T on Holiday in Cambodia :-)

Sunday the 10th
Teresa arrives for a holiday
09:00 out at PP International Airport (again) waiting for Thai Airways to land and deposit the first of my visitors this month…
having half an hour to kill I treat myself to a café latte and a chocolate croissant at the airport café. The coffee is virtually undrinkable and cost roughly EIGHT times the price one would normally pay in a Khmer restaurant – only double what one would pay in a western restaurant bar… the choc croissant though is fabulous, although that may only have been because I have not had one in a couple of years !?!?

T arrives and we head home so that she can unpack and catch her breath after the long journey out.

Not wishing to risk going native completely on the first night, T opts for an opening night meal of good old Indian Curry :-)
So it is off to Shiva Shakti – On Sihanouk Boulevard. The finest Indian curry house in Southeast Asia! With dishes ranging from classic Indian to Moghul specialities. Slightly boring I know, but the best Tandoori dishes I have had in a very long time.

Having dined, we decide to call in at the Peace Café for a nightcap, only to find that Dave has closed the bar a couple of days early, citing to much work to do one the new premises and their big re launch party on Saturday in the new space. So , down this end of town our only options are now; a Khmer beer garden, or Martini’s.

Heading over to Martini’s we find it almost empty, well it was early and the place rarely gets going before 10 o’clock at the earliest.


Monday the 11th
Day one of my short holiday
I am in work 07:00 to 09:30 for a meeting that I could not get out of, back home at 10:00, wake T up and start to give her the tour of the city.

Stroll along the riverbanks – Tonle Sap – stop off for an ice cold drink or two.

Lunch at the ‘Mary Bubble Tea Euro Gratin Restaurant’ on Monivong Boulevard: Spaghetti in a cream mushroom sauce au gratin.

After which I get Thou to pick us up in his tuk-tuk and it is off to P’sar toul tom poung - The Russian Market
Although Toul Tom Poung is primarily a residential area at the southern edge of Phnom Penh, P’sar (Market) Toul Tom Poung (i.e. Russian Market) at streets 155 and 50 is perhaps the most important market for expatriates and many would claim, myself included, a must see on any good tourist itinerary. This is where we buy our US$2 DVD’s and Gap T-shirts, our Ralph Lauren workshops and Birkenstock shoes.
For the visitor to Cambodia this is possibly the best market in Phnom Penh to buy souvenirs; with a large range of antiques both real and fake. Carvings, statues and Buddha’s are but a few of the items you will find here, along with a large variety of beautiful silks and other fabrics.

T buys assorted ‘Cambodia: Danger Landmines’ T-shirts for Dick – classic traveller purchase for Cambodia :-) I particularly like the one with diagrams of various pieces of ordinance on the back !?!


Then it is time for us to visit Wat Phnom
Set on top of a tree-covered knoll 27m high, Wat Phnom is the only hill in town. According to legend, the first pagoda on this site was erected in 1373 to house four statues of Buddha deposited here by the waters of the Mekong and discovered by a woman name Penh. The main entrance to Wat Phnom is via the grand eastern staircase, which is guarded by lions and naga (snake) balustrades.

Nowadays people come here to pray for good luck and success in school exams or business affairs. When a petitioner's wish is granted, he or she returns to make the offering (such as a garland of jasmine flowers or bananas, of which the spirits are said to be especially fond) that they promised when the request was made.

The vihara (temple sanctuary) was rebuilt in 1434, 1806 , 1894, and, most recently, in 1926.

West of the vihara is an enormous stupa containing the ashes of King Ponhea Yat (reigned 1405 to 1467) . In a small pavilion on the south side of the passage between the vihara and the stupa is a statue of the smiling and rather plump Madame Penh.

A bit to the north of the vihara and below it is an eclectic shrine dedicated to the genie Preah Chau, who is especially revered by the Vietnamese. On either side of the entrance to the chamber in which a statue of Preah Chau sits are guardian spirits bearing iron bats. On the tile table in front of the two guardian spirits are drawings of Confucius, and two Chinese-style figures of the sages Thang Cheng (on the right ) and Thang Thay (on the left). To the left of the central altar is an eight-armed statue of Vishnu.

Down the hill from the shrine is a royal stupa sprouting full-size trees from its roof. For now, the roots are holding the bricks together, but when the trees die the tower will slowly crumble. If you can not make it out to Angkor, this stupa gives a pretty good idea of what the jungle can do (and is doing) to some of Cambodia's monuments.

Curiously, Wat Phnom is the only attraction in Phnom Penh that is in danger of turning into a circus. Beggars, street urchins, women selling drinks and children selling birds in cages (you pay to set the bird free locals claim the birds are trained to return to their cage afterwards) pester everyone who turns up to slog the 27m to the summit. Fortunately it is all high-spirited stuff, and it is difficult to be annoyed by the vendors, who after all, are only trying to eke out a living.

After boiling in the midday sun on top of the hill, we wander down to the Coyote Ugly Bar just off from the hill. As the only customers in there we are subjected to a huge amount of attention from the 10 barmaids, they turn the air-conditioning on, redirect fans towards us, top up our complementary bowl of popcorn every few minutes and giggle frantically when I am able to chat to them in Khmer - although they may just have been laughing at my bad pronunciation…

Thou and his tuk-tuk turn up after an hour there to take us over to Café Freedom on the lake, where we relax and watch the skies darken – we are hoping for rain, but it does not seem to come. After a while we stroll down the lane and call into a few more places, until we stop off in the imaginatively named ‘The Pub Crawl Bar’ where we have an ice cold glass of beer, or two. The promised rain finally comes and you can feel the temperature dropping as it falls.

Home to shower and change then

18:00 out to the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) for dinner. Love it, or loathe it, the FCC is a place you have to drop into at least once if you are visiting Cambodia, while these days you do not have to be an intrepid reporter to enjoy the French colonial ambiance of this beautiful restaurant and bar. Tourists, business travellers, expatriates and even a few locals enjoy drinks on the first floor or rooftop bars overlooking the Tonle Sap River. The menu is a mixture of Western and Asian, with Khmer curry sitting on the menu next to pasta dishes, pizza, Caesar salad and desserts. Beer is a little more expensive than in other bars at USD1.50 and upwards, but for a piece of classic Phnom Penh charm, it is worth it; well, once in a while.


Tuesday the 12th
Day two; the depressing stuff you have to do with visitors
Khmer breakfast – rice~pork, fish and beef broth, pickled vegetables and chilli dipping sauce; standard stuff for us ex-pats but Teresa was not impressed!

10:00 Thou picks us up in his tuk-tuk and takes us out to The Killing Fields Memorial – Choeng Ek
This memorial is on the site of a Khmer Rouge extermination camp where almost 9,000 bodies were exhumed from mass graves after the fall of the regime. The real number of victims is estimated to be twice as many, as the dead were not exhumed from all the graves discovered. The centre piece of the memorial is a solitary stupa in which the bones of the dead are displayed along with many personal possessions buried with them.


Lunch at the Bodhi Tree restaurant with its lush garden setting being bombarded by torrential rain. A virtual oasis in the otherwise barren suburban neighbourhood near the genocide museum.
Among the highlights on the menu are mixed tapas in authentic Spanish style and a spicy vegetable curry served with coconut and long rice noodles.

Once the rains stopped we were at last able to visit the former S21 concentration camp –the Toul Sleng genocide museum. Now to be honest, I have already been there a couple of times with various visitors and I was not looking forward to going again.
When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, this former high school was converted into the detention and interrogation centre known as Security camp 21 (S-21). Political enemies suspected of treason were brought here and tortured for confessions. Very few detainees survived S-21, but the brutal history of Toul Sleng was documented by the Khmer Rouge themselves in the post-mortem photos of many of the victims. The tragedy of S-21 is almost too much to bear


A couple of beers at the Gecko Bar while waiting for Thou to return from his afternoon airport run.

Back home for shower and change before…

18:00 off to Raffles Hotel for cocktails in The Elephant Bar – well, it is nice to do this sort of thing once in a while :-)
The thing about the Elephant Bar in Raffles is that you are unlikely to forget it. The paintings on the ceiling of this famous watering hole lend it its name. Colourful elephant motifs catch the eye as the legendary signature cocktails capture the taste buds.Here you can enjoy a Femme Fatale, a cocktail named in honour of Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit here; an Airavata, a cocktail of secret ingredients; or the Million Dollar Cocktail which gained notoriety in Sommerset Maugham's bedsite tale, The Letter. The hotel itself originally opened in 1929. It was completely refurbished in 1997 and is now both a modern hotel and a historical landmark. Architecturally stunning, the hotel is spread out in a series of low-rise wings interconnected by courtyards and gardens, which surround a pair of swimming pools. There are a variety of rooms and suites, all luxurious, ah to be rich !


Wednesday the 12th
Parting of the ways
07:00 - I am back in the office, breakfast with the usual crowd and a meeting ?!
09:15 – I nip back home so that I can lock up after T leaves
09:30 - a car picks T up to drive her up to Siam Reap for 3 days. I have booked her a trip up there with the Speed~King to Siam Reap taxi driver, a friend of Thou’s (only Glen and Paul will know, which taxi driver I am talking about here…) have also booked her into a hotel that is owned by a Heng’s family up there, knowing that her and her husband will look after her, sort out temple tour guides, taxis, boat tickets back to Phnom Penh, et cetera.

Back to work for me for a few days, boo hoo.


Friday the 14th
The return of T
Not being too sure of T’s itinerary, I arrange to be ‘working at home’ on the Friday afternoon…
As it turns out, she gets the bus back from Siam Reap with one of Heng’s cousins, Nong, who helps her deal with it all :-)
I then get a phone call from Nong saying that T is at her house, so I head up there on the bike to pick her up.


Saturday the 15th
Off we go to Kampot town, Kampot province
08:00 the taxi is here to drive us down to Kampot town

The Boroy Bokor Hotel: US$15 for a twin room with air-con and cable TV, not the cheapest, but far from the most expensive, and a nice hotel to boot.

11:00 an early lunch / late breakfast in a Khmer restaurant which extends out into the Mekong River, the view opposite is back dropped by the Bokor Mountain range

12:00 our car turns up for the arduous journey up the mountains to the top.
Now the Bokor mountain resort was the site of protracted fighting during the Khmer Rouge which destroyed the French built hotel~casino on the top, as well as the other outlying buildings up there

The road up there is bad, in fact using the word ‘road’ in any connection to it is misleading, potholes, craters, gravel sand, sheer drops, eroded cliffs and the odd bit of tarmac protruding up like black icebergs ready to take out an axle from an unwary driver. Built in 1917 by the French colonists using conscripted labour it took many years to finish and cost the lives of many Cambodians.


After two arduous, jarring and spine fusing hours up this mountain ‘road’ we reach our first stop, the Black Panther Palace, built by former Khmer King Monivong in 1912. Now it is little more than a concrete shell, riddle with bullet holes and bad graffiti – in Khmer and English – the view from the balcony does however give an indication of why it was built; sweeping down the hill bellow are acres and acres of forest / jungle, which joins into the flat land below, further out still are the fields and rice paddies of Kampot province, past them you can see the coast and the Gulf of Thailand, in which several large islands sit like emeralds. The islands in question no longer belong to Cambodia, they are currently owned by Viet Nam as part of some border deal that the French cut. One of the many boundary disputes that are currently being argued over here in Cambodia.

After our break here, it is back in the car for the slightly better road across the flat(ish) top of the mountain (and I do mean only slightly better)

Twenty minutes later we are driving past the burnt out (bombed out?) shell of the French post-office that was built up here to service the hotel and casino guests, we do not stop, all that is left to be seen, can be seen from the 5 minute drive by.

Reaching a fork in the road we have a choice to decide what to see next, we decided on a visit to The Waterfalls, more properly known as Popokvil Teuk Cheu which translates as Swirling Clouds Waterfall. Half an hour, jostled again along a very rough road, we reached them. Or rather we reached to point where we parked the car and walked through the thicket to the top of a double waterfall. In a country as flat as Cambodia mountains are few and far between, waterfalls like wise. So this double fall was quite impressive after a year and a half of flat plains, flat rice paddies and rivers.

At last we reach the ‘highlight’ of this little tour, the former Bokor Palace Casino Hotel. This French folly opened in 1925, when it must have been truly spectacular. Unfortunately the strategic location of the building and the hill made its capture critical during may periods of fighting – independence from the French, the Lon Nol coup, the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese invasion/liberation. In fact, at one point the Khmer Rouge were barricaded in the Church, while the Vietnamese were barricaded in the Hotel (500 metres away) and they spent months hurling bombs and bullets at each other!

The hotel has been pretty much stripped of everything walls, ceiling and oddly enough some rather nice ceramic floor tiles? Graffiti adorns every wall in the place, in both English and Khmer, with random bullet holes punctuating it.
One of the ‘better known’ guide books for Cambodia draws allusions to the hotel in ‘The Shining’ and the former Bokor Palace is just about as creepy as any building I have been in.
As we reached the Hotel a thunderstorm was just starting, within 10 minutes of us being there it had become a full blown storm, with booming claps of thunder and lightning striking the grounds around the hotel, holed up in the grand ballroom, along a few other visitors, we watched the rain being driven through the open window spaces, jumped as the thunder echoed around this ghost hotel and jumped as one when lightning exploded only metres away from us. Dark and primal; as elemental an experience as much as a historic journey into Cambodia’s past.

Then it was time to start the equally hairy decent back down the road from hell – only this time in the rain…

Somehow we made it back to Kampot town in one piece, although I did feel like my internal organs had been rearranged, but that is not an uncommon feeling after travelling any distance on a provincial Cambodian road.

Back just in time for Dinner at the Little Garden Bar, one of Kampot’s few foreign bar / restaurants ran by an Englishman called Norm
Roast Pork coated with rosemary, roast potatoes, carrots turnip and red wine/onion gravy!
Surprisingly enough T opts for an Asian dish – sweat and sour pork with rice.


Sunday the 16th
Off to the beach
I am awake and up at 06:00. T is still feeling ill, so I head off for a stroll on my own and to see if I can find a Pharmacy that stocks anything useful for her.
Breakfast in the Khmer pavement café opposite – Rice and Bacon with the usual trimmings, scrummy ! after which I call into the Little Garden Bar for a coffee with Norm and to ask him [his Khmer staff] where to find a Chemists

10:00 car and driver turns up for the trip to Kompong Som – Sihanoukville

12:00 and we are checking into the Sokha Beach Resort – the only 5 star hotel at this beach town, once we cleared the roadworks on the edge of Kampot town, the road was only a few months old, easy, smooth and comfortable, a nice change from yesterday!

www.sokhahotels.com

Having done so much travelling over the last few days we just had a lazy afternoon; the pool, the beach, the sea – damn that sun is hot, thankfully plenty of trees, sun loungers and bamboo beach umbrellas are provided :-)
Only leaving the resort for half an hour to visit the local ‘western-style, luxury supermarket’ after which it was back to the hotel, all the while our drivers were trying to find out when we were going back to Phnom Penh and could their ‘friend’ drive us there in his car – cheap, cheap!

After this very restful afternoon, we decided to head into town for dinner, leaving the hotel by chance we ended up with the same motodops to town, which involved more taxi haggling for the following day. The earlier attempt by them having been thwarted by the hotel concierge who also had a ‘friend’ who could take us to Phnom Penh - basically they were fighting over who would get the commission on trip!

Dinner at the Sri Lankan restaurant ‘Bamboo Lights’. Having eaten here a couple of times before I was looking forward to it. The Lamb Rosti with spicy vegetable curry was excellent, after which a few drinks at the ‘British Pub’ – The Angkor Arms, ran by a slightly strange Swedish guy who spent half his life in Australia and for the last 10 years has been running this British pub in Cambodia?!?


Monday the 17th
Ho hum, back to Phnom Penh
The taxi driver managed to set a new world record for driving from the beach to Phnom Penh, this journey takes the bus over four hours, we did it in two and a half – although the speed run did cost the life of one puppy who was foolishly trying to cross the main road, as well as us having a couple of near misses with various herds of cows and water buffalos…

After which, purely to recuperate and for medical reasons, it was time for Gins and Tonic at DV8, then over to the new Peace Café to see Dave and his new bar. I missed the opening night party on Saturday because we were in Kampot, so I really wanted to see how it had turned out, the last time I had seen it was a couple of weeks ago and it was still a building site.

Have to say, it is looking good.


Tuesday the 18th
Ow, last day of holiday

A late breakfast at the Rising Sun – sausage, bacon, eggs, chips and beans, wonderful, I am starting to forget what rice for breakfast tastes like (although not for long I suppose!)

The afternoon at the Royal Palace and then onwards to the FCC for Happy Hour cocktails.
Followed by dinner at the Pon Lok Restaurant, which offers some of the best Khmer/Thai/Chinese food in town – although not at the best prices :-)
Rounding it all of with a nightcap – or three – at the recently relocated Peace Café.


Wednesday the 19th
Ho Hum, back to work
At 08:00 Thou the tuk-tuk driver turns up at my house to take T to the airport, we say goodbye and I head off to the office. In my absence not much had changed, some new reports needed my attention, some meetings had been planned that I needed to attend and some more reports from VSO needed to be filled in by me.

Back to the grind for a bit I guess.