Suzi's Travels

Big update this one...

I spent the last two days of my time in Laos in Vientiane, the capital, basically just bar hopping and walking around the occasional temple, there's really not an awful lot to do there... then last Saturday I flew back to Bangkok with Lao Airlines... scary... propellor planes... brother says they're less high maintenance than other commerial aircraft but it just felt like it was gonna drop out of the sky at any given moment. Service and food was good though. I've stayed on the legendary Khao San Road for one night before moving about 5 minutes away to the hotel where I started my tour into Cambodia and Vietnam.

On Sunday evening I met my tour group. We've got a pretty cool bunch. I'm sharing a room with a girl called Roxy who is on a career break, then there's Rachel and Mike who are on a 6 month break from England, Gareth from Wales who works for the Times and is doing an article on a few people in the group (not me fortunately... I'm really not a good example to people planning a gap year or career break...) Amy who's on holiday from Brisbane, Nina and Mike and Claire and John all on holiday as separate couples from Melbourne, Frankie from Canada who wants to become a professional bum having travelled the world already but all work-related, and Sarah from the US who is on a long holiday too. We went out for dinner that night just off Khao San Road, then ended up on Rambuttri at a minibar on the street where we drank cocktails for a pound each. Mike has quickly proven himself to be the "I'll try anything" person of the group... having wandered off to look for pancakes, he returned with a couple deep-fried frogs, grasshoppers, cockroaches and maggots. Ewwwwwwww! But he tried each one and lived to tell the tale... Oh, and we did find pancakes... really nice banana ones with chocolate dribbled on top. yum.

On Monday it was up early to take a minibus to the Thai-Cambodia border. This took about 4 hours and I think most of us slept a good portion of it. Once we got to the border we had to walk over with our backpacks, through a no-mans-land area full of casinos - there is no local law so they thrive there. Then it took a while to get through passport control on the Cambodia side. Next up was a 5 hour bus ride along the "Boulevard of Broken Backsides"- it's pretty much an unsealed 4WD road which allegedly one of the airlines pays to keep this way so it can get people to fly instead of go by bus... I'm not sure I'd do that road again... having seen some of the potholes that we fell into or avoided together with the number of trucks parked along the road having their tyres changed... well I'm just glad we made it in one piece without having a puncture. I think the boys at the back of the bus hit the roof with their heads a couple of times after bouuncing into a pothole.

We got into Siem Reap at about 5.30 in the evening and our hotel was much nicer than I'd thought. The trip I'm on is run by Intrepid and is one of their "basix" packages - no frills. So to have a western toilet, toilet paper and hot water was a very pleasant surprise. We all went out for dinner to a local restaurant and had our first taste of Khmer food. I had a curry which was a bit bland - apparently they think westerners really don't like spicy food so deliberately don't put it in the food they serve to us.

The next day, Tuesday, we got up at 5am as we were heading out to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise.

We had hired a guide for the day, Yous Sa, who spoke amazing English considering he's never been there, and has the most wonderful cockney accent on top of it - we don't know how he acquired it, although I've heard a twinge of it in other people since then, but you see this Cambodian dude standing in front of you, and as soon as he opens his mouth you expect rhyming slang to come out of it. Terrific dude.

Angkor Wat was amazing. The pictures of this place just don't do it justice. It's one of those places that is really peaceful but really imposing and you pretty much walk around with your jaw on the floor. After watching the sunrise, we walked around to the other side and then up the 37 steps to heaven. I say steps, but you could practically call it a stone ladder it was so steep, you're crawling up on all fours... thank god they put a handrail on one of the sets of steps so we could get down without breaking anything... or dying, which apparently does happen.

We came out of Angkor Wat at about 9am ready for breakfast so all went over to a restaurant for a hearty meal of eggs, bacon, and fresh baguettes. I have to say, they do a mean breakfast out here! Next up was Ta Phrom, where some of the movie Tomb Raider was filmed. Yous Sa did a wicked impression of Angelina Jolie! This temple is really interesting, it hasn't been restored and there is a lot of rubble lying around it, and trees growing out of and on top of it! It's the strangest thing to see, I thought I'd wandered into a fairy tale when we went in.

After Ta Phrom, we visited Angkor Thom. This is a complex comprising many temples, including the Bayon which is the one with the faces on the columns. Again, this is a really mystical place and you can easily get lost in there.

After Angkor Thom we went for lunch. We sat at the edge of the restaurant, and local kids were constantly asking us to buy stuff. This is one of the most difficult aspects of travelling around here. You see all these little kids selling stuff, and they look so adorable, and you know they're really poor, and you really want to buy something from them but obviously you can't buy from all of them. So when you finally do buy something only for another little girl to offer you something and you say no and she says "why you no buy from me?", your heart breaks for her. Saying no is probably the equivalent of saying "I don't like you" in her mind. In practical terms, whether or not you buy something from one of these kids can mean whether or not they go to school the next day and it is really hard not to feel responsible. I guess you just have to harden yourself and know that if you do buy something you're helping someone if not everyone.

After lunch we went to a land mine museum. This was just horrible and I don't think anyone walked out without tears in their eyes. We were shown around the museum by a 19 year old whose right leg had been amputated below the knee. He had gone into the jungle as an 8 year old with his brother and sister, stepped on a mine and lost his leg, his brother and his sister. It was awful hearing him tell his story in such a matter of fact way, and none of us knew what to say to him. He showed us all the different types of mines that they are clearing and you just can't understand why anyone would invent such things. It's such a terrible legacy for the country, where 50% of the population is under the age of 18... but I haven't met a single kid who doesn't have a smile and a bright hope for the future.

That night we went out for pizza and then on to a club... where most people got rather wasted.

The next day I got up fairly early - around 8.45, as I wanted to get some laundry done and then some of us had talked about going to one of the posh hotels in Siem Reap to use their pool for a few hours. Only three of us made it to the Angkor Palace Spa Resort... everyone else was too hungover! For $18 we had the use of the pool, the gym, sauna, steam room and a three-course lunch. We only used the pool - and we only came out because we were hungry! It was a really lovely setting but I think we had the right idea - pay around $10-15 to stay where we did and then pay to use the pool rather than paying $150 a night to stay there!

When we got back to our hotel, people were just about feeling human again, and we all set off for Tonle Sap - this is a huge lake in the middle of Cambodia where there is a floating village complete with school, church, temple, football pitch and basketball court. We took a boat trip out around the village and stopped at one of the restaurants where they had a fish and crocodile farm. Any time you went near the edge of the floating restaurant all you could hear was "one dollar" - for bananas, for coke, for beer... after we left we convinced the captain to hang around to let us watch the sunset - and any time we came anywhere near anything, someone would row out to meet us as fast as they could to sell us more bananas or drinks!

We got back to the hotel later than planned, and our tour leader thought we had fallen in! We were dining with a local family that night so we felt a bit guilty for holding things up but it all worked out well. We ate loads of food, and danced with the kids.

On Thursday we took a public bus to Cambodia's 3rd largest town, Kompong Cham. We were a bit apprehensive about the bus but it was air-conditioned and quite comfy as long as you weren't 6 foot tall. We got into the town around lunchtime and after a nice burger we were off on our excursion. We were going out over a bamboo bridge to an island in the middle of the Mekong. Most people cycled but me, Nina and Roxy hopped on a moped and rode out pillion, which was a lot of fun. The bridge gets rebuilt each December as the monsoon destroys it each year. It felt a wee bit rickety going over it...

On the island is a small village, and as we rode through it the children were just getting out of school and kept running up to us saying "hello""hello"and holding out their hands for a high five... they were so cute and it was great fun high fiving them all.

On Friday we took another public bus into Phnom Penh, the capital, where we had lunch at a restaurant that does a lot of great work in the community. They reach almost 2,000 kids on a daily basis, helping them with problems such as drugs, homelessness and prostitution, and get them a place to stay, get them into school, and give them skills to get jobs and support themselves. The restaurant is staffed by Teachers and Students, all of whom are in the programme. And the food is great.

After lunch we got in a minibus to take us to Takeo where we were staying with a local family for the evening. We were told that the family was very poor and to expect really basic conditions. I figured after trekking in Chiang Mai and staying with the tribes there I would be pretty well prepared. But it was much nicer than we had been led to believe, and the family certainly wasn't that poor. It was the first night of the Chinese New Year so we bought some fireworks for the children... as soon as they saw them their eyes lit up... and they practically yanked them out of our hands... with almost disastrous consequences... it's not that they were kids and didn't know what they were doing, because they did - that was the scary part - they don't have nice health and safety laws and safety guidelines on the boxes out here so the kids see no harm in getting as close as they like to the fireworks while we look on and start screaming at them to get away!

Saturday we took the minibus down to Sihanoukville on the coast where after having a yummy lunch and a couple jugs of pimms (made by a barmaid who'd never made it before so it was rather alcoholic...) we hit the beach. We all dived straight in the water to cool off and it was heavenly. We had the great idea to build a human pyramid so some of the girls tried climbing up on the guys' shoulders - but couldn't get their balance with the waves. Then some local kids swam up and we invited them to get on our shoulders and have a fight. I think we all almost drowned there and were absolutely exhausted by the time we made it back to shore.

In the evening we went to a bar that was giving away free food and vodka shots and cheap drinks... we all had a go (or five) at the vodka shots - they had themselves an ice ramp with a gulley running down the middle so they just poured the vodka in and we waited at the bottom to receive the chilled vodka. We had a boat trip planned for the next day so I just got a bit merry and left before midnight, helping John get Claire home... but most of the others stayed on for a few hours and were still drunk when we got on the boat the next day!