Blog : Phnom Penh

We were very extravagant and splashed out an extra $2 on the cost of the bus ticket from HCMC to Cambodia, to travel on the VIP bus and oh my god was it worth it!! Literally about twenty minutes before we boarded the bus my stomach decided to go all Delhi belly on my and I had pretty s***ty s***s. After however many days of being completely bunged up down there, it was bloody typical that I would go completely the other way, just before a seven hour bus over the boarder to Cambodia. I had slung my bag into the hold and had to run onto the bus preying for a toilet - hello VIP! Not only was there a toilet but it was clean enough to sit on! Amazing!! Trying to squat over a dirty bowl on a moving bus with a runny tummy would certainly not have been easy! I had to sit right next to the toilet the whole journey so that I could keep getting up and using it, it wasnt very pleasant and I did have a moment where I was in the cubicle for about twenty minutes as I just couldn't get off the toilet and I was feeling sorry for myself, had got a sweat on and had a little cry! Bad times! On the plus though, the bus was nice, it was a usual coach style seated on rather than a sleeper but I had two seats to myself, and we got given a free box of pastries (yummy) a refreshing wipe (very handy) some cold water (again, handy) a hilarious lady tour guide (who was hungover and brilliant!) and she put our movie Wanderlust up on the big tv screen at the front, which was hilarious, as there was loads of swearing and nudity and inappropriate was and all the Cambodians on the bus were completely transfixed!! The whole journey took about seven hours in the end and crossing the boarder was very straightforward, everything had been sorted out for us in advance and so we literally just had to get out of the coach to be 'stamped out' of Vietnam and then again to be 'stamped in' to Cambodia. We did see one poor chap, about 20 or so in the no mans land bit in the middle who was being refused entry to Cambodia because he was African and couldn't go back into Vietnam because you have to apply for the visa in advance and cannot buy it from the boarders!! Poor bloke was sobbing his heart out at being stuck and we all wondered later on in the afternoon whether he had managed to get into either of the countries! When we arrived into Phnom Penh the lady conductor sorted out two tuktuk to take us to our hostel, the White Rabbit. We checked in and were amazed at the size of the beds, they were like giant singles but bunk beds! We dumped our bags and pretty much headed our for food straight away, bypassing the restaurant downstairs in favour of a cheaper and authentic meal up the street, which ended up being pretty disgusting.

We couldn't really see anywhere obvious that people were drinking so we headed back to the hostel after dinner and stuck on a movie and we flopped into the comfy sofas to watch "the perks of being a wallflower". The owner of the hostel was a complete a******* about the whole palaver... We had asked a couple of the girls behind the bar he was sat at how to work the DVD player, as we were taking advantage of the signs all over the hostel saying make yourself at home, and he was sat listening as we talked about putting this movie on. About ten minutes in he stuck his head around the door and asked how long "this drivel" would be, because he had a baseball match to watch. He said it with such attitude and I think he was just expecting us to say oh sorry, here well turn it off for you, but obviously us being us that wasn't happening! I said to him in my sweetest voice that the film would be another hour and a half but we'd be sure to let him know when it had finished! Needless to say he wasn't impressed! We slept in the next morning which was nice, before moving rooms to the s***test sweat box ever! Our next room for the following night had only two working fans and just thin mattered des on the floor. The following night we all slept spread eagled and sweating profusely in the heat! Nice! Helen and Christa headed off to the killing fields and S21 detention centre around lunchtime and we treated ourselves to a day sunbathing by a swanky hotel pool, which was really expensive ($8 to get in and $7 for a sandwich!) but sooo nice! It was quite overcast and by the end if the day my face looked like a tomato, red and sweaty through burn! Oops... We stayed until about 5 or 6pm when a massive gaggle of children descended upon the pool and it was all screaming and shrieking! We all met back at the hostel and the girls told us about their harrowing day. We showered and Christ it took such a long time to cool down. I had to sit in front of a big electric fan, just to keep my face dry! We went for dinner at a restaurant called Samaky, which we'd passed earlier in the evening when we'd been to book our next hostel room for when Lora and Alice arrived. The food was really nice, I had some grilled snapper and the girls had toasted sandwiches and big pick and mix salads. The food was pretty reasonable too. We had a couple of drinks up in the hostel bar but it was sooo sweaty mine of us could stay there that long as it was so uncomfortably stifling though. Helen and Christa caught a bus at the crack of dawn the following morning to Snookie as we affectionately have names Sihanoukville. I didn't even see them go as I was fast asleep in the sweat box but we'd already made plans to meet up with them again soon so it wasn't a final goodbye.

We checked out of the White Rabbit, leaving the crazy owner and his attitude problem behind and into our new hostel, Top Banana, which had equally huge bunk beds and amazing aircon! We went for breakfast/lunch at the downstairs restaurant Samaky for a second time and I had the nicest bowl of fruit and cereal, which kept me going for the majority of the day. In the heat of the day we got a tuktuk to the Russian market, where we had a wander around, fascinated by all of the pretty horrible clothes and souvineers. We brought Lora and Alice a little travel bracelet each and finally managed to replace Als flip-flops which broke in Nha Trang (half way down the Vietnamese coast!) as we were walking around I saw a tiny basic looking beauty salon where women were just sat on the floor or on tiny little plastic stools having manicures and pedicures done at weeny tiny costs and we decided it would be fun to do it...! We all sat down and I went first to have my cuticles buffed and all the rest of it! I think it was the first pedicure I've ever had! Especially since having do many problems and treatments for my scabby toes! I had the Cambodian flag painted onto my big toes, which the girls next to us had to translate to the lady doing the ped on the floor, who then said she didn't really know what the flag looked like!! Having been such a long time without having my toenails painted, to suddenly have such garish colours all over them made me think my feet looked like tranny toes! Al and Kate had theirs done too... The lady did a random but well cute design on Al as Kate had some temple looking thing. We were so impressed that it had only cost $2 each as well!! Once we'd finished looking around the market, we caught a tuktuk to the Friends restaurant, where street children are taught how to work, wait and cook. I had basil and roasted vegetable spring rolls which were so delish! Defo something il make when I get home. The restaurant also had a subscription to my fave cooking mag Delicious, which I sat and read cover to cover whilst I was waiting for my food. I was in my element! I had good calls with mum, Claire and the boy over the next couple of hours back at the hostel, whilst Kate made a sign for us to hold at the airport when we picked the girls up later that evening. We got to the airport with about five minutes to spare before their plane landed, only to discover that it had been delayed by 45 minutes... Ggrrr! We couldn't even stand still when people started coming out of the arrivals tunnel bit, we were jiggling with excitement, with our sign bobbing above the rest of the waiting crowd. We spotted them in the distance and literally ran towards them. Considering they'd just been on a plane for twelve hours or so they both looked great! Awwww it was so nice to have a big fat hug from home and be with Lora in the middle of South East Asia, actually it was a really surreal moment!!

Our tuktuk driver had waited for us to get the return fare so we hopped in and he drove us all back to the hostel, via a strange makeshift petrol station in the middle of a layby, manned by a female engineer and a man asleep on the floor next to the pump. There was something broken with the engine and so we all had to get out and sit on the side of the road whilst it was fixed. There were quite a few rats running around and pretty dark in a more rundown part of town. We certainly didn't feel unsafe but I was thinking that for the girls it wasn't the best first impression of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh! When we got to the hostel Alice and Al had a sweet reunion and the exchanging of packages happened... Lora have me mums amazing one, full to the brim with goodies for the kiddies we come across on our travels, magazines (which I've already finished because I'm such a gossip w****!) chocolate mini eggs (which didn't even last five minutes with all five of us starting hungrily at them!) and every kind of s*** tablet going... AMAZING, thank you Mummatron!! I gave Lora a little travelling bracelet to start building up the standard travellers wrist collection and a silky liner to sleep in, in the not so nice hostel beds! Alice had brought out new knickers for Al and letters packages from home for Kate so we all had five minutes getting excited about our goodies, which pissed the boys off in our dorm as they were trying to sleep - as they had been at 12 when we checked in, 4 when we got back, 10 when we left for the airport and 2 when we got back... Idiots! So we all went up to the bar and had a drink as chatted instead :) Lora filled me in on all the happenings and goings on at home and we nattered about the trip so far as her work... It was really nice. We went to bed about 3ish as we were planning on getting up early the following morning. Which didnt really happen! We were up and out of the room by midday but by the time we'd had breakfast and everything it was half past one and we had been planning to try and get to both the Killing Fields and S21 prison on the same day, so we could catch the bus to Sihanoukville the following morning. At breakfast in the restaurant downstairs of the hostel I had fruit salad with honey and SOY MILK - yes I managed to buy and store in the fridge overnight a carton of soy milk, hallelujah! It was so tasty and kept me full for most of the day! The girls all had omlets and then we jumped in a big tuktuk and drove out to the killing fields which took almost an hour and was pretty sweaty. At one point I actually had sweat running down my shins and we all had drenched shorts when we got out from the sticky leather seats. I'm definitely the sweatiest though, especially on my face. At even the slightest glimpse of sun my top lip breaks into a river everything just shines horrifically. It's quite embarrassing, especially when noone else is suffering to quite the same degree as me! I've had to take to carrying around a small sweat rag with me to surreptitiously wipe away any swimming pools which get settled on my face, or between my boobs!! Naice! What a catch I am...

Its really difficult to describe quite how the Killing Fields were and put across quite the violence that was experienced there... Harrowing is the only word that I think fits the bill. We arrived and were given an audio tour headset an paid five dollars to enter. The audio tour guided us through the space whilst educating us on what the Khmer Rouge was and the atrocities that Pol Pot commuters against his own people, the Cambodias, all in the name of communism and his extreme views on wanting to create a country living the country lifestyle. All those who lived in cities were sentenced to death or shipped out to the hillsides and ordered to work 12 hour days on next to no food, ploughing fields and harvesting rice to be sold to China. Anyone who was educated, doctors, teachers, academics etc were killed; those who wore glasses, answered back to any of his regime or who Pol Pot felt threatened by were all handed a death sentence. The audio tour spoke of many cases where victims were actually ordered to sign their own death warrent, admitting to having stolen a banana or working for a spy agency or not working hard enough as having soft hands to prove it. The Organisation as Pol Pots movement was called even ordered that whole families should be killed, not just one or two members in order to prevent revenge - a famous propaganda slogan of his was "better to kill the innocent than spare the guilty". At the actual killing fields, many grave sites had been excavated, with several hundred bodies found in each. All the graves had been marked out with a small fence around it and lots of people over the years had put bracelets on the fence posts as a sign of respect and mourning. There was one grave where nearly two hundred bodies had been found all buried headless, another with 600+ people in and a third which I found the most distressing, nearly 200 women, some pregnant and young children's bodies all tossed into a pit no bigger than 6ft x 6ft. The audio tour had many stories from some of the very few survivors of the killing fields, one of which told how babies were killed in front of their mothers by being flung against a large tree next to the pit to smash their heads, as bullets were expensive and not to be waste on such a meaningless task as killing children. I was really moved by all the stories and the sheer amount of people that were killed at this massacre site. It wasn't even the biggest but many of the other sites were either totally destroyed following the political over turn or are inaccessible as they're buried deep with jungles or surrounded by land mines. We could actually see shards of bone and cloth in the ground around the site where we were told it surfaces from the earth beneath, as many bodies were not dug up. It was really scary and I did actually shed a year looking at the display of 2000 skulls displayed in the remembrance monument, particularly those in the aged 20 - 30 category, with such horrific and obvious head wounds and smashed skulls. It was a really horrifying experience and what made it worse was that it was Cambodians doing to their own people. Over a quarter of the population died within those three or four years apparently.

After the Killing Fields we were all in a pretty subdued mood and no one spoke that much in the Tuktuk to S21. Security base 21 was the detention centre people were held in, before being shipped to the killing fields to be murdered. It used to be a high school before the communists took over it, commandeering it as a jail, to process people for killing. Each of the different school building had been used to imprison victims. Tiny cell blocks had been constructed which were so small we could barely get in them and some still had the original arm and leg shackles that prisoners were laid out and attached to. We also saw lots of the old torture instruments and many mass cells which were still blood stained. I found it really upsetting seeing a group of school aged kids on a tour of the building as well, knowing it was once a school and full of similar children full of happiness and learning before it was modified into the terrible torture chambers.

From S21 we went back to the hostel and all sat and read s***ty gossip magazines and stuffed chocolate and sweets and oh my god yummy yummy mini eggs to cheer ourselves up after what had turned out to be a pretty depressing and teary day but one of the most interesting on our whole trip! We got ready and decided to then go an sample some street vendor food and we headed out to a recommended street nearby. It was quite difficult to know what was being cooked as most stalls didn't have menus or anything and we weren't sure on the Cambodian word for vegetarian. We found a cute old lady in the end who had a very basic rice and noodles menu and we ordered scrambled eggs in clay bowls that had been BBQ-ed which were tasty but very runny and I had veg fried noodles with egg which was distinctly average unfortunately. I think everyone else thought the same about their food as well and most of us suffered the s***s the next day which we guessed was something to do with dinner! After dinner we went back to another hostel bar and enjoyed a couple of cocktails before heading back to Top Banana and Lora and I at at the bar and had a lowly catch up natter, into the small .hours of the night, talking about boys jobs, houses and life plans and what everyone was up to at home. The other girls had gone to bed long before and when we decided to head downstairs I was still pretty awake and decided to to call home and have a bit of a tipsy chat with the whole family, even my auntie and cousins from Germany, which was really nice as I hadn't had a good Skype session with mum or dad for a while! It wasn't too long though as we were catching a 6:30am bus the following morning down to Sihanoukville, to try and make the last 2pm ferry crossing to Koh Rong (Monkey Island) for some beach and sunbathing time for the girls...