Beaches, Books, Beers & a Boat

Kat in a Princess Chair

I think the title sums this post up really as our last week and a bit was spent in Cambodia relaxing in the Serendipity beach area of Sihanoukville. We got ourselves a little bungalow and didn’t do much except read a lot of books. Most days we headed down to the beach for a walk, to play Frisbee or have a fruit shake and sit in a princess chair at one of the many beach bars. The biggest decision we had to make most days was where should eat tonight? Most nights you could find us sat under the stars on the beach enjoying 50 cent draft beer and occasionally the BBQ seafood that all the bars cooked such as barracuda! Every night of course these romantic moments were tainted somewhat by the continuous flow of beggars, hawkers and the hundreds of other backpackers who surround you at every turn. A deserted paradise this was not.

Ordering Drinks

The bar attached to our bungalows had a night called tutu Tuesday where if you wore a tutu you received half price drinks all night. A great deal and Kat was very keen to wear a tutu for a night! So both of us did and the highlight of the night was trying out the fire cocktail that was our bar’s signature. The next day unsurprisingly neither of us felt very well so we stayed off the beers for a night. Of course this only lasted one night as in this area of Cambodia when you eat out beer is cheaper than soft drinks or bottled water!

The other notable thing we did was a boat trip to a protected Island called Koh Rong Samloem. First stop was for some snorkelling in a cove where we saw lots of little fishes and I took the opportunity to jump from the boats top deck into the sea which was a scary 7 meter free fall! Next the boat docked near the Island where Kat and I swam the 200 meters to shore and did our best James Bond coming out of the water impressions as we arrived onto a pristine white sand beach that was deserted except for us and the 10 other people that got off the boat. We went on a river walk to see where the mangroves grow on the island and then gave the jungle walk a miss to enjoy the clear blue waters of the beach some more with a beer J it was a really great day.

We’re now in Bangkok again and have met up with Lianne and Simon and it’s lovely to see them! We all went to China town yesterday and did a bit of shopping. Today it seems more shopping is on the cards as Kat needs some new clothes and later on tonight we will be heading to a Lady boys of Bangkok show called Calypso!!!

Love Chris & Kat xxx

A Week in Cambodia

Battambang – (brilliant name – I think!) is home to the bamboo railway.  We boarded our “first class” carriage which consisted of a bamboo platform, lined with a plastic mat (for our comfort) sitting on steel wheels with a speedboat motor at the back.  On this flimsy bit of wood we hurtled at aprox 15km/hr (which when on a railway track feels much, much faster!) it felt very much like a rollercoaster ride – it was BRILLIANT!  We felt every bump in the tracks and it did occur to us that it is probably wasn’t health & safety assessed and probably the most dangerous thing we’ve ever ridden on – but it was BRILLIANT!  Chris even got the manly task of driving and soon discovered that the ‘breaks’ where a plank of wood that you put your foot onto to make it press into the wheels and slow down.  We met a few tourists coming in the opposite direction – no problem though, you just hop off, the drivers dismantle the carriage so the others can pass by, then they put it all back together again! 

We stopped at a countryside village and decided to have a coconut to drink – it really wasn’t as refreshing and tasty as we expected, in fact it was pretty horrible!  So, disappointed with our coconut experience, we had a local kid show us around our village – the absolute highlight being a man beaming with pride as he closely (very closely!) watched his stud pig...ahem, make friends, with the lady pigs!  Our tuk-tuk tour continued to a few hill-top wats/temples.  One had amazing caves which made you feel like you were discovering a lost world, sadly, as a lot of places in Cambodia, they have a dark history as they were used by the Khmer Rouge as Killing Caves during the civil war.  The other temple was old and a good preview to what Angkor Wat would hold for us.  We completed the day with a visit to the only Cambodian winery – we had a little sample (rude not to!) and it was really nice, quite a woody after-taste but most enjoyable!

Onwards to Siem Reap and the crys of “hey lady, its too hot, you want a tuk-tuk?!”  Despite the calls of “hey lady” I really liked Siem Reap.  Yes, it is touristy as hell but well, I kind of liked that!  We woke up at the ungodly hour of 4am, but with that feeling of excitement like you get up when you get up early to catch a flight. We boarded our tuk-tuk and joined the fleet of them heading to Angkor Wat.  It really did feel exciting, we found a nice spot in front of Angkor by the side of one of the pools and by twilight the temple looked really impressive.  We watched as the sun came up and enjoyed the burst of colour...until we saw the scaffolding!  How dare they do renovation when we’re visiting Angkor!!  But it was still worth the get up and we spent the day exploring Angkor and other temple complexes.  For us the other temples outshone Angkor (maybe too much hype surrounds Angkor?)  we liked Bayon for the cool stone faces which were on each stone turret and there are some amazing bridges around the sights which are lined with demons on one side and gods on the other doing a tug-o-war.  We returned to Siem Reap for a very ticklish fish spa treatment ($2 for 20mins and a beer!) and then we had a Khmer BBQ of snake, crocodile, beef, shrimp & frogs legs, all of which were very good but the crocodile was the winner of the taste test.

Our second day we hired bikes and returned to the temples.  We particularly enjoyed Ta Phrom – famous for a few seconds when Angelina Jolie runs past it in the Tomb Raider movie!  It’s old, kind of falling down in places, green stained of moss and has the most amazing tree roots entwined in the temple bricks – really cool to see.

By the third day, we were a little templed out...we have been in Asia for 5 ½ months now afterall!  So we spent a wonderful, relaxing day hanging out at a pool & bar.  But we did decide to go to watch the sunset at Phnom Bakheng...as did the rest of Cambodia.  You read in the Lonely Planet that sunset is a bit of a circus, but you think ‘it can’t be that bad’ but it kind of is.  A sunset, to me, should be unplanned quiet, beautiful, romantic – this sunset was planned, full of about 300 people jostling for position  for that perfect photo and anything but romantic!  Glad we went as we’d have always wondered if we’d missed out...but we wouldn’t recommend it at all!

Kratie was our next stop.  It is an industrial town with very little to do – but we saw the endangered Irrawady dolphins on the Mekong River.  They are very very sweet and they played, splashing about and coming up for air only about 5 metres away from the boat. 

The sights & activities have been good in Cambodia, but we’ve become a little peed off with the constant inflated white person prices – you get it everywhere in Asia, but here they are pretty greedy and I guess after 5 months it is bound to grate on you!  Also, the buses are fairly long to get anywhere here and we’re a bit sick of that too – so we have retreated to the South coast for a holiday within our holiday, hopefully the break will relax us and revitilise us for Lianne&Simon’s visit in Southern Thailand!

Love K&C xxxxx

Mekong Delta and the Beginnings of our Holiday in Cambodia

 The Mekong Delta was great. There is a definite change of pace compared to the rest of Vietnam, everything seems unrushed and everybody happy. We travelled on so many different types of boat, and the occasional bus during our three days. The rowboat on the last day was my favourite experience as we got expertly navigated by a local woman through a brightly coloured floating village where everybody’s going about their daily lives and their dogs watch you float by from their porches, all in the early morning sunshine. The floating market we visited on the second day went by quickly but seeing all the buying and selling from the big boats stuffed with fruits and vegetables to the small boats was fantastic and the big boats even advertised what they sold by tying a selection to the mast!

As part of the trip we learnt how the people of this area make money from the natural resources of the Delta which was really interesting. We visited a brick factory and saw the thousands of clay bricks they produce and then sell on - 30 for $1! A family business to do with coconut processing where nothing is wasted of the coconut and they make sugary candy, coconut drinks, coconut toffee and the shell of the coconut gets pressed into wooden souvenirs such as salad servers that we bought with some of our left over Vietnamese money. We also visited a fruit farm which grew all the exotic fruits of Vietnam, a fish farm which consisted of a house built over a huge square net that fish swim into to get fed through a hole in the floor and then never leave and of course rice fields that when glimpsed from the boat stretched endlessly into the horizon.

The lunch on the first day of the trip is worth mentioning because we had this HUGE ugly, angry looking Mekong fish presented to us. He tasted so good! We had fresh spring rolls prepared in front of us which consisted of a bit of fish, mint leaf, pineapple, and rice accompanied with a dipping sauce. Mmmmm! We then had about 3 other dishes all delicious but none of them could beat the spectacle of the fish.





The border crossing was no problem at all, we had an hour wait for the visas so we ate something in the border cafe and by the time we were finished they were done! Getting to the border was the most interesting as we took a 3 hour slow boat. All the houses were set back on land with stilts rather than in or very nearby the water as we’d seen previously. Children would run to wave and blow kisses to the boat (one girl even pulled different poses with her fingers making the peace sign – I blame the Japanese!) and people just carried on as they always do crossing from one side of the river to the other in a row boat to visit friends, casting fishing nets from small boats to catch lunch or ferrying huge amounts of vegetables from the fields on the back of a pedal bike over a rickety looking wooden bridge - it was fascinating.

Cambodia so far has been really friendly and everyone always has a smile on their face even if half the people we talk to are tuk-tuk drivers looking for a fare... The Khmer food that we’ve tried has been fantastic and the beer seems good too which is always positive! The money can be a little bit confusing at first because they mainly use US Dollars but you can also use Cambodian Riel mainly for smaller things. This means that a lot of the time we’re using the two currencies together – to pay $4.50 you might put down $4 and 2000 Riel. The temples in Phnom Penh remind us a lot of Bangkok and rest of Thailand’s glitzy and slightly gaudy style. We took a walk around the main sights and the river front on our first full day taking in some more French Colonial architecture combined with monuments, temples, wats and even the national museum! Phnom Penh is certainly a busy city and we’ve found finding certain cafes has not been the easiest as streets and buildings are given a number whenever they are built meaning you might see buildings 14, 36 and 108A all sitting next to each other. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the cafes mentioned in the Lonely Planet have closed making them impossible to find.

Yesterday we went to S-21 and the Killing Fields. S-21 was a school that got turned into a prison and interrogation / torture area by the Khmer Rouge an extreme Marxist style party who took over Cambodia from 1975 – 1978. During their time in power they abolished money and forced everyone from the cities to become slaves in the fields working 12 -15 hour days and receiving nothing but watery rice for food. Naturally the leaders were suspicious of everyone including their own party members thinking KGB or US informants were everywhere so they rounded people up and tortured them until they lied about whatever they wanted to hear. Then truck loads of these self-confessed ‘spies’ and ‘traitors’ were taken to the killing fields 15 km out of Phnom Penh and savagely killed by most often a blunt instrument such as a lead pipe and pushed into a mass grave with hundreds of others. It’s appalling to think that this happened just over 30 years ago and the leaders behind it have still not been punished. S-21 had portrait photos of each of the victims, some photos were also taken after the torture everything is mostly the way it was with tiny cells and barbed wire covering any escape routes. It’s still quite a brightly coloured building and so ordinary looking which makes it all the more chilling for the crimes that were committed there.

Hope everyone who reads this blog is doing well just a quick note to say on Flickr you can browse by 'Sets' (Places we’ve been) as well as 'Collections' (Countries) if you want to look through any of our older photos it’ll be much quicker to find than scrolling through our Photostream.

Love C&K xxx