Two touristy weeks in Cambodia

The first thing that hit us when we arrived at Cambodia's north-westernish city of Battambang was relief - as the bus ride there took a cruel 16 hours. In fact our short stay was a bus lagged daze; desperately trying to wake by drinking strong coffee while perusing some great bizarre little local art galleries - many of which are on the road between streets 2 and 3 which city developers amusingly named "Street 2 1/2".

We woke up at the circus. There were no clowns, thankfully; just a show with a good balance of superhuman acrobatics and unnecessarily dangerous stunts. The Phare circus was established to teach performing arts and music to disadvantaged children - and when there's people jumping over blazing lengths of rope to a sprinting beat being pounded on the drums, it feels like they did a fine job. There was also a touch of traditional (maybe) music and dance which was nicer than the grayscale pop music distorting speakers across Cambodia.

Battambang

The Circus!!!

To avoid taking another bus, we opted for a slow boat to the town of Siem Reap. It turned out to be an incredibly noisy 9 hours on bum hating wooden benches but it gave us the opportunity to see the floating villages on the Sangkae River and out onto the great Tonle Sap lake (the lake really is huge - it's like a trapped freshwater sea).

These villages don't have walkways so people travel between the buoyed huts with rowing or longtail boats. Some houses are on long wooden stilts along the riverbank - placed at a height to hopefully withstand flooding - but some of these had unfortunately collapsed yet still somewhat sadly being used.

Floating villages and fishing!

Siem Reap is a small town which is world famous for its proximity to the Angkor temple complex. Apart from being an amazing array of ancient temples in the largest pre-industrial city in the world, they were also importantly used in the climax of the movie Tomb Raider. Due to this, we found ourselves in a veritable sea of tourists when we visited the biggest attraction in South East Asia.

We dragged ourselves out of bed at 4.30am and cycled up to the daddy temple Angkor Wat for a picturesque sunrise, and followed a map to find giant stone faces, fairyland towers and twisting trees jutting out of crumbling wonders - nodding approvingly at the intricate architecture. The whole ruined city retained a surpringly calm vibe to it considering the bus loads of tourists and was altogether thoroughly pleasant.

Angkor Historical Park

To try and make our own little wonders we went on a ceramics making class, which is probably aimed at children, to form bowls, plates and even a goblet. They also let us paint some cups which was nice of them. It's a little embarrassing how much fun we had with this.

Ceramics!

Siem Reap Town

We needed a few days to get Vietnam visas sorted so our final stop in Cambodia was again the capital city Phnom Penh, full circle from our first stop in the country a few weeks previously. Whearas our first stop was not so great, this time we were armed with a map. We explored the popular riverside area and kitsch art streets, but also found cool patches of Chinese shops, the grimy bustle of the Russian market and the huge dome of the Central market.

Phnom Penh

We must have wandered somewhat off the tourist streets as in one cafe we went in for breakfast the staff of three suddenly became very worried, unsure how to deal with us strange foreigners. Using gestures and pointing we got some noodle soup and coffee, and assured the still concerned staff that this was exactly what we wanted until they looked happy and returned to looking at Khmer Facebook.

Just outside the cafe was a roadside cobbler, which was useful as my soles were abandoning my shoes. I showed him this and he gestured to a tiny plastic stool to sit on. As he got the tools, he points at me and asked a little sternly;
"American?"
"Err.. No. From England" I replied.
"Ahh. Vietnamese. Not Cambodian." He said pointing to himself.
"Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City?" I asked with my vague knowledge of his country.
"Hanoi" he replied and gestured a machine gun firing.
"Pow, pow, pow!" He says and pulls down his shirt to reveal a large scar across his chest - reminding us that the Vietnam War wasn't that long ago.
Kath and I were a little taken aback.
"Definitely not American." I said of myself - unsure quite what to say. We all had a chuckle and parted ways. He did a great job of the shoes.

You do have to get used to a certain level of hassle in Phnom Penh. On one 15 minute walk we were asked if we wanted a Tuk Tuk by 11 different drivers, usually each trying 3 or 4 times. In the markets, as well, they don't use subtlety with their product advertising, and will flatly ask "buy something?" as you walk past. If you show a spark of interest then a vendor will lift up every item they sell for your examination in case you wish to purchase. It's still great fun to look around and we used the markets as an opportunity to try some local snacks and fruits. Here are some of our favourites:

Top: A slightly salted grilled skewer of sugar bananas.
(Sugar bananas being a small sweet banana variety.)

Bottom: Pan fried chive cake
This is a refreshing rice flour cake of err.. chives with chilli sauce

Top-left: "Star Apple" or "Milk Fruit" - a soft fibrous sweet melon taste with lots of juice.
Top-right: "Salak" or "Snake Fruit" - a spiky but easy to peel skin gives way to 1-3 segments. These segments smell like a dusty furniture store but taste like Haribo Tangfastic apple sweets.
Bottom-left: "Mangosteen" - looks like a fake plastic fruit but cut it open and it has juicy sections tasting somewhere between a lychee and a cool swim on a hot day
Bottom-right: "Rambutan" - basically a lychee with a punk rock hair-do. Very more-ish.

A great place for food in Phnom Penh turned out to be Restaurant 54 - filled with over 100 rowdy Khmer people and giggling children who would come up and say "Hello!" and then chase each other around occasionally face planting on the floor. They do an amazing dish called "Special Fish on Fire Lake" where you have a tabletop grill with a gigantic meaty fish which is in a bubbling coconut soup to which you add noodles and vegetables. Eating it makes you feel a little like Captain Ahab might have done.

“I try all things, I achieve what I can.”

We ended our time in Cambodia on a slightly sad note as we visited the Killing Fields. In the 1970s, deluded madman Pol Pot gained political leadership of Cambodia and with his Khmer Rouge ("The Red Khmer") killed thousands suspected of being a threat or even an intellectual. The Killing Fields is one of the main genocidal locations where people were brought in truckloads. There is now a large stupa memorial in respect for the dead.

Equally upsetting was the Tuol Sleng museum, or "S-21 security prison" which was once a school but turned into a detention centre by Pol Pot. The conditions inside were terrible, but the hardest thing to look at were the endless rows of photos picturing the inmates, who would usually be tortured and forced to confess to often invented crimes before being shipped off to the killing fields.

The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

It was an upsetting way to spend our last day in Cambodia but felt like an important thing to see. It's very recent history, but thankfully we saw little bitterness in everyday life. Nearly all the Khmer people we met were quick to laugh and often helpful to us two probably confused looking travellers.

- Jon

Living' it up French colonial style in Kampot and Kep, Cambodia

In its heyday, Kep was a fancy coastal resort town favoured by the French, although it was abandoned by holiday makers following Cambodian independence and subsequently looted by the Khmer Rouge - leaving behind an array of ruined villas.

The town is very spread out with a beach square in the middle, separated from the main urban bit to the East and the famous crab market to the West by a couple of stretches of empty coast road. It's quiet and what street lighting there is goes off about 9pm. The people are very laid back and friendly, and far more likely to spend their time playing kick volleyball (fun to watch) than trying to sell you stuff. We were relieved to find not all towns as intense as Sihanoukville or Phnom Penh, where you can feel like a walking ATM sometimes.

Kep also has one of the tiniest national parks going, really just one forested hill rising up from the beach. We walked its 8km circumference in flip flops (due to rubbish rental bikes and my shoes having broken). Posted on trees along the way are signs informing any who care to read about the resident flora and fauna. At one point while we were learning about lychees we spotted a troop of monkeys above us, who clearly knew all about them.

Welcome to Kep

Kep is great for food, if a bit pricy. (By the way, Cambodia has an odd dual-currency; ATMs dispense US dollars, which are interchangeable with the native Riel. This means I get more confused than usual when checking change). We had an astonishingly good seafood dinner at Breezes restaurant, with grilled barracuda wraps and prawn crackers used as little edible trays for shrimp salad (brilliant idea). Kimly restaurant was great too, although Jon had to make do with shark as they were out of stingray.

Crab is the town's main draw, and so to try it out we went to the crab market, which was smoky and bustly in the best tradition of food markets. When we asked for a kilo of the crustaceans, one of the ladies promptly waded out into the sea to retrieve some live crabs from a trap. These were briskly weighed, washed and chucked into a steel pan on the fire to steam (I'm sure they died quickly...). 5 minutes later we were presented with our super-fresh lunch. Eating it took far longer and was a very enjoyable mess.

The crab market

Just before we left for Kampot we sampled a fresh sugar cane drink, the famous smelly fruit called durian (banned from many hotels and minibuses but actually quite nice) and had a visit to Kep Oceanarium, which houses several surprising sea creatures brought up from the bay just outside.

Durians, sugar cane drinks and imprisoned sealife

Kampot is only about forty minutes from Kep, a much larger town (though still small really) and the major trade centre for the area. Once there we headed to market, which was chaotic but full of helpful people, to get my shoes fixed by a street side cobbler. Definitely worth doing as they did a very thorough job, re-stuck my flip flop soles into the bargain and only asked for $2 (we gave $3). The rest of the market was full of excitingly unidentifiable fruit - we bought a large quantity of what turned out to be longan and sapodilla, plus some mini rather tasty oranges.

Shoe fixing, sapodilla, longan and mini rather tasty oranges

The town is noisy in a mainly good way. There are several fascinating windowless buildings which play birdsong at high volume to attract unwitting birds to nest inside the cave-like interior. Bird's nest soup is big business! Our arrival also coincided with 'wedding season', and all over the place (usually in the middle of the road) pink marquees were going up and tables laid out to celebrate Khmer nuptials. All very festive, but we were driven onto the streets till midnight after appalling, ear-splitting karaoke kicked off at one near our guesthouse.

Kampot is world famous for pepper and also has large salt farms - it's the condiment capital of Cambodia! We took a quick tour to see it all. The salt farms consist of many tennis-court sized beds, raked flat and then filled with seawater which evaporates over about 10 days, leaving behind a bed full of salt crystals! It's then collected and stored in sheds ready to be shipped out for cleaning.

The pepper plantation (Starling Farm) was equally interesting and much greener. All black, white, and red pepper comes from the same plant (news to us), but is harvested and dried differently. The peppercorns picked on the cusp of turning yellow and sun-dried turn black; those left to ripen and turn red can be dried for red pepper or blanched first for white. The green berries are eaten fresh in stir-frys too and are super hot but very good!

Salt and pepper!

Bokor Hill, to the West, has an apparently amazing 'ghost town' type abandoned French hill station on top. I say apparently, as we didn't quite make it up... The summit is 8km from town on the flat and then up a continuous climb of 32km. We rented mountain bikes for the trip, were making good ground and had just 10km to go when Jon's chain snapped! Some locals attempted to help out (with a pair of pliers), but had very uncertain knowledge of rear derailleurs. Despite our best efforts at communication, the chain ended up reattached in a big loop, making pedaling impossible! Luckily freewheeling 22km back down to the main road was more awesome than arduous, and once there Jon hung onto my rucksack and I towed him back towards town. With 1km to go a roadside mechanic was able to 'fix' it (with a lump hammer) in the correct routing. He did a very good job considering - not sure how long it'll last but good enough to give back to the rental shop! To celebrate I ate a huge rack of ribs at the Rusty Keyhole, an event in itself.

Freewheeling down Bokor Hill

Other activities included paddle boarding around mangroves and a spot of rock climbing. Paddle boarding involves standing on a surfboard type thing with a long paddle to maneuver yourself, and is slow, surreal and very fun. We set off on the river in the late afternoon, in time to see the local fishing boats set off for sea. They fish all night and take the catch to market on the way home. The mangroves off the river felt prehistoric, full of huge ferns through which ran little channels of flat dark water. We arrived back after dark feeling awesome.

Paddle boarding

We climbed with Climbodia, a new company set up by a Belgian with a passion for a local cave he first saw last year. He's set up via ferratas, that is, safety cables to clip your harness to while traversing around the rock face and inside the cave, plus abseiling points down chimneys in the rock and a few top-rope climbing routes. He's waiting on a box of rock anchors from customs to expand his routes around the hill but the ones he has already were challenging enough for us!

The cave itself has a few shrines and several wooden ladders and walkways. We were informed that the latter are actually props left behind by a French film production while they were filming 'The White Soldier' recently! Most of Kampot's expats were apparently used as extras, and the locals got the ladders plus cut-price army boots and other goodies after filming. We'll have to see if we can watch it once it's out!

-Kath

Climbodia!

Also around Kampot and Kep...

p.s. We are now famous! Well, maybe a bit. Our pictures are now in the slideshow on Cycling Sukhotai website (www.cycling-sukhothai.com) from a tour we did in October last year. On the slippery slope to stardom.

From 4000 islands down to 1

Si Phan Don, in Southern Laos, is a collection of islands in the Mekong river. The name directly translates as "the four thousand islands" but it is unlikely anyone counted and if they did they probably rounded up. We chose to stop on an island called Don Det ("Don" meaning "Island"), a fairly backpacker heavy place that is currently suffering from a brilliant plague of kittens.

To get there involved a boat and soon after leaving the mainland shore the engine stalled and we drifted helplessly in the current. Two other boats sprung to action at a leisurely pace, splashing everyone on board with terrifyingly liberal swings of the propellor shafts, and guided the weary vessel up to the island coast.

That propellor shaft, some litter kittens and a bit of a bridge

After this excitement we landed and for the next few days we mainly mooched about the bustling villages watching the odd boat race, talked to expats who had opted for the easy life and generally had a good old relax in a sun soaked hammock. Some of this downtime was somewhat enforced by a winter cold which I picked up - completely unexpected and unwelcome in the tropical climate!

Don Det has a railway bridge over to neighboring island Don Khon. This bridge is a relic of French colonists who tried desperately to get boats up the Mekong river and link the territories of French-Indochina - but failed due to the sheer scale of the waterfalls and rapids here. Their loss was our gain, though, as the waterfalls are spectacular. We cycled over to Don Khon on rusty rented single-speeds and some places really made us feel like David Attenborough may be narrating above us somewhere.

Si Phan Don

Then Christmas day made its daybreak with brilliant sunshine and a sense of being very far from home. Thankfully, a Scouser run restaurant called King Kong had arranged a proper British Christmas turkey roast, complete with gravy and roast potatoes, and a trifle for dessert (which confused a lot of people who had never heard of such a wondrous thing)!

Christmas Toblerone!!

Boxing day was a day of treats as we decided to transit to Cambodia. Everything was fine until the border crossing, which involved a "health check", or an introduction to scambodia (a clever combination of "scam" and "Cambodia"), where someone hovers a plastic beeping box over your face and charges you $2 for the privilege of being healthy enough to enter the country. Our connecting bus arrived 2 hours late, crammed as many people in as the suspension could hold and then crawled down the sandy crevise (supposedly a road) to Phnom Penh. A bus journey like that makes you type bitterly.

Always room for one more.

We arrived 4 hours late, at midnight, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city, at the mercy of the tuk tuk drivers to take us to guesthouses at least 4km away. Our tuk tuk ride was shared by a homesick Spaniard and we watched the scene change from gold crazed opulence to child beggars and saw piles of roadside litter with a feral cat chasing 2 giant rats.

Arriving at almost 1am was strange as we were used to midnight curfews in Laos. Even that late we could get amazing gnocchi from an inexpensive Italian restaurant, and the city was still very alive as we hit the hay.

We were just passing through Phnom Penh and unfortunately mainly saw dirt and sleaze while we there. This was somewhat accented when we accidently left an ereader in a guesthouse as we checked out. The device had magically disappeared by the time we returned - which felt pretty raw.

The next quick stop was in the Southern coast town of Sihanoukville which was way over touristy and in-your-face so we dived for refuge into Top Cat Cinema's comforting armchairs and caught up with Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit 2. However the coast is nice for a bike ride to a quieter beach called "Otres" which while still busy is much less intense.  Here you can sit by the sea and enjoy Khmer dishes like the excellently named Amok Fish Curry (coconut milk based brothy curry) and Beef Lok Lak (tender strips of beef sautéed with mild spices with rice and just maybe a fried egg).

Sihanoukville - where a Praying Mantis landed on my arm

Off the coast of Sihanoukville is a small island called Ko Ta Kiev which, apart from a small Cambodian naval base, has "Crusoe Island" which rents tents to pitch by the beach. We got a boat there and pitched a tent on our very own section of white sand, just a short treacherous climb away from the communal eating area. We stayed a few nights and this area helped build a community feel between the dispersed beach campers. There was a lack of wifi to enforce conversation.

There was a great sense of freedom on the island and swimming in our own bit of sea every morning felt great. We only shared the beach with scurrying crabs (some of which were hermit crabs with hilariously bad fitting shells) and the odd lizard who mainly went about their own business. During the day, apart from a little tentative sunbathing we had to fortify our tent against the high tide (which only happened at night) as from inside the tent we could hear the rising water as if it were about to whisk us away to the ocean.

The best thing to do there is snorkeling. It was our first time and apart from initially hyperventilating from the shock of breathing with your mouth underwater, we got the hang of it. There are vast thriving coral reefs here supporting schools of cute little fish and viscious spiky sea urchins. It's a bizarre multicoloured sight which can't be captured without a waterproof camera. At points the sea floor drops to 4 meters or so and you can see strange shimmering life forms of a very imaginative design.

Ko Ta Kiev

Showers on the island are the traditional Khmer "bucket of well water" which is bracing if a little futile as you will immediately be covered in sand again. We heard that one of the Khmer staff was once driven to a city and when faced with his first hot shower was surprised, unsure and turned the heater off. Apparently not everyone enjoys the supposed luxury.

For New Years Eve around 65 people came to the island for a hog roast and a party. This was some great marshmallow roasting, mock sports fun and a brilliant way to meet people and avoid feeling homesick at a festive time. We found out here about a local phenomenon of bioluminescent plankton on the surface of some parts of sea at night.

The next evening, which without light pollution was full of surprisingly vivid stars, a small group of us headed out for an midnight swim (at 11pm) to see the bioluminescence. The sea with the plankton looks completely normal, but as you splash about brilliant blue spark-like flashes shoot around you. The effect increases further out to sea until you can make sea angels (like snow angels but with bioluminescent plankton) and you are surrounded by a blue glow. It was really a very surreal experience which will not be easy to forget.

- Jon