First days in Cambodia

Due to some requests we decided to continue our blog in English. Somehow we should have done that right from the beginning on…

Now our new update. We landed safely in Cambodia and have already covered some distance here. Due to limited internet access this is so far the first chance we have had to go online. So this is what happened:

We arrived in Phnom Penh with our Jetstar Asia flight which was very good – except for the landing. The pilot kind of missed flaring out the A320 so the landing gear proved what it can take. Anyway, we were taken into town by a taxi and dropped off at the guest house of our choice (Okay Guesthouse) Rooms were great and we had spacious clean rooms with aircon and TV for US$ 10 / night.

The interesting thing in Cambodia is that they use 2 currencies – US$ and Cambodian riel. 4.000 riel equal 1 US$ and it is common to pay with a mixture of US$ and riel (think of the riel as being the cents).

Anyway, we hired a tuk-tuk for the day in Phnom Penh and managed to see about almost everything there is to see in Phnom Penh – starting at Tuol Sleng the infamous S21 prison of the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields outside of town. It is devastating to see what the Khmer Rouge have done to Cambodia and its people. The museum and the Killing Fields are quite heartbreaking actually. Anyway, to lighten up a little we visited the Russian market and the Royal Palace before going up to Wat Phnom – the founding site of Phnom Penh.

Our first impressions of Cambodia were friendly people, very dirty environment and absolutely mad traffic. Here people really use every square inch of space available. There would be a lot more to tell you all about but I'd better get on with our "Japanese style" tour…

The next day we headed north to Kratie in a 7 hour bus ride. We arrived in the afternoon and still managed to take a boat out and watch the Irriwaddy dolphins in the Mekong River (yes, freshwater dolphins). Since this is about all there is to see in Kratie we found ourselves on a bus to Skuon the next moring – with a maniac driver. Those were probably the 4 hour of most reckless driving we have experienced in our lives. Gladly we arrived safely in Skuon where we had to wait 3 hours for our connecting bus to Siem Reap – with a much more cautious driver.

Well, so now we are in Siem Reap and spent our first days at the Temples of Angkor. The place is purely amazing – even though it is absolutely overrun by American and Japanese tourists and in some places feels more like Disneyland than an ancient spiritual and cultural heritage site. However there are ways to avoid the crowds and then the place just turns out to be absolutely wonderful. Tomorrow we are heading into the temple area again. Our tuk-tuk driver "Brum" will pick us up at \n4.45 a.m. so that we are in within the park for sunrise. Let's see how many other tourists will manage to be up that early.

So much for the moment – we will probably report again from Thailand. Our plans have changed a little so that we might skip out on Sihanoukville and instead head down to Ko Chang in Thailand for a couple of days. We will definitely decide on that tomorrow or day after tomorrow.

See you then!

Katrin & Marcus.