Since I reached Phnom Penh Cambodia on the 12th, I haven't been up to very much. I'm waiting on Erika and Rob to land here on the 17th and I've just been making preparations. The day to day life has been been extremely dull, so I'll just go over what I did rather than a day to day rendition. I do too many of those as it is.
I found a great hotel on the recommendation of Leeroy from the previous hostel in the Cameron Highlands. It's a place called the Happy Guesthouse and it's not really at it's happiest. You see, it's built along the shore of a largish lake that has seen a lot of nearby development
in recent years, and a while back the city decided to sell the lot of it to developers who will fill in the lake and destroy anything built over top of the water... like my guesthouse. They're being compensated $3800 but that's not nearly enough to build up something equally good as it's really one of the best places to stay in the city and now it's got 2 weeks of life remaining.
The guesthouse is made of up some cool cement rooms, located down an alleyway from the street, and from there is joined by a huge wooden structure overhanging the water. This houses the kitchen, bar, cheaper but less comfortable rooms, a huge hangout area with TV and a pool table, and a gardened patio to watch the sunsets from.
It's a great place to meet people and the cement rooms w/ private bath are very livable for $4 a night. The neighborhood isn't very nice though, but it's a 5 minute moto ride from town and that's fine with me.
Motor scooters are the most popular form of transportation, and hopping onto the back of one is the cheapest lift you can get. It costs about $1 to get across town, but if you have more people you can hire a tuktuk for double the price. I've also seen a few cyclos, where you sit in a large seat on the front of a rickety old bicycle. It's really easy to get around here, but the streets can be a little intimidating to cross with the nonstop flow of congested traffic and general lack of stoplights. I hear in Saigon (a week from now) I'll see what real traffic is all about. I can't wait.
I've visited the riverside several times with different people. It' a popular place to visit the bars, restaurants, and shops and is generally where the bulk of the tourists spend their days when they're not seeing the sights. The cheaper bars sell a half liter of beer for around $0.6 and cocktails for $2. There are also many happy pizza restaurants with crowds of younger foreigners haunting them. Here in Cambodia, weed is legal but unpopular with the youth. They see it as an old man's drug and prefer to go with anything in pill form. I think the beer is enough for me, and so much better than in Malaysia.
Because Erika and Rob are coming to visit, I've been avoiding doing the popular tours such as the Killing Fields and the Silver Pagoda. I'll save those and have instead done things like wandering the city and visiting the central market. The market sells pretty poor quality stuff and is loud a hell.
I was looking for headphones and after visiting the market's shops and may other electronic shops outside, I've come to the conclusion that you just can't get good headphones here. EVERYTHING is knockoff, and it all sounds just awful when tested. I saw knockoff iPods, everything Sony, and ended up buying a real but poor set of creative headphones just because they sounded best despite being ancient and dead ugly. Maybe I'll try to find something better in Saigon.
What else have I been up to? Oh, one night after many many rounds of beer with some dutch people that I met, we went to a dance bar called the Heart of Darkness. It's a fashionable dance bar that's crowded, even at 5 am when I left. Most of the Cambodian men that are there are well connected or gangsters, and the rest are drunk backpackers (men and women), and prostitutes. The Cambodian women are good looking but I'm not really in the market so I just danced, talked with friends, and went back to the hostel with the Dutchman I liked best, Leon. He keeps asking me to go back to the bar with him in subsequent nights but I can't be bothered to stay out that late too often.
Earlier that day, the 2 Dutchmen, a Dutch woman, a Polish girl, and I went to visit an orphanage near the garbage dump. We heard about it from a 3rd Dutch guy at the hotel. He worked there for 6 months doing something or other, and aid that the kids there rely on donations to survive. He also suggested that if we visited we should bring rice, cooking oil, and maybe Coke as a treat. On the way over we had our tuktuk driver stop in a rice market and we spent a good 30 minutes haggling over a 50kg sack of rice. We only bought the good stuff and it worked out to $26 between the 5 of us. We also bought 5 large bottles of Coke but didn't have time to get oil. The drive there was long and went though some really depressing neighborhoods.
Finally we pulled into the school/orphanage and saw only a few children. We neglected to remember it was a Saturday and most of the kids had the day off. You see, when the children aren't being taught in school, they work in the garbage dump next door separating out recyclable materials and burning electronics for their precious metals. It's a toxic and unpleasant job,
and I remember reading some National Geo article about some Africans that did it and have a life expectancy of 30 years. Terrible stuff. Anyways, we gave the rice to the school master who was there and opened a couple bottles of Coke for the kids. We played soccer, carried them around, and generally made fools of ourselves for an hour before we had to go. It was getting late and we had a dangerous neighborhood to cross.
Yes, I did all those few things in the last 4 days. Not too much. Still, I was reasonable entertained and had plenty of time to play pool. Too bad the lake is too dirty for swimming.
I'm currently waiting for Erika's plane to land so that I can pick them up from the airport. It's going to be a great 9 days with them and I've got our schedule all mapped out. I just hope there aren't any transport complication because it's a tight schedule to do 3 cities in so few days. We'll get it done though, I'm kind of an expert at this sort of thing now.
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