Andi’s Weblog

… so I was about to describe the most adventurous part of the travel, right? Here we go:

We left the bus that had taken us from Rach Gia to Ha Tien and got informed that there was no bus crossing the border in direction Sihanoukville or anything near. So we had to hire two motorbike drivers (who were incredible overchargers, of course - the power of monopoly) who took our backpacks to the front (in-between their feet) and us on the back. The ride was a little bumpy on a dusty road and we overpaid our visa by 5 dollars. Since we had heard stories from people who paid up to 50 dollars for “insurance” we must have arrived at a time that the border guards had earned their money from other tourists or in other words we were lucky. Since we had already used our luck for the day, something had to go wrong.

Ok so we hired these motorbike drivers who brought us to the right town (Kampot) but unfortunately didn’t arrange any meeting point before. Their mobiles were not working because they had Vietnamese simcards. On top of that none of the drivers did understand any word of English except for “dollar”. We ended up driving around town, talking to just about anyone who looked like they could possibly understand SOME English or French. Finally I found a guy who was fluent in French and who I could “employ” as my translator. After two hours of waiting, sending a taxi driver around to look for Flo and Flo driving almost all the way back to Vietnam in order to look for me, we met again and we took a taxi to Sihanoukville.

We enjoyed our days there at beautiful beaches playing volleyball, rented a motorbike to drive around and got to try some Cambodia style BBQ on the beaches at night time. Generally, we had some really laid-back time again. The next station of our trip was Phnom Penh a city that is not interesting itself but has the S-21 (Genocide Museum) on its ground. The S-21 shows in frightening closeness to reality some facts of the Khmer Rouge Regime and their activities. It used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge took over and was turned into a prison where prisoners were held like animals (or even worse) and from where they were - if not tortured to death before - deported to the killing fields and executed. Besides the fact that the prison still looks like it looked during the war, the visit was frightening because most of the tour guides are direct close relatives of former prisoners and therefore have personal stories about the prison to tell.

After Phnom Penh, we took a bus again (on which Flo got his camera including most of the pics from Vietnam stolen) and went to Siem Reap. From there we visited THE Cambodian must see spot: the temples of Angkor. Some of the temples are well preserved others have suffered under the aggressive attempts to wipe out religion of the Khmer rouge or you can simply see that they have been mostly untouched by humans and have been left to the forces of nature for some 600 years. The temples of Angkor cannot otherwise not be described in words, one has to see them to get a feeling of it. They are just impressive.

We could finally backup some pictures to picasa. So if anyone is interested in seeing them, please drop me an e-mail so that I can give you the link.