Well I'm finally on to the cambodia blogs, I'm on a coach right now on the way to singapore and chars asleep in the seat behind me so thought now's the perfect time to get my write on!! Listening to Buble as well reminding me of my father as always.

We left Don Dhet for phonm penh (however u spell it) at 8 am and got a long tail boat to the place we left from. The same boat as char this time, weren't taking any chances again! Got a bus to the border after alot of faffing around...i just made myself chuckle with the word faffing haha. Then when we reached the border it took us over an hour to go through the 5 different places to get this and that checked and pay for it all. The driver on the bus gave us enough money for 2 visas and he said when we stop in kratie we can give him the money back for both the visas and the bus. Sorted! Once we'd sorted the visas we got back on a different bus, and left for ponhm penh.....we were in Cambodia!!

... And there were midgies everywhere i reckon i killed at least 30 i got to 25 and lost count. I got a nice little window seat and was all settled and comfy when the guy in fronts seat came flying back crushing my knees and well...me! u know how i feel about leg room so was not happy then he turned round and he explained his chair was broken and it wasnt him putting it back on top of me.....Il be honesthe was quite beautiful so i let him off...and decided having him practically lying on top of me was better than someone else.

We sat there for about 10 minutes before this guy who worked on bus came ove rand said you owe me money to me and chars, we explained what we had to do and when we get to cash point we can pay him back. He just looked at us funny and said no you pay now...we need to send the money back to laos from the border, we tried to explain that if we had the money in Laos we wouldnt need to have borrowed it....he wasnt getting it and kept on at us telling us to borrow the money off someone on the bus..... 1. we didnt know anyone and 2. no one in their right mind would lend two strangers 96 dollars, it wasn't like it was 2 dollars.Anyway he kept on me and char not amused by his tone, in the end i had enough and said to him look you can keep talking and insisting all you want but the fact is we have no money on us so untill you take us to a cashpoint you're not getting anything from us! he soon realised and went to pester some french guy at the back.

The guy in front wanted to go to a certain place in Cambodia, but the guy kept telling him its rubbish also no one else is going there so it means taking everyone out of the way just to take him there, I couldn't believe what i was hearing this guy was trying to make him feel guilty for going where he wanted to go and where he had booked and paid to go. In the end the guy gave in and said he'd go to Phonm Penh, then the guy charged him more than what we'd paid for the initial trip, such an idiot. Then to top it all off halfway through the journey the bus stopped and family got off and sure enough it was at the place that guy had initially wanted to go, the guy who's name i think was Andrew,chars and myself were ranting away to eachother about how much of a joke it is and how much of a nob that guy is and he came over,so we questioned the payment again and the guy just started shouting we were all like alright chillout!!! He was such a nobheadand didnt give us a great first impression of cambodian people.

The trip seemed to take forever even though it was a lot shorter than some other bus journeys we'd been on. We did stop off at a cash point and the nob guy said only one of us could get off to get money out as the whole bus was waiting, me and char just ignored him and both got off, he really didn't want to cross us so didn't say a word. We stopped off for people to eat at around 7pm and i said to char whats the point in stopping now, we are meant to be getting there at 7.30pm, how wrong we were after splitting up the bus, the people going to Siem Reap went on another bus and we continued on the one we were on, we were stuck on there for another 2hours. But we couldn't complain too much as the guys going to Siem Reap had another 5-6 hours to go...bad times! Looks like me and char did it a good way round for once. Char kindly swapped places with me for last couple of hours and took over the killing of the midgies,we called the seat by the window the killing seat. Soon there was enough room in the bus for me to get my own seat and I stared out of the window watching the lights as we drove into phonm penh...it looked pretty awesome. We got off the coach and with the help of a German guy haggled our way to our hostel. As we pulled up this security man ran over offering us a room and got very excited when we said we had already booked. As we walked in i thought i heard my name, then heard it again, everyone was shouting Jenni!! Haha and there was a sign on wall saying welcome Jenni Murray i felt very famous. We chucked our bags in the room and saw we had two king size beds....one each amazing!! We went to find somewhere to eat as we hadnt ate all day, it was very dark and there were alot of street sellers but the food didnt look too appetizing and it was a bit stinky! We found an indian and paid 3.5 dollars for a buffet of food... everything here is in dollars. This actually made it alot more expensive than we were told and thought it wouldbe, Everyone told us cambodia was really cheap but it really wasnt.Ok so this meal was and it was pretty good too. Altho char noticed a cockroach across the room and freaked a bit.. at home you wouldnt dream of staying in a restaurant if you saw one there but here its normal they are on the streets outside and run in. As we walked home, there was this weird guy talking to us and started following us luckily we were right by our hotel so we just quickly walked in. Unfortunatly my pains came back that night they were as bad as when i went to hospital but luckily only lasted for hour or so so no need to panic thankfully....esp as i think the nearest proper hospital was Bangkok.

We slept for a good few hours in our king size beds and woke up showered, watched Invictus....and headed for a walk along the river. We struggled to cross the road, they were so busy that in the end one of the locals helped us across, when we said thank you he laughed and said...not like traffic in your country...no it was not. The men here are funny too when they see us they are like Oh My God Ladies...anyone would think they hadnt seen a female before. We walked along by the river and there were kids playing football everywhere, so we tried to avoid being pelted by the ball. Decided to go for a drink and saw happy hour at this bar called garden in the shade. Ordered 2 beers and sat down watching the world go by...so then we ordered another round...and another and saw they had quiche on their menu we shared that and it was pretty rubbish compared to the ones at home....even the asda value ones..in fact they're the best. So that was disappointing. We decided to reward ourselves after the disappointment by a glass of red wine each. The guy who worked there was called Murat well i thought his name was Borat and we didnt ever find out the truth. He was really funny he hada really high voice and kept flicking back and forth between me and char as to which one he was in love with...he was just a mate really. We all had a giggle. There were kid sellers everywhere, they were all coming up to us but no one else...did we have mug on our fore heads!!!...hold on a sec those bracelets are quite cute ...1 for a dollar... no way 2for a dollar...ok so char bought me and her one. That was it then we had constant attention from the kids..so i bought two bracelets one for me and char. Then this little horrible girl came up picked up my lighter holding it in my face and saying WHAT'S YOUR NAME!! i kept giggling at her as she was so rude it was almost funny. She kept shouting its not fair you buy from them but not me char said lifes not fair... then she started talking to me while eating i said you shouldnt talk with your mouth full and she glared at me.. she then turned to char who said exactly the same thing that wound her up more....which made us giggle. She got ruder and ruder and had this fake nail made out of straw and kept scratching us with it... I said to her you're a very horrible and rude little girl so she swore at me i laughed and said aww gutted i was gonna buy all your bracelets but now you did that im not...she looked hopeful before realising i was being sarcastic...she really really hated us! haha. There was another boy that said do you know f-u-c-k-y-o-u (he said the letters) Char said how rude...do you know P-i-s-s-o-f-f and he said yeahhh s***! haha no not s*** hun! He was a right lil s*** tho, and when he kept on I said do you know C-U.....Char stopped me laughing.... spose that might have been a new low haha. Char said she's worried about the kids i'll be teaching english too...she can talk she taught them piss off! There was this older guy selling books he was 20 and he was a nice guy and just seemed to like to talk rather than sell, when he asked if we wanted to buy a pack of 10 post cards char pointed out we don't have 10 friends..haha And when we looked at the postcards they were all depressing rubbish ones so we passed. This guy with no legs was selling books and he kept coming over to me ..they were all about the killing fields...one was called sex slaves....i explained they aren't really bed time reads...he pretended to cry to me.. char said what an actor! so i was like alright morgan freeman!! From then on whenever i saw him id call him Morgan, in the end he was answering to it. He kept pointing at his legs telling me he didn't have any but I did, I kindly offered him some of my legs as I have enough bloody meat on them to share with him...in fact if he has any legless friends, send them my way!

But our two faves were these two cute lil boys who gave up on offering us bracelets but kept calling us stingy and cheapcharlie (people must teach them this) I asked one of them for one for free when he said no i said wow stingy!!and he was like no your stingy they were lovely though kept running back and forth hiding from us but loving the attention. At one point they walked off, the littler one followed the older one completely and just copied what he did. so when the older one walked past shortly followed by younger one shouting 1-2-3 stingy we hada giggle. They kept chanting it so me and char joined in and they were laughing away. They left for a while and suddenly we heard them again this time they had recruited all the other kids and there was about 8 of them chanting and marching, i got some of it on video and the girl who really hated us comes up to the screen waving her finger at me haha was very funny at the time. There was this girl there who we hadnt seen before and she started shouting at us me and char looked eachother and were like excuse me...u are new!!! Everytime Murat/Borat came out to see us the kids legged it as weren't allowed to sell to customers. Murat kept saying baby to us so we sang justin beiber and he loved it and joined in but when he said his name it sounded like he was saying Justin of Ebay.

We headed back to the room and to sleep as we had a day tour booked for the following day.

The next morning as we had some tea and coffee in the hostel waiting for the tour to start, i decided i needed a wee and our room was really high up and a lot of stairs so it made sense to use one in the reception...as i walked in i saw a tail making its way out through a hole in the wall....rats yukkkk i suddenly didn't need to wee that bad and went to tell char...we made an oath not to eat at our hostel. We had a private tuk tuk (dont u know who we are) driver and he took us around the city seeing everything that we needed to, First stop was the killing fields/ genocide museum, This was horrendous first thing we saw was thousands of skulls piled up and old clothes underneath.... This tragedy happened in late 1970's so not even that long ago...Pol Pot and his cronies used to bring people to the killing fields (soldiers,prisoners, men, women, children even babies...no pattern just anyone they could) and they would beat them,torture them and kill them and bury them in the fields, we saw a tree where babys were flung againt to kill...it was absolutely awful, and being at the exact place it happened was shocking but so interesting. We saw pictures of victims, the exact tools used to kill over 3million people, and we saw the a third of the grounds hadn't even been dug up yet so god knows how many bodies were yet to be uncovered. But the thing that got me the most was every grave (well holes where the victims were buried) had butterflies flying all around them I hadn't even seen a butterfly since I've been away so to see all them was incredible and really made you believe that there was more behind it to them just being butterflies. After such horrific yet interesting time there we headed to the place where the ones that weren't killed straight away were kept and it had the exact cells there and again it was disgusting, seeing the chains and the space they had etc. Really makes you question how something like this could happen especially in the last 30-40 years and why is this not heard of more we hear about Hitler all the time, taught it at every school, people should be aware of this as well, just because it's not on our doorstep....oohh look at me getting demanding...i guess it just really made me think..it was such an awful thing to happen and the trial has only just started.

After that we went to this museum which was very boring i gotta admit, now I like museums but i like to see things that people used a longtime ago or learn about how they lived etc etc this was like vases and pipes that were made and to be honest me and char were quite bored and headed to the gardens for a drink.

We then went to this market place where we walked around for a good hour, i bought 200 cigarettes for 1pound 90...im not smoking very much anymore but assumed its better to get them now than pay a fortune elsewhere. Also got loadsa dvds for like a pound, got twilight films and 24 and glee, we tried to find a little laptop for me as the one id brought out had broken so had sent that back but no such luck the computer place we had seen before,disappeared when we went back to look for it. We were literally walking for ages until we realised there was nothing there and so ended up getting a tuk tuk elsewhere. When we got a tuk tuk back the guy didnt know where our hotel was so we just told him to take us to the river front....if he didnt know where our hotel was i suppose we would HAVE to go to the bar again. what a shame. so we headed back there and sat round the other side, however it wasnt long before the kidsfound us and kept annoying us again,i bought a shell necklace off one girl(ima sucker) me and char bought two pairs of sunglasses for 5 dollars and we were chatting away to the book guy. These guys were behind me and they kept asking us to go to the club with them later but we decided against it... they then wrote it down on paper and kept holding it up to us was quite amusing when someone would just appear with a card asking us out. The two little boys were still hanging around and we did actually like these they werent annoying brats like most of them so we bought 5 bracelets for a dollar of each of them. When we were sat there this guy was doing some sort of interpretive dance across the road it was so random and weird i cant even explain it. The boys loved it though they ran off giggling away. Soon they were back and as we left to go back to hotel (a little sad to say goodbye to everyone wed met) they were soon by our sides asking us to buy them shoes.... shoes! then we realised they had none on, the thing is you cant be sure what the people who make them sell will take off of them, so we bought them an ice cream each and they were very happy with that so we were happy too. The book seller kept shouting johnny come here johnny dont go....seriously how hardis it to understand my name is not johnny! I got called it in turkey and everywhere around the world lol....maybe it would be easier if i changed my name.

On the way home we realised we were hungry and hadnt eaten all day, glee was on in half an hour and i wanted to watch it so we walked to find some food, but there seemed to be none around, why we didnt just eat by the river when there was loadsa food places i dont know.We were walking around for while and decided in end its late lets just eat here so walked in and there were women in red dresses everywhere it was a posh place and we were regretting the decision when these women got on stage and danced and sang we looked round and realised it was only men and me and char as customers...we'd only walked into some kind of geisha/w****house we were in and out and eaten within 20 minutes haha we couldnt stop laughing!only us!

We then went back to the hotel watched Castle on starworld(we'd missed glee due to the w****house/geisha confuffle) we were leaving for Siem Reap the next day so packed our stuff and got ready for Cambodia Part Two....