The world is brighter since I left Phnom Penh this morning. The difference between this place and PP is staggering, but I’m not sure if the difference is the change in the location, or it’s just me. After my last entry and finishing my lunch I headed down to the beach. I didn’t know what to expect, but water is always a good thing for me. It didn’t take long before the sea came into view. Everything will be good from now on.

I walked to the end of a pier and watched a couple of guys fish for about ten minutes, or another way to describe it, I left when a girl started hitting on me. She was eating noodles on the far side of the pier and we got eye contact, about 30 seconds later she came over and asked where I was from, my answer; Phnom Penh.  I don’t think she got the joke, or maybe it was the snarky way I said it, but after about a minute of silence I got up and left.  I think many of the girls here regularly look for men in my age group, because these type of things are happening all the time since I’ve been in Cambodia. In Dubai I am lucky if a girl even looks at me, I can’t even imagine one coming up and talking to me, but here all I have to do is smile and I usually get attention.

I walked along the beach for about a mile taking in the pounding of the surf and the setting of the sun. It was so relaxing that I even stopped at a beachside bar to have a coke.

Tomorrow I am going on a cruise of the islands around here. It should be lots of fun, they take us to three islands, feed us breakfast and lunch, and take us snorkeling at one of the lagoons. I’m so looking forward to it and I should be able to get underwater video of it too.

So what a few days I’ve had. Let’s see, since the last time I posted a entry I was leaving Battambang for Phnom Penh. I can report that I made it there and now I’ve left and arrived in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. I don’t expect anyone knows about this place, but from what I’ve read it will eventually be the “hotspot” of Cambodia. The beaches are supposedly awesome and people are starting to come. I’ve only been here for a little less than an hour so I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet.

I don’t know if I ever explained why I’ve chosen the places that I’ve gone while here in Cambodia. Let’s see if I can correct that, somewhere around the time the tour through Myanmar was ending I was planning on going to see Angkor Wat, but that was all I really knew about Cambodia other than Pol Pot, the killing fields, and the capital city, Phnom Penh. Since I had two weeks before my next tour, I decided to follow a tour that lasted about 10 days. I’m not on the tour, but I’m staying at the spots that the tour would stay at. So far it’s worked out okay. I’m probably not seeing the same things that I would if I was physically on the tour, but I am seeing the right cities.  Sihanoukville, is the last one before I head back to Thailand.

Phnom Penh was okay. I think that is the best that I can do right now, maybe over time I’ll look back and say it was great, but not now. I managed to go to a few clubs and I really did have a great time the first night. Unfortunately that was pretty much the end of the fun for me. Because I don’t know who would be reading this entry I really don’t want to go into too much detail on my night out, but lets just say it’s been a long time coming and was what I needed (nothing lewd or lascivious).

I think I took about four photographs my whole time there and to be honest I haven’t looked at them to see if they are any good. I think there is a good chance that there won’t be any photos to add to this entry.

I decided to stay in Battambang for another day. There wasn’t really any good reason for it except that I was just too tired to make any plans last night. In fact as I write this, the next morning, I don’t think that I’ll be going anywhere except walking around the city today. Maybe if they rent bikes here I’ll go for a bike ride later.

I got back from dinner and went to my room and started transferring my images to the computer when I realized that I couldn’t find the adapter for my small video camera. I guess the lack of sleep just kind of made me a bit neurotic because I considered it my mission to find it. I emptied every bag I had on the bed, repacked everything, and generally searched every possible hiding place for the adapter. I finally gave up and resigned myself to being and idiot and moved on to my regular camera. The whole search took about an hour, maybe a little bit less, but not more than 10 minutes after I’d given up on ever finding it, I reached in my pocket and there it was. How does that happen? I know I checked my pockets about 10 times. I think it was pretty much nothing more than a lack of sleep.

I woke up at 445 from the sound of people talking and dishes being washed. I never mentioned that the hotel gave me a room in the lobby. It’s so strange to be on the level of the lobby when people are doing things. My only guess is that the room used to be for a night clerk or maybe an owner, and now they rent it out. Anyway, besides being just weird being on the ground floor, it is also very loud.

As expected I took the boat down to Battambang this morning. I was up at 445 and ready to go at 545 for the bus that would pick me up at 6, only the bus didn’t show until bout 7… gotta love it.  The bus got to the dock about 730 and we boarded what I considered to be a smaller boat than expected, but I was just happy to get the ride started. In some ways I think I was just as happy to be leaving than anything.

The boat ride was interesting as we made the 100km journey (guessing on the distance), and just as foretold by all the articles, we broke down. It was kind of funny, the boat is chugging away and at the time we were in the winding part of the river, and we went around a corner and then straight into the bank. For some reason the boat couldn’t make right-hand turns. The first time it happened we hit the bank a little bit hard, afterwards the driver took it slower. The problem kept happening until we couldn’t make left turns, at that point we moored at the bank and waited for help to arrive. It took about two hours for another boat to arrive and the mechanics to fix the problem. It was fun though just floating on the river chatting to other passengers.

We pulled into Battambang at about 530 and there was someone waiting to take me to my hotel. Sure was nice not to have to figure out how much to pay, or to barter with a driver on where to take me. There is one thing that I don’t know if I should mention or not, but Cambodians are a strange group of people. I wrote about my experiences with the tuk-tuk drivers, but tonight was almost just as strange. I found a restaurant to eat at, so all good, I sit down and wait. The next thing I know is I’m being goosed in the ribs, it’s the waiter telling me hello, and asking if I remember him. How could I remember him I’d been in town for about thirty-minutes. Just weird. Then as I’m eating the waiter says something to me, I look up with food on my fork, and ask him what. He tells me I should be using my spoon instead. What? Another thing happened later on, but I think I made my point, Cambodians are some strange people.

I’m at the hotel right now and I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t want to stay, but I don’t want to do all the work to leave either. I’d have to get a bus ticket, get a place to stay, and then get up early in the morning… maybe I’ll stay over one more night. I still have a week before my tour starts.

Tomorrow morning at 6 I leave for Battambang. I am not so interested in seeing the city as I am in taking a boat up the river to get there. Remember, it’s the journey.  I’ve read all sorts of information about the ride up the river with nearly every article saying that the boats break down all the time and at other times people have to get out and push the boats off sandbars. Should be fun. The city itself sounds pretty interesting if only for it’s French colonial architecture, because of this, I’ve only scheduled one night there. I expect to leave for Pnom Penh by bus the next morning. Once there I plan on staying for at least three days. Not bad, close to the next four days are planned.

I didn’t do much today, I’m not really sure why, just that I didn’t seem to have anywhere that I thought I should go. There were places that I was interested in, but not enough to get me motivated to leave this afternoon.

So after my not-so-fun entry into Cambodia I’ve decided to change perspectives on my first impressions of the country. At this time I don’t know if I’m going to post what happened two days ago during the border crossing. I was going to but then started to feel like I was just on a rant and that’s not what I want to blog to be about. So I may tweak the entry, or post it as is I just don’t know right now.

What to say about Cambodia so far? It’s definitely not what I was expecting, at least so far as I’ve gotten into it. The first thing that stands out is that the two cities that I been in, Poipet and Siem Reap and both have been dirty and seemingly lacking in some of the basics of life that we sometimes come to forget about.  The second is that there is a tension here when it comes to some of the Cambodians, especially the tuk-tuk drivers. Depending on whether I post what happened when I arrived here or not you will see my first encounter with the drivers, but let me say they have an open hostility towards me, maybe all “European” people. After I decline a ride it is more common than not to hear them laugh at me as I proceed past. This happens almost anytime I pass a gang of them about four or five times a day. I’ve read that it’s common for people who can’t get a job to end up being  tuk-tuk drivers, and I also read that there are way too many drivers since the global slowdown in 2008.

At 645 in the morning I left the hotel and went looking for a driver to take me to Angkor Wat, the process is pretty simple, you hire a tuk-tuk. The problem I have is that I’m starting to really dislike all the drivers I’ve hired and all the drivers I pass as I walk around… so after being laughed at the corner I cross the street and head in a different direction. I flagged down the first tuk-tuk with the idea that I was going to turn him down but this guy seemed like a nice guy. He was young, respectful and seemed to be genuine, so I hired him for the day. It turned out to be a good decision.

I’d like to give a little history to start about Angkor Wat some of it you may or may not know already. Angkor Wat is one temple out of many. It is also the name of a national park that has dozens of other Wats (temples). Although it may be accurate to say you spent the day at Angkor Wat, it may also be a little misleading because tourists can visit many Wats while at Angkor Wat. Hopefully that made sense.

I passed the gates into the park at about 715 in the morning. In retrospect I think it would have been better to be a little bit earlier, maybe 6 or 630, but nevertheless I still beat the majority of tourists to my first temple; Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat is supposed to be the most famous, the most preserved, and the most popular so I guess it is first on the list of wat to see (pun intended). To be honest I wasn’t sure which I wanted to see, where I should go, and which would be the best. I did know that I’ve been fascinated by photographs of trees almost swallowing walls and buildings and I did have a Lonely Planet guidebook to give me a little history to the wats.

The day was spent going from one temple to another and for the most part each had something a little bit unique to itself. Some had staircases rising 50 meters at nearly 60 or 70 degrees, some had statues of elephants standing guard at each corner, some had reliefs of dancing girls, while others had warriors beheading their enemy. Each temple was worth seeing.

It wasn’t until I got to Ta Prohm that I really got excited. It is the temple that looks like the jungle is slowly devouring it. Trees emerge from the top of buildings and walls, their roots flow down the sides like a waterfall frozen in time. As I was walking around and taking pictures, like every other tourist there, an old man crosses in front of me, jumps a rope fence and waves for me to follow. Hmmm. He’s got an official looking shirt on, so why not? I jump the fence and follow him through a crumbling passageway and over toppled walls until he points at another tree growing over the building. He holds his hands up to pantomime the taking of a photo, so I take a photo. For the next fifteen minutes we go around the temple through blocked off areas taking photos of things that he deemed interesting. When I had to climb up to get a better vantage point, he’d tap the areas where I should step. Looking back I don’t think he ever said anything to me, everything was in gestures. The whole thing was kind of surreal, this guy never asked me to go with him, I never asked, or even had eye contact with him beforehand, but it worked out great for me. I was going where I probably shouldn’t have gone, getting photographs that I know I wouldn’t have gotten without him. At the very beginning, I was like, “I am not going to tip him… I didn’t ask him for the guide!” about 5 minutes in, “okay, so this is cool, maybe I’ll give him a dollar.” After about 10 minutes, “I wonder if $2 is too little?”

I stuck around there for about an hour, with some of the time just sitting and watching tourists or trying to visualize what this had been like in it’s heyday, or even what it must have looked like when it was first “discovered” by Europeans as it must have been much more overgrown than what it is now.

After Ta Prohm the rest of the wats paled in comparison and except for some serious steep staircases there wasn’t much more to talk about—photos will do better. Rain was looming and when my driver said there wasn’t any temples left I decided to head back to town. The rain started before we left the parking lot of the last temple and the rain soon turned into a downpour.

I ended the night at a Western style restaurant for a burger and extra fries, all washed down with some local ale. Not a bad ending for a great day.