Saturday 22 December 2012

Goodbye Laos, hello Cambodia!


26th November 2012

Our time in Laos has come to an end! Our next destination in Phnom Penh and while we've booked and paid for this leg, Stray doesn't accompany us through Cambodia, instead they book you public buses. We weren't too bothered about this as most of our trip has been on public transport anyway! However, the day didn't start very well – my trusty and pretty much brand new camera is broken! There's no obvious damage, rather I keep being told that there's a lens error which is a real pain as I'm all about the pictures! But anyway, at 8am we left Don Det and took a flimsy wooden boat to the mainland. Our bus didn't arrive until about 9.45am and things didn't speed up after it arrived – we were told our arrival time would be 6pm but we've also heard 8pm, 10pm and a few fellow Stray travellers left yesterday and didn't arrive until 12.30am so who knows how long the journey will be! To make matters worse, the bus seems to be transporting enough cabbages and lettuces to feed a small country; lucky us, we have to put up with the smell of rotten cabbage and petrol for the next twelve hours! Once on the bus we waited for another few hours and eventually cleared immigration at about 11.30am! Most people on the bus paid an extra $2 to have the bus driver deal with our immigration paperwork but of course there were the difficult customers who thought they were getting ripped off and insisted on doing it all themselves!

Said customers only grew more annoying as the trip progressed... When we were waiting at the border there was the opportunity to buy snacks from the usual stalls. One such stall was offering an entire fresh pineapple for 12,000Kip or $1 which is a pretty cheap but this particular group of French tourists had a real problem with the pricing. So instead of just handing over $1 they haggled with the girl selling the fruit and tried to get it for 8,000Kip or about 60cents! Rory and I couldn't believe that a grown woman who was wearing designer clothing, designer glasses and Birkenstock sandals was actually arguing with a teenage girl about the price of a pineapple! At our next stop the same thing happened, a man in the same group didn't want to pay $1 for a can of coke so he got out his brand new iPad and showed the young girl the exchange rate and the price he wanted to pay! I understand that people are careful with their money but we are literally in a third world country and these people were haggling over pennies. I just couldn't believe that these grown and obviously wealthy westerners were trying to deprive a person so clearly in need just so they can act like seasoned travellers who are too smart to get ripped off!

Wee spent the rest of the day travelling through Cambodia which is actually a lot like Laos. I suppose I presumed that because Cambodia is a well known country it would be more developed but from what I've seen, it's very similar and fairly undeveloped, at least in the country. Rory and I have been reading a few books about the Khmer Rouge and the genocide in Cambodia and it's so surreal to think that this all actually happened here. As Rory pointed out, when we crossed the border the Cambodian official looked to be in his fifties or sixties which would have made him 20 or 30 when the atrocities were happening. With 1 in 5 Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, he would have been directly affected and yet, there he was, stamping us in to his country.

We ended up arriving at 10pm which is quite good considering but as soon as we got off the bus we were hounded by tuk tuk drivers and as always it was pretty overwhelming! We gave in and got one to our hotel, which we were quite worried about. It was a spur of the moment decision which we hadn't really researched so we had no idea where it was or what it was like! For $6 we were driven to the door and it was about 3km away from the backpacker center of Phnom Penh. Of course nothing is ever straightforward and we ended up driving the wrong way down a busy main road! Despite our initial worries, our room is really nice and at $15 is a complete bargain!

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