old Apartment’ from a low altitude.
Is the Harbour Bridge and Opera House a magnificent and welcoming sight as you descend? Yes.
We wondered what our apartment had been doing without us. Had it been lonely? Had it coped in our long absence?
The landing was easy but bought the predictable cheer, because a lot of people on that plane were right about to be stuck in Thailand for a while until Qantas put on extra flights out of Phuket.
Next thing was to turn your phone back on and tell everyone we were home and on dry land; answer a few phone calls and then hit the Duty Free shop for GIN!
We must have landed at the exact right time because there were no lines (at all) for either the Australian Passport or International Section of Customs, and we had our choice of eight different desks.
Pick up your luggage from the carousel (it all came through this time), get in a taxi, find out from the driver if we missed anything at all in politics (we didn’t), and then past many familiar sights to Broadway Shopping Centre, where Simon and Adrian had come to collect us. We bought pictures frames with the voucher Alice had been given by Gadfly when she left, and also had a slight problem wherein the tax driver didn’t have change for a fifty and she nearly got run over crossing the road to get change from her Dad. Who didn’t have any, but her brother did.
The drive home was unremarkable; we spent half of it asleep, and by 3pm were back in Bathurst, unpacking our bags and just sitting in the yard, feeling rested.
Greg
Business Class (3rd December)
Early in the morning of Wednesday 3rd December, we dragged ourselves out of bed and had a quick shower, then a breakfast of small tubs of yoghurt and bits of pineapple out of the fridge, most of which didn’t look that great because the fridge in our room wasn’t the strongest. So most of the pineapple didn’t even get eaten; just thrown out.
Predictably, downstairs, the same two hotel staff were on duty again. I think they probably own the place. We thanked them for everything and took a quick photo of the nice young man behind the desk, who was slightly surprised.
Despite it being 7am there was still a choice of tuk-tuks out front, who knew from the bags to ask us if we were going ‘airport airport?’ We were indeed going airport airport. We had slightly tinged visions of either a very long slow tuk-tuk ride, or perhaps once again one which cost more than what it should have, but the driver said $7 which is what it’s supposed to be. That’s fair enough too; it is a pretty long ride out to the airport, and the traffic was already humming. I sat facing backwards, going a bit crazy with the video camera trying to get one last look at everything. So somewhere there is about half an hour of footage somewhere of regular Cambodian traffic.
The only day was a bit accident on the other side of the road, which was pushing traffic onto our side. Unfortunately, from what we could see through the crowds, it looked like a motorbike rider had gotten caught underneath the front wheels of a small truck. Two people, apparently the truck driver and the bike rider’s friend, were in an argument. The blood on the road did not look very promising. And with all the mental traffic we had seen in Vietnam and Cambodia, over the last few weeks, I’m surprised that we hadn’t come across something like this sooner.
Did we break down in tears on the way to the airport, and beg to be let off to go back to travelling? No; we were just happy and relieved to be going home, and also kind of astounded that we had made it through four months in the world without getting major-league cabin fever and strangling each other, or running out of money and needing to declare some bodily organs ‘non-essential’.
The airport is not that big, and not very busy either. We got there just after 8am, thinking we needed to be 3 hours ahead of departure time as it’s an international flight to KL.
Nope.
Could have still been in bed then.
We sat in the airport twiddling our thumbs and double-checking our bags and getting really hungry for an hour, before our flight even showed up on the departure board, and we saw that we two hours before check-in closed and also that we wouldn’t be waiting in long lines. There’s 7 or 8 departure desks, and flights aren’t frequent enough for a queue to build up. So we walked over to the little cafe and discovered that fleecing hungry transients is an airport customer all over the world, not just in Sydney. Quiche: bland and unevenly warmed. I can’t remember what Alice had, but it was average. And we’d spent about $5 of the USD $10 we had left.
Out front of the terminal a Cambodian sports team, in matching tracksuits, was getting ready to depart for somewhere or other; not sure which sport, but there was a TV camera and everything so it must have been a big deal.
Eventually check-in time came, and we kicked our stuffed backpacks along in the Business Class line, trying to push the wrinkles out of our clothes and generally appear presentable, convinced that for some reason when we arrived at the desk there’d have been a mistake and of course we wouldn’t get our comfortable seats.
But No!
The nice lady took our tickets and passports. She reminded us to pay our Departure Tax of USD $25 (oh crap…). She didn’t notice that our overweight bags were actually leaning a bit against the desk when they got weighed. And she gave us a card each, which was an invitation to the Traveller’s Lounge upstairs. We quickly transferred to Plan B, which involved putting the Departure Tax on the credit card, and skipped on through the security gates and all that lot, then followed the signs to the Phnom Penh International Airport Lounge.
If I had known it would all work out so smoothly, I wouldn’t even have eaten breakfast. Free drinks! Free internet! Free comfy lounges and swish tables! Free food – and not airline-grade food. Nice stuff like pastries and mini chocolate mousse and fresh fruit, juice, anything small and tasty was there somewhere.
In fact there was a whole glass-front fridge full of mini pastries and sweets.
I hadn’t slept that well so two free coffees and a substantial morning tea later, I was feeling a lot better about the prospect of waiting around in KL for eight hours for the flight to Sydney. We’d get lunch on the flight there, so if nothing else we would not be hungry.
Of course when the time came to board our plane to KL we didn’t really want to leave; but we twisted each other’s arms.
Through another stroke of fortune we’d been assigned seats three and four, which are the first ones on the left when you get in the plane. We were comfortable seated (and I mean comfortable… lots of elbow room in Business Class) and ready to fly about 30 seconds after walking on the plane.
Would you like some wine before lunch sir? Why yes.
Yes to everything.
One very cushy 2 hour flight later, after a quick jaunt over the ocean, we pulled into Kuala Lumpur where with the 1 hour time difference it was now 2pm. KL airport is rather a lot larger and busier; in fact to get from the terminal we arrived at to the one we’d depart from, we had to catch a shuttle train. Not that far; maybe 1km at most, but still it’s a pretty sizeable airport.
And that terminal on it’s own is still pretty big. It’s x-shaped so we wandered up this way, up that way, and up the other way and around and about for a while, then saw that there was a Malaysian Airlines lounge up on the second floor. Terminal boredom was just setting in, and immigrants had already staked out the best sleeping spots in all the plastic chairs around the corridors. So why not, we thought. Let’s try our luck with the lounge. We presented our boarding passes like everything was normal, explained that we had been upgraded to Business Class, even though our next flight was economy, and the nice lady waved us through.
Should we, I said, stick our backpacks out of the way in the pigeon holes near the doorway? But Alice didn’t hear me or didn’t care, and was almost running into the lounge before they realised they had let in two hungry and disheveled backpackers.
Without going into too much detail, it was paradise. Much bigger than the lounge in Phnom Penh, with rows and rows of couches, newspapers everywhere, free tea, coffee, cakes, biscuits, cheese, sandwiches, free wireless internet, and a bar where you just walked up and got what you asked for. So we got some champagne and toasted our success. And then red wine. And then more free cheese and biscuits. And juice.
And the bathrooms were swish.
So we made ourselves (very) comfortable in the lounges, plugged the computer in, sent everyone an email with a picture saying Guess Where We Are, and then did some writing and wasting time and reading the free magazines.
And then – well – time flies, and seven hours later it was time to brush our teeth with bottled water for the last time in a long time, and say a regretful goodbye to the now rather full Business Class Lounge, and shuffle off down to our gate for the flight home. To Sydney. It was an odd feeling that the travelling and packing was actually going to be over for a while; but as an anti-climax we sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, waiting for a flight from Phuket to arrive with Australians fleeing Bangkok on it. On the TV they played a documentary on the restoration of a castle in rural Malaysia. It was boring.
In our two separate seats right up the back we could stretch out a bit, do what we wanted, and wait for late dinner to arrive, once the plane got into the air, even though we weren’t hungry anymore. I don’t sleep that well on aeroplanes. I’d had too many free coffees and sat watching the little dot of the plane move over the map toward Western Australia, trying to nod off.
Greg
Photo Phnom Penh (2nd December)
We had an odd feeling waking up today, because it was finally the last day.
And everything was organised, unlike when we left and still had to pick up passports and get malarone and get ourselves through the snow to Sydney in the first place, all on the day before we flew out. All we had to do now was go off to the photo exhibition, then pack our bags. We’d been to so many different places in four months, and come so far, that it didn’t feel like it could possibly all be part of the same trip. But the photographic evidence is incontrovertible. And also we have receipts. And visa stamps.
We made our final visit to the kitchen on the top floor, where we had our final serving of lightly fried eggs on toast, with our final slices of slightly coconut tasting bread. And bits of onion on top. And tomato sauce.
Then we shuffled around the room for a bit and sorted out things for tomorrow, we did our final load of sink washing, and hung it up in the metal window frame to dry, with the window open. We read through the months of itineraries again. We studied the Photo Phnom Penh brochure to find out where all the exhibitions were, what they were, and how many we would likely be able to get to on a walking tour. We drew a rough route map. Somehow that took until 1pm and we still had to pay our last visit to the Thai restaurant next to the hotel for Pad Thai again.
Most of the exhibitions we were interested in were somewhere near the main part of town; the French Photographer JR had taken a series of women’s eyes and posted them up large on the outside wall of the French Embassy, but that’s waaaayyy up the other end of town, and those pictures would be on his website anyway, so we had to leave that one for next time we’re in Phnom Penh and JR has an exhibition on the outside of the embassy…
The first exhibition was in what looked basically like a house, and there were some dudes constructing something out the front that required band saws and angle grinders, but inside you could only hear it strong enough for a mild headache. The photographer had contacted groups of women who had been rescued from sex slavery in India, and given them props and a studio and as a therapeutic exercise encouraged them to dress up however they wanted and create a character to speak about what they wanted to do about their experiences. Obviously some of the ladies came up with dramatic vengeance themes. But others simply showed how sad the whole situation was, or adopted personas of grace or divine aid, and said that they would like to help other in the same situation. Fascinating exhibition.
At the second gallery they had some posters up on poles outside that were matched to the principles in the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which was maybe having some kind of anniversary. In the same building were two very different exhibitions, set up in your typical airy, white walls, high-ceiling gallery space. One of was some photos of teenagers looking upset or bored on summer holidays with their parents, which I think was supposed to express what it is like to be upset or bored on summer holidays with your parents. I didn’t ‘get’ it.
The second was really cool; this guy had got some incense sticks and blocked out all other light, then set up some blue torch light from underneath and taken these ghostly looking images where the smoke seems to be a little too similar to a woman with her back turned, or a man kneeling, or something.
Across the road they had a provocative collection from a Thai photographer who had created a character of his won; the Pink Man. What the Pink Man does is walk around in a pink suit with pink shirt, tie, socks, shoes, the lot! No, it’s not Shane Warne on Jane McGrath day… he also pushes a bright pink trolley through every photograph, and has this look on his face like ‘Whatever is going on here, there must be some way that I can BUY IT.’ But the additional step, which really makes it art, is that he had been modelled for some photographs, and for others simply pasted in. So, for instance, they took black and white pictures from the 1970’s of cops beating the living shit out of University Students, with corpses lined up in rows in the background, or Democracy Protesters literally hanging still from trees, and they just pasted that Pink Man into the scenery somewhere, with his pink trolley.
It gets the point across. Another memorable picture is of some huge cube-shaped rocks in Indonesia, with this tiny little pink man cruising around next to them, trolley slightly small to purchase such vast natural monuments.
We had seen glossy books with samples of photos from all the exhibitions on sale at the gallery with the UN posters; after thorough consideration the books over food policy won out again and we acquired a book to take home with us for $25.
Nearby was the AV centre, where they had lots of interesting things.
1. an exhibition of standard front-on shots of Cambodian school children, but taken so that they mimicked the faces of all of those photos of people going into torture camps like S21
2. some great photos of some of the abandoned, half-constructed, or half-deconstructed buildings around Phnom Penh
3. some old old aerial photos, printed about 4ft x 4ft, of Phnom Penh itself, which show you just how glorious it would have been before the war came along
4. the AV archive, which is basically a Cambodian history museum, except entry is free and you can sit down at one the computers and search whatever you like in the archives of photos, text, and many kinds of videos like old news reports, footage of De Gaulle’s state visit in 1950-something, what Phnom Penh and the Water Festival looked like in the 1920’s, some kooky footage of a parade in 1977 presided over by Pol Pot, and also every documentary by the well-known Cambodian film maker Rithy Panh. We watched some large sections of his documentary on laying the first fibre-optic cable across Cambodia in the 90’s.
It’s an amazing place. Pretty much anything you might want to know about Cambodia is in there somewhere, for free.
The next exhibition was in a very modern but small and narrow gallery, of various Cambodian youths who the artist had come across out on the streets at night, but who had obviously spent ages on their ‘look’. And so these kids posed for portraits on such-and-such corner at night, but some of them have so much adornment and make up and hair dye or whatever that you can’t even really tell that they’re Cambodian. It made an interesting sequence.
A couple of blocks closer to the river we came across an odd site at the corner of Monivong Boulevard; cops were clearing an intersection and stopping all the traffic entering, and all the way up and down that street there was no traffic coming. Clearly something was about to happen. After a minute or two the motorbike guards turned up, followed by six or seven of the standard government variety large black four-wheel drives, some of which bore Chinese flags. State visit, or something. And they must have been visiting quickly, because they were driving pretty damn fast. So that was entertaining. But was really just hilarious was watching the intersection and streets refill rapidly with cars and motorbikes and ladies with baskets on their heads as soon as the cops moved a little bit out of the way.
We strolled along down the boulevard, made a right at the independence monument, and took ourselves all the way back to the hotel via our favourite (cheap) supermarket, where we found an easy dinner consisting of bread rolls and cheese and other related items, as well as some pineapple and yoghurts to have for breakfast in the morning, because we’d be getting a move on before breakfast time.
Then we pulled everything out of everywhere and laid it all out straight on the bed, and made a valiant attempt to get it al back into our backpacks with any major mangling or shoving, while also not making either the cabin bags or the hold bags too heavy. Or heavy enough that any one might become suspicious, even though both of our backpacks, I’m sure, were more than 20kg. And then we tried to go to sleep.
And we did start to realise that we would be going home.
Greg
An afternoon tour (1st December)
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
Wat Phnom, and the Lady there (30th November)
Sunday morning.
Phnom Penh.
New tickets home safely stored in our waterproof orange bags.
Three days to see whatever we might want to see in this slightly jumbled city, with it’s vast armies of Tuk tuks and disorganised rabbles of street children and occasional shiny glass shopping centres, the carpark bus station and the wide river.
We increased our familiarity with the hotel breakfast staff, and just the same they became more sure that the only thing we would ever order was fried eggs on toast.
We wanted to have a little look along the waterfront in the day time, but also to see Wat Phnom, the temple that precedes the entire city, according to legend. The waterfront is actually called Sisowath Quay. The quay itself is not in evidence, unless it’s hidden somewhere behind the wooden billboards covering some type of construction project most of the way along the riverbank. Like many things in Cambodia, people are busy rebuilding it, but you could imagine that in five years it will be really nice. Along the riverfront is mainly restaurants and other things tourists might be interested in, like massage or souvenirs or travel agencies. And a fair few beggars, unfortunately; some among them families.
It was late on for lunch but we stopped at what looked like a bakery, and found certain tasty items which were suitable for eating. I don’t think it’s really that good a trend for people to run shops in, let’s say, Phnom Penh or Tokyo or Kinshasa which are supposed to look like they could be in New York or Sydney. But when you’re less than a week from home, you can’t help yourself.
Now; in many places that we saw it, the Mekong River seemed mighty. But in Phnom Penh, the sheer width makes it particularly mighty. After lunch we walked north towards the long but unrefined concrete bridge; just before there is basically the start of Sisowath quay, and near to the edge of ‘town’ proper. You do a left turn and cross some busy roads and Wat Phnom is right there, easily recognised by being more or less he only hill in sight, even though it couldn’t be much more than 50m high.
Or if you wanted to you could just follow the smell of monkeys, elephants, and dogs… for those are the things which crowd around the bottom of the hill or lie on the grass in between the spiralling stone walkway to the top. Well, mainly dogs and small monkeys, to be honest; there were only a couple of elephants and those were reserved for tourist rides at a semi-modest price we did not enquire about. Still, it’s an elegant setting, with the green grass and stone walls and the shady trees on the hillside.
The temple at the top is surprisingly small, something like 5m x 15m, and set in a final row of stone battlements with wooden drum and bell houses inside the walls. The story is that there was a Lady Phnom who found a buddha statue washed up on the banks of the Mekong, and looking about for a suitable spot to set this statue up, she saw the hill and realised that would be ideal, and then she became more or less the patron, and so of course there is also a shrine to Lady Phnom in behind the actual temple. The building is quite simple; white stone on the outside and wood panelling inside.
And from somewhere; about 80 million mosquitoes, which I had no idea were hanging around, until we sat down inside for 15 minutes, on the mat with shoes off, although your standard Dunlop Volley is just a pair of socks with laces anyway. While we were having a close look at all the various buddha statues, in glass cases or not, of many sizes, and having a strange mixture of decorations all over and around them. Some of them had banknotes stuck into every nook and partially open hand, which finally answered for us the question of what Cambodians actually do with their 100 riel notes.
So we closed our eyes for a bit and then tried to take in the altar and it’s garish population, and the mosquitoes took in every drop of my blood that they could swallow. It was only about 2 in the afternoon, so I thought I just had an itchy back. Not so.
Actually, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m feeling a bit itchy just writing about it.
Out the other side of the building people were also lined up, but not so many as you might have seen at Angkor Wat, to pay their respects to Lady Phnom. Her statue, in the corner of the outer wall which comes just before the stairs back down, is considerably more ‘decorated’. And it has little pre-recorded dancing figurines that twirl. How that amounts to giving thanks to the lady who built the temple, I am not sure. But people like them, so that’s good. Other than that I have strong memories of a hell of a lot of yellow material, of the glitzy variety.
On the way back down Alice had fun playing with the monkeys while I reminded her about those rabies shots that the GP had wanted me to get…
We had a bit less fun noticing just how many beggars there were all up and down the steps, and the combination of injuries that they had managed to acquire, e.g no legs and one eye, and other awful things like that. Those people, you can see, really do need a break from life. Maybe just one person giving what they can will be worth it.
As we walked back through the gaggle of dogs, monkeys, elephants, other tourists, and tuk tuk drivers looking for rides, I looked back and the monkeys were taking over the arms of a giant clock built into the garden. So the army of the twelve monkeys has already made it this far.
Afternoon was well into play by now; we wanted to get to the internet cafe and then possibly have to make phone calls before dinner at 6 with Ella, who would be off the following morning. With no great progress on the ‘Will we get to go to Hawaii’ front we were still not sure what was going to happen, but at least we knew that we would be getting back to Sydney. So we hopped into a tuk tuk and paid a whole two dollars or something to get back to the hotel because we were pretty much just sick of walking. For no reason that I could identify, the tuk tuk had a little All Blacks flag taped to one of the poles…
One of the great features, now that we started to think of such things, of the previous months, was how much time we had to just get about taking photos, and then have a really good look through them on the computer and rank them and start to get a much better idea of what a good photo is and how you might make one. And that’s usually a nice way to take up the rest of the afternoon.
Dinner with Ella was funny because we couldn’t resist going back to the same Korean restaurant right next to the hotel. This being the same Korean restaurant with the Funny Old Korean Men in their Funny Old Korean Indoor Sunglasses.
Other things we couldn’t resist;
a. getting wrapped up in the Korean romance-drama on TV, even though we had no idea if they were actually speaking Khmer or Korean or possibly German…?
b. getting more incredibly strong-flavoured Kim Chi like raw onions and ginger-pickled vegetables, and some kind of salt paste soy thing which temporarily prevented thought.
c. giggling at the above.
d. attempting to communicate in english/sign with the funny old Korean men. Apparently Kim Chi makes us stronger.
So it was a great fun dinner, with another little bite of sadness because the people that we were just getting to know were pretty much all gone. Although we did manage to pass on some more Malarone to someone who might actually use it… seems less like a grand and frivolous waste of money that way.
Greg
The Thai Airways ticket lottery (29th November)
Well. This is almost too good to write down.
In years and years when someone asks what the funniest thing in our trip was, the answer is going to be ‘Rescheduling tickets at the Thai airways office in Phnom Penh.’
Anyone expecting the hotel restaurant to be open at 6am was going to be disappointed. No trouble procuring a tuk-tuk out the front of the hotel though; those guys don’t seem to sleep all that much. Although he wanted $4 to go over to the office, and claimed that it was a long way away, across town. We offered $2.50 and then $3 and he says OK $3. It was about a twenty minute ride, but anyone expecting a huge line to have already formed out front of the Thai Airways office was about to be profoundly relieved. There about ten people there, and it was 7.15am, and they weren’t going to open until 8am. A French lady came over and asked us if we spoke French or English.
English.
OK. You are twelve, she says. Pointing to the people next to us, ten-eleven-twelve, pointing at us.
OK. Thanks.
And all the other people were lined up waiting were old people. Marvellous.
So we stood around, and thought about what we might do if they offered us this or offered us that, or what we really wanted to do, in other words. The best case, let’s say was that we get rescheduled to a flight on the same day, or maybe the airport’s open and we don’t need to change flight at all, and then everything goes ahead as normal and we get to go to Hawaii. Or it gets moved by a day and then we call Hawaiian airlines and they don’t mind moving the flight to Hawaii and then we still get to go to Hawaii, but only for four days. Or maybe we can still go to Hawaii but we have to pay a fee to move the flight. Which we don’t really have spare money to do. But it’s Hawaii. And it’ll be nice hotels and a volcano walk. And Kona Mountain coffee. So maybe we just go ahead and pay it. But Hawaiian airlines only flies to Sydney every other day, and returns on the even days. So we’d have to stay somewhere in Sydney for the night, although there’d be someone we could crash with. No problem. Worst case; flights are delayed by some time and we have to pay extra to stay in Phnom Penh for quite a while. Or we have to pay for the tickets home to be rebooked, in which case we have a real problem.
A little before 8am we see the staff turn up in their orchid purple uniforms and go on in the back door, and twiddle about and turn the computers on and generally look like people who were working until 10pm or 11pm the previous night, which was, we heard, when they started having to turn people out of the Thai Airways office.
The French people at the head of the line started to shake their heads and flap their hands a little, until around ten past eight the front doors opened and people rushed for the ticket machine. Some guys from way behind us in the line came sneaking around the side to try and pinch a ticket they hadn’t lined up for. I didn’t really think we’d have time to explain the anti-borgnine rule to them, and the people in front of us seemed determined to let them push past, so I stuck my sticky fingers in there and grabbed a ticket as well.
Number 11.
And we sat down. Another five minutes or so passed. The lights lit up and the staff started calling people to counters. We set ourselves to wait for a bit and got cups of water from the cooler over the other side of the store.
The elderly couple came over and said ‘excuse me, you took the ticket from in front of us, could we change?’
Now where was the assertiveness when those guys were pushing in round the side? But Alice was thinking, and had a plan, and had taken a ticket as well. So now the elderly couple had our precious No. 11, but we had No.12 and No 14.
And we waited some more. Then a fellow in trousers and one of those hunting vests with about 400,000 pockets all over them, in tan, maybe 50-years old, came walking in the door with his regularly dressed companions and marched straight up to the counter. And expected everyone to do something other than go very far away. But he had missed his flight.
‘No. You must wait your turn, just like everybody,’ said the man already waiting at the counter.
And on like that for several minutes, while the important man explained about he shouldn’t have to wait. And convinced nobody of anything at all.
Sometime after 9am we had the pleasure of stepping up to the counter, and presenting our existing tickets, and asking the nice lady if they had any way to know if the airport would be open by next Tuesday, and if we would need to rebook our tickets. We wouldn’t be needing our ticket No. 14. So we gave it the pregnant lady sitting next to us, showing her the one we already had. And you could say she was quite pleased about that.
Bad news at the desk, though, where the nice purple-orchid uniformed lady read our tickets and typed things in the computer.
‘Ah, airport is close until 5th December.’
Then we had our turn at waiting for 10 minutes or so while some computers checked in some databases and figured out some convenient combinations of the many ways that we might be able to get from Phnom Penh to Sydney.
‘Can we still fly on the 2nd December, next Tuesday? Is that possible?’, we asked.
‘2nd December is all booked, I am sorry sir, still some flights available on 3rd December.’
Now this is the point that we looked at each other, and had that little giggle which translates as ‘That was a good idea you had insisting that we get up at 6am to go to the airline office.’
A bit more waiting. Then we got offered the 3rd of December, via KL, but the nice lady was unable to rebook our flights for us because we booked them through a third party.
Eh?
We didn’t book directly with Thai airways; we booked through STA.
‘Booking through agent, the agent must have authorise, it’s OK, I give you authorisation code, sir, and you give code to your travel agent.’
Now that would be our travel agent, STA, at Broadway Shopping Centre in Australia. Would they even be open now? What’s the time difference. Two Hours. So we went out onto the footpath, and I had a good rant about how travel insurance is where you pay them, not where they pay you, and Alice called the travel insurance people, on her mobile, internationally, there being no other option, and waited on hold for them to confirm that because of the delay being due to political unrest, they would not cover the cost of new tickets. If we couldn’t Thai airways to rebook them for us. If the magic authorisation code could not, eventually , be made to dance and do our bidding. We’d bought our tickets and passports and all that with us but somehow the piece of paper with the phone number for STA travel broadway on it was back in the hotel. So then Alice called her parents, internationally, on her mobile, there being no other option, and got them to look up the phone number for STA travel.
And we didn’t have a ticket to get back in the line. So even if STA travel could rebook for us from our end, or authorise something, or do something, somehow, we still might have to get up at 6am tomorrow and come back to the office again, seeing as there were notices in the office confirming that due to circumstances they would be opening Sunday. Until midday.
Emma, our reliable and faithful travel agent, was not there. Damn. Eventually she got passed to the duty manager, who hadn’t really heard of this sort of thing before, but found a space on the computer which looked the kind of place you might, as the travel agent, write notes for other people, and he wrote that little reference number in that space, and we said thanks very much.
Now, the next thing was, just as we were coming back inside from our marathon of expensive international telephone calls, the pregnant lady had just finished having her flight rearranged, and she was waiting in the doorway for her companion, who was squaring away final business with the lady at the counter.
‘Hello. Could we, perhaps, have your spare ticket, if you have one?’ is what we could have said, if she didn’t turn out to be Japanese, and speak OK english, and be a little unsure as to why we wanted the ticket they’d already used.
‘No, your spare, your other one.’
‘Ex-cuse-ah-me?’
Now due to us being the friendly people who gave her ticket No. 14, once she translated what we were asking – and weren’t we lucky at that point that we were dealing with someone who could understand us – was only too happy to give us her left over ticket No. 18. And happy to wish us good luck, and ask us where home was, and apologise several times for not speaking good english. Clearly adequate to the task though.
Ticket No. 18. One million points for the person who can guess what number the desk ladies were currently serving… yes, No. 16.
When 18 flashed up on the counter, it was the same lady we spoke to before, so that saved explaining about the code, and she went right ahead and printed us out a print out of our available options. And the earliest one was still direct from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, then KL to Sydney, at 11.30am, on the 3rd of December.
That’d have to do, then. The lady set about rebooking our tickets. And we looked at each other thinking ‘How on earth did we just get away with that?’
She printed out the new tickets. She highlighted the dates and so forth. We repeated the numbers out loud. And we said thank you very much, and asked if we could still choose our seats on the night flight from KL to Sydney. But we had to go to the Malaysian Airlines office to do that. And they wouldn’t be open on the weekend, what with the lack of any huge crisis staring at them.
So we got our tickets home. You can call it good luck. But it was a bit more than that.
Out front, we called STA again and reassured them whatever they had done worked, and thanked them very much. We did also hug then. The tuk-tuk drivers knew what was happening and were waiting around after dropping people off to join what was now a pretty extensive line. Some of them probably people who waited in line all day the day before, and got nothing for it. The driver wanted $5 to get back to our hotel, but then we recognised each other from earlier in the morning. It was the same driver! So then the price became $3 again. And along the way, on a main road, while I took pictures of Alice holding up the new tickets and smiling, I dropped the lens cap for the camera, and had to run back and get it. Oops.
–
The phone number listed with our tickets for Hawaiian Airlines was available on the weekend, but being no more than the ticket office, they were quite happy to charge us the small amount of $250 each to rebook our flights from Sydney to Honolulu. Not to speak, even yet, of our flights from Honolulu to Sydney. Secreted away in the Hawaii tourism prize pack was the business card of a certain PR contact. So we went to plan B; leave her an email today or tomorrow, then on monday call up and see if she was willing to ‘help us’ move the flights. Makes sense, right? I mean, they’re already paying, what’s the difference to move some flights? Right?
–
OK. Deep breath. Having said goodbye and thank you to Nak the previous night, after dinner, we were at our liberty, but equipped now with a grasp of the town layout and the things we might want to see and do before we leave, possible forever. At the Thai restaurant next to the hotel, which we seemed to be living in lately, the head waiter spoke fairly good english, enough to know what Vegetarian meant, and was only too happy to provide a vege Pad Thai, just like the ones we used to have on Harris St. in Ultimo. We had lunch there and then walked all the way along Monivong Boulevard to find the central markets, which were right near the bus station. The central market building is a bit odd-shaped; it looks kind of like the spokes of an old car wheel, laid sideways, with a big space-ship bump in the middle, then heaps of tarpaulins draped all around the edges. Inside you could buy pretty much anything; watches, clothes, food, shoes, toys, trinkets, wigs, live crabs, and even small embroidered patches of the Cambodian flag, for which we could not resist parting with a dollar.
In the modern shopping centre a little way up the street from the central market, we went poring through the ‘DVD’ shops on the upper floor, where we came across a certain Mr Jamie. He was getting a bus next morning, with Amanda, back to Sihanoukville, to have a few more days at the beach until their respective flights, which had also been moved, departed. Dinner tonight sounded like a great idea, yes.
We walked on back to the hotel. We watched the documentary about S-21 Toul Sleng which we’d bought for about $3 in the ‘DVD’ shop. We resisted paying, I think it was maybe $50USD, for a box with just about every Simpsons episode ever in it. We washed some socks in the sink. We had a shower which we skipped in the morning to get down to the office faster. We took the laptop for a walk to the internet place across the road and paid $1.50 to send off some emails to certain PR persons, and to our possibly alarmed parents, and so forth. And SMS’d friends to see if we would be able to stay with them in Sydney.
Downstairs, we swapped Horror Flight Rearranging Stories with Jamie, Amanda and Ella, and then we strolled off together to find a restaurant along the waterfront, on Sisowath Quay. Ella had been unwell early in the morning, but seemed OK now, or capable of eating dinner anyway. At our outside table we had a very nice dinner and then split up into the ladies, who went to some lady-place to get their toes and toenails inspected or injected or decorated or something, and the men, i.e. myself and Jamie, who walked back to the hotel but stopped at a trendy looking bar, and sat in comfortable chairs, and drank beer. And discussed the relative absence, lately, of a world financial sector. Jamie actually works for UBS, a large swiss bank, and sort of understood how some of it works.
Because he was going back to the beach, and because we hadn’t taken a single one of our malarone tablets, we gave him enough out of our boxes to last a few days, and bid himself and Amanda goodnight and farewell.
Meanwhile Alice seemed to have some kind of green decoration on her toenails? Not sure what that’s about.
Greg
Back in Phnom Penh for fight night (28th November)
You might say we were less than enthusiastic to be getting up early for another bus ride, particularly knowing that breakfast might be a while in arriving at the restaurant.
But they did have a breakfast buffet available, which was hot, so we paid about 50c more for that and did well out of the transaction.
And although we didn’t really have much to drink last night, the late-ish night wasn’t doing us any favours. But there were others in the group who were looking a bit more second-hand; even the people who were staying on in Sihanoukville had gotten up early just to say goodbye, which was really nice. Staying at the beach pretty much forever would have been great; if you had to pick a beach to stay at. But w were within a conceivable time of ‘going home.’ Four months? Inconceivable. A week? Hmm… can we have our own shower back yet?
The bus actually pulled up in front of our hotel, just as it had done in other towns, so really, we didn’t have a damn thing to complain about. Just the same, everyone was looking forward to making their seat as comfy as possible, pulling their hat over their head and nodding off.
The bus trundled on through town, past the big roundabout with the Golden Lions with the unusually large (or possible just realistic) testicles, then to the bus station, which in true Cambodian style was really just a carpark with some stalls around the edge. But it still works OK. Except when you’re three American ladies who somehow managed to miss an earlier bus. Turns out, as we are able to ascertain while they ‘discussed matters’ with the bus driver, that their earlier bus was supposed to come get them from their hotel. And it sort of, well, didn’t. Therefore, they should be allowed to go on this bus. By all known current laws of international justice and customer service, they should be allowed to go on this bus.
Except that according to the omniscient clipboard, of which said driver was sole possesser of and referrer-to, this bus was full. Booked out.
Except that this bus was not actually booked out. This bus was not full, because we’d left three ticket holders named Kiel, Lou and Sherry on the beach.
Once again Nak stepped in to explain things in Khmer to the bus driver, and to assure the driver, on our request, that we didn’t care at all if somebody sat in those three seats and those three people definitely were not coming.
And then the bus rolled on out of the dusty carpark back to what was, for us, the end of the line. We trundled along through flat farming kind of countryside, palms 50-million deep next to the road in places, and a very determined breeze pushed anything not a vehicle to an acute angle. At the morning stop-over somewhere between some place and somewhere else, in a dusty bus park out the front of a restaurant kind of building, we had a little giggle about how ungrateful our guests were to be offered seats on the bus. We’d heard of the trouble in Bangkok and Amanda was talking about going straight to her airline office when we got to Phnom Penh. The airport, they said, officially, was to be open by 9pm tonight.
‘But that’s just an estimate, isn’t it?’, we asked, ‘and it just means they’ll have another look tonight and might declare it closed for another 24 hours if the protesters are still occupying the terminals?’
And that’s why Amanda was going straight to the office.
On the bus we nodded off extensively, save some short interludes of attempting to read my book about the Angkor Wat complex, and asking Nak questions about the names, e.g., why do all the ruler’s names end in Varman?
‘Varman mean like, great? Or like, you know, glorious?’
‘So it’s Jaya the Great is Jayavarman, Suryavarman mean Surya the Great?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Just like with Western rulers, like Alexander the Great. That’s funny.’
The only solid period of sleep I managed, with the bumping and the horn beeping and the arctic AC, about which I think I have already complained in these pages, was just before we rolled on into Phnom Penh. I woke up just as we were crossing the huge concrete bridge over the Mekong. And it was sort of refreshing to find ourselves somewhere we had already seen, and knew where the supermarkets and ATMs were. Not that we’d have much opportunity to frequent the ATM, being just about out of money entirely.
Hi Mum. Yes, I should have told we were just about out of money entirely.
(whistles innocently)
Yes. Phnom Penh. Millions of motorbikes and Tuk-tuks. Wide main avenue. Men riding in the backs of trucks full of…. flowers? Yes. Flowers. Take a picture. Along Preah Monivong Boulevard we stopped at traffic lights in front of the Sydney Shopping Center. Oh look. Sydney. I remember you. We’ll be flying there next Wednesday. Just think of it. We’ll be going home. But it was spelled Center… Hmm. Not quite home yet.
I thought we were taking a wrong turn when we didn’t hang a left to the bus station, or the bus had to go round the block to fit in, or something, but : Joy of Joys! They took us straight to our hotel. Good old Town View. Same people working the desk; 20-something man with short hair and 20-something woman in elegant skirt. Different room this time though. On the second floor.
In that room we spread our bags out and tried to think of something to do until 5.30pm when we tuk-tukked over to a building past the central market, back toward the north end of town, to see traditional Cambodian kick-boxing. I have a feeling, a sort of suspicion, that Nak didn’t take us to see this for heritage value, for understanding of culture, or that sort of thing. He probably just goes to see a fight every friday night and thought we might like to come along. On the door they were handing out bottles of energy drink as a promotion to every customer. It was called Carabou. Green bottle with a picture of bison skull and horns poking out. Tastes no better than Red Bull but I think there might be some ingredients which are legal in Cambodia that are not exactly legal in other countries.
I went a bit silly.
OK, so in the small auditorium, they set up the ring in the middle, judges just next to that, and next to the judges is the five-man band, and that’s the traditional part. They play the fight music, which was a kind of jungle rhythm thing, and the seats crowding up the concrete step in the auditorium have no backs on them. It’s just a bum-shaped piece of plastic, bolted to the step. They play the traditional music and the two guys, in red or blue head gear, sort of menace towards one another, except they don’t keep their hands sort of in front of their throat like we do, they hold them up next to their heads, and sort of jiggle them up and down to the music while one of them decides whose going to try and kick who in head first.
Then the fight starts, and it’s just normal kick-boxing from then on, except for the slightly cheerful backing music, and the crowd chanting something in particular, which may just be roaring with each blow, or may in fact translate as something like ‘Kill’. But the thing is, they chant all together. And they love it.
I guess we watched either five fights in total, maybe six. Clearly the bigger, stronger, faster and better exponents were reserved for later on in the evening. I took a bunch of photos from up in our seats, then went down ringside with the faster 1.8 lens, because even with the lighting most of the punches were too fast. And I didn’t really want to use the flash, due to the signs saying, Please Do Not Use FLash. With a picture of a camera. I went right up in the corner of the building, and had a look from there, and went back to our seats, and then back ringside with the other lens. I took probably 900 million photos, something like that. It was great fun.
I suppose we’re confused about how many fights it was because one of them was over real fast. In the first round, they’d hardly even finished dancing towards each other gently, and waving their hands around their heads in time with the music, before dude in blue headgear unleashed this kind of lightning punch. Knocked the other guy flat. I wasn’t even sure if he would ever get up. He got hit hard. Real hard. Dude in blue takes off his headgear, bows to every corner of the room, prays something, and goes and has a giggle with his coach in the stands. Guy in red; still flat on his back in the ring.
I hope he got paid a flat fee.
We had a little break back at the hotel and then met downstairs again for dinner; everyone had been hearing about and wanting to go to the Starfish restaurant, because it’s in the Intrepid Cambodia booklet and because it’s one of their charities of choice, and we were finally getting to do that.
Everyone had also been hearing about how much the situation in Bangkok was changing, about how the anti-government protesters, who wanted democracy, were blockading the airport and how there was like a thousand times more people involved today than yesterday, and how even the red-clad pro-government protesters were holding up proceedings downtown. And how it really wasn’t looking good for anyone intending to fly to or through Bangkok in the next little while, which would be us, Ella, Amanda, and even Sherry, who was going to be coming back to Phnom Penh on Monday morning for a monday night flight. And the yellow-clothed protesters had even gone to the trouble of sending a deputy delegation to blockade the old Don Mueang airport, which was only replaced by Suvarnapumi about to years ago, and was still more or less in working order.
Amanda had to wait in line for ages and ages and ages at Thai airways, while the queue machine was handing out ticket 109 and the desk lady was serving 34 or 35 or something like that. Now because people have connections and people want some options and because of other things like that it was taking them quite some time to sort out each individual person. People were queue-jumping wantonly. Not being particularly interested in the brad of malarkey, and knowing, courtesy of Amanda, that the office would only be open until midday on saturday, we resigned ourselves to an early morning trip to the Thai Airways office. To get our flights rescheduled. Meaning we probably wouldn’t get to go to Hawaii.
So… dinner.
What the booklet don’t tell you is just how nice the restaurant it. Some of the smaller and less frequented streets in Phnom Penh had a, well, uncared-for appearance, but Starfish was a leafy walled sort of area, and inside was all polished wood, and adobe walls, high ceilings, the lot. And the restaurant had a swimming pool that you could make use of so long as you ordered something. If they did accommodation I’d never leave. Or I might go somewhere else now and then to get a slightly cheaper feed, because while the meals were stupendous, and delicious, and creative in their presentation and combinations of ingredients and so on, we were paying more or less what you’d pay for the same thing in Sydney.
But if anyone happened to stumble on this website looking for travel tips or similar, do not go to Phnom Penh without going to Starfish Restaurant.
And also Happy Birthday Simon.
Greg
A day by the pool (27th November)
Today was a day earmarked, for some time previously, as a lazy day.
We’d read the itinerary and so we knew when we got in the plane to Bangkok that we’d be off to the beach in Cambodia when we got to Sihanoukville. And we knew when we saw the detailed itinerary in Phnom Penh at the start of the trip that we’d only have one full day to ourselves in Sihanoukville.
And this, I proclaim, this was that day. And we spent most of it sitting at the hotel restaurant or getting a really good look at the pool. And we washed some clothes and hung them up in the window because we are classy backpackers.
Also my foot had really started to hurt even more than last night, but I could still move my toes, so while I didn’t know what I could have damaged so badly I knew nothing was broken. And that would have to do.
We didn’t rush out of bed, on this our day of not getting up at 6.30 or 7am to get in a bus to go somewhere, but we didn’t really have an epic sleep-in either. But we were still finishing breakfast and making use of the wireless internet in the restaurant area when breakfast ceased to be served at 10.30. Then the laptop battery unexpectedly died (again). It’s ben developing a disturbing habit of doing this and I’m wondering whether it just needs some good old-fashioned 240v AC, or whether the internet rumours are true and some laptop batteries just don’t make it far past 300 cycles.
Anyway… it’s good to have the computer die without warning halfway through something, especially when something is putting up pictures on your website so that everyone knows you’re still alive even though you’re getting a bit behind in the travel journals, which you definitely intend to finish off as soon as you don’t have to pack and repack your bag every other day.
So then came the sink-washing, which is always an amusing thing to do, even more so when it’s a tiny sink and the plug isn’t the tightest you’ve seen, and your clothes end up getting not much more than a rinse, and frankly are starting to get a bit greasy. Readers might guess at this time that we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel in that we would soon actually be able to unpack our bags and not need to pack them again for quite some time. And oddly enough, that’s when it started to grate the most. While it was just reality, i.e., in September when we had months of travelling left and I was in St. Petersburg and quite happy just to have my backpack in one piece, thank you very much, packing and unpacking and moving was just a thing we had to do.
But there’s no time to worry about those kinds of things when you have to squeeze a mid-morning nap and a solid application of moisturiser on your horrific beetroot snorkel burn into your busy schedule.
And before you know it it’s lunchtime and you have to go back down to the restaurant and find a nice table to lounge around at and have fried rice and vegetables for lunch; net cost: $3USD.
Then the afternoon really starts to get away and you’ve got to go and get your washing down and sort it and fold it and shoehorn it all back into your backpack ahead of a bus trip tomorrow, and then hit the pool. What with the sunburn and all, I wore my white rash vest thingy, which was getting more or less the only usage during our late Sihanoukville period that it had in the whole 4 month trip. Yep, that was worth carrying around. I didn’t know, though, whether or not we would end up taking the Malarone which would have given us some photosensitivity.
After a reasonable dip I retired to the deck chairs to count Alice up through the 50 laps she wanted to swim, but ’25 to go’ sounded like too many, so I cut it down to how many prime numbers were left between now and 50. 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47… anyway I thought it was funny. That made it 5.30pm and time to start vaguely contemplating getting together for dinner with the group to celebrate what a great trip we had. Some people had decided they weren’t going back to Phnom Penh, or didn’t need to to get where they were going next, and therefore they’d much rather go and find a little beach hut they could rent for a couple of days and remain as close to the beach as possible.
Nak took us to a restaurant literally ON the beach, and we sat in some of those cane cradle-chairs and ordered cocktails, and Kiel and Jamie dared other into getting jugs of cocktails, while Mike and Helen got stuck into some jugs of cocktails with little prompting required. The breeze made it a somewhat tolerable temperature and everyone did start to wish that they were going to be staying here on the beach as well. There was no moon tonight so someone had the bright idea of hosting a Black Moon party, for which we had to walk a little way down the beach to a bar which might have been a lot of fun if there were more people there, but as it was it just noisy and covered. Preferring to sit actually on the beach, we left the group there and took ourselves back towards the hotel, lounged into some cane cradle-chairs at another bar, and had us some more cocktails.
And I can assure you, based on our extensive research, that there is just about nothing better than laying on comfy chairs right next to the water, sea breeze refreshing you, with cocktails, on a warm tropical night.
Around about an hour later, as we were just about to pull up stumps, the rest of our group came rolling back past, significantly merrier, heading for another bar down the other end of the beach. It did occur to us to wonder how many would be awake for the 7.30 bus ride back to Phnom Penh tomorrow morning.
Oh and also we were so busy being relaxed today that we didn’t end up taking any photos. Sorry.
Greg