2013 World Trip Part 3

The photos now complete, the people that ran the joint now expected payment. Baffling, I know. I’m sure they were quite devastated when their stunning sales pitch of:

                ‘Come onnnnnnn... COME ONNNNNNNN!!!!’

Failed to get me to buy another mag of rounds for the M4. I was quite mindful that the three weapons I’d already played with cost $230 USD (the M60 alone cost $150!!). Ian and I were both well shy of the cash needed to pay the men so we decided to visit a bank with one of the men from the shooting range accompanying. We drove back into Phnom Penh being followed by a smiling Cambodian gun-owner and after a prolonged wait at an ANZ bank (they are EVERYWHERE!), we made sure the right funds got to the right people. After being told that we weren’t able to visit the Royal Palace (it was 2.30pm by this point…) we decided to avoid our drivers’ next suggestion (ANOTHER gun range) and just head home.

Ian and I collapsed on our beds, unsure what to make of the day. Ian however had the perfect idea. He’d been in contact with some friends who’d been in contact with some friends who owned a great little pub in Phnom Penh. It was an ‘Irish themed bar’ called Alice’s Bar so Ian suggested we make the trek and see what it was like. I agreed. We made our way to reception prior to leaving and booked a bus to Siem Reap the following day. Then, with as much confidence as we could muster, we made our way back out onto the streets of Phnom Penh and the homicidal drivers.

We’d purchased a map of Phnom Penh prior to leaving the hotel, so we knew where we were headed. In the end, it really all boiled down to:

                ‘Straight here. Left at the big pointy thing. Straight for a bit more then hook a right.’

The big pointy thing was actually the ‘Independence Monument’ but really, I don’t think you care all that much.

On the way to the pub, we stopped because I wanted to buy a book and some pens to write this very journal. We found a cool little store that sold nick-knacks and we got chatting with the owner. He was originally from the US he told us – though he had literally no US accent and looked as Cambodian as any other Cambodian from Cambodia. We chatted in broken English (for a former US Citizen, he certainly avoided speaking to any of them for a good portion of his life. Thinking back, I am almost led to believe his telling us he was from the US might have been a cheeky fib!) until I received my nice leather-bound book and pens. Then it was au revoir to that dude and bonjour to the pub.

We actually walked past it initially after first scoping it out, deciding it definitely couldn’t be it and getting redirected by one of the patrons of the bar who chased us down the road. We took our places at the bar where we would stay for the next 8 hours. We made many new friends that night including Nathan – an Australian guy who’s been travelling for blah blah many years doing finance blah blah. He was very, very awesome, let him tell you. We also made friends with two Swedish guys when we commandeered the laptop and thus the music. We chose some ‘Flogging Mollys’ and were firm friends from that point on. At some stage we became strangely close with a bunch of Cambodian… businessmen? I don’t really remember much after the Jaeger shots. I barely even remember the Cambodian body builder strip at the bar. Oh yeah, that happened. It’s on film.

It was on the tuk-tuk ride home that I realized I’d left my newly procured journal at the bar. The fact that I was mind-numbingly drunk seemed to ease that severance pain a little. Please keep in mind that I don’t even remember the ride home or even getting home for that matter, it was only when I reviewed the footage that I was enlightened. We somehow found our way to our room and sometime later, Ian’s stomach decided it didn’t like what Ian had been drinking for the past 8 hours. It decided instead to have a wonderful sale – the kind where everything must go. And go it did. Violently. With me taping the whole thing much to Ian’s intense pleasure, I’m sure. Bed time followed soon after, the next day was going to be a big day of travel.

We awoke very slowly and incredibly seedy. Ian’s stomach remembered what it had been doing the night before and it wasn’t long until that resumed. It was at that point that I remembered that my hangover cures – anti-emetic medication and aspirin – were safe and sound at home in Australia. We would have to face this self-inflicted hell on our own.

We packed our things as best we could and found our way to reception to check out. We found that not only were we late for the bus that we thought had been booked for us the night before, but the booking had never actually been made in the first place. Luckily, another bus trip was available at 2pm (it being 1pm already) so all we’d have to do was sit in the foyer until it arrived. You see, normally this would be an easy thing to do. However, I was fighting back waves of nausea whilst Ian was ducking in and out of the toilet every fifteen minutes to see what his bile looked like. We had almost convinced ourselves to stay in Phnom Penh for one more night to write off the rest of the day in self-pity when the bus arrived. We were out of options; we’d just have to tough it out.

We entered the ‘bus’ (a large mini-van) and sighed with relief – it was air-conditioned. Cramped, sure. But air-conditioning is a godsend sometimes. The van started and so did Ian, showing me some bile in his newly procured plastic bag – it would be his friend for the trip. We stopped once before leaving Phnom Penh to pick up more passengers – much to our disgust. We were quite happy being the only passengers on the trip. We took off and drove for HOURS. Literally, it felt like a life time. I cannot stress to you just how long that trip felt. I WOULD go on about this but I don’t want you to feel what we went through – especially what IAN went through – but ERMAHGERD that trip was so damn long.

Driving was suicidal – we’d go headfirst into oncoming traffic then weaving back onto the right side of the road juuuuuuuust in time for us to retain our lives, but not my urine which painted my pants frequently. On another morbid note, we actually drove past a very, very recent accident – 4x4 vs. bus. Neither one had come off the victor. Ian later told me that one of the deceased occupants lay in clear sight of the gathered crowd, with no-one trying to preserve dignity by covering them.

After three hours of this erratic driving, we pulled into… some… town. I wish I knew what it was but I was too tired and there were no signs screaming its name so I’m sure I just hallucinated it anyway. During my hallucination, I made friends with an American girl who’d been travelling around South-East Asia for the last five weeks on her own after quitting her job working as a doctor’s assistant in Arizona. I can remember all of those details about her, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name. I'm sure it started with an ‘L’ so for the sake of this tale, let’s dub her ‘Louise’.

Louise and I piled back onto the bus with the other 6 Cambodians, rejoining Ian who’d never left the bus’s dark confines for fear of inciting a new stomach explosion. By now we’d nutted down the main cause for Ian vomiting – he was conscious. So with a little help from exhaustion and a lot of help from the 25mg of Promethazine Louise gave him, Ian slept for the rest of the trip and didn’t puke once.

It was around 8pm by the time we reached Siem Reap. Ian regained consciousness and donated his little bag of bile to a trash pile nearby. We made firm friends with a man whose name we forgot instantly, but who seemed friendly enough. He spoke fairly good English (the racist in me wants to write ‘Engrish’ every time I refer to an Asian speaking English). In fact it was far better than any other person we’d met in Cambodia so that was rather pleasant. Exhausted and needing to lick our self-inflicted wounds, bid farewell to Louise, curled up in the back of his tuk-tuk after showing him the business card of our hotel – the ‘Tanei Guest House’ – and he drove us there slowly and carefully. Along the way he tried to get us to change our minds about staying at the Tanei Guest House, but we stuck to our guns despite him clearly saying that he knew better places. Looking back, it may have actually been worth it.

We arrived at the hotel and made the decision to keep the guy’s services the next day to take us to the ‘crazy jungle temples’ we’d read so much about. The main reason I wanted to be in Siem Reap was these temples – they’d been used in the 2001 Academy-Award winning movie ‘Tomb Raider’ and after I’d found this out, I had been desperate to see them. Until I knew they were real I honestly thought they simply existed as a set piece. We bid farewell to our new Cambodian tour guide and friend and checked into the hotel. The staff hit us with the bad news first – there had been a mix up with our booking and our room wasn’t available. The good news came quickly after that – they were going to upgrade us to the VIP room for the night FOR FREE! After this emotional rollercoaster, we lugged our bags up the three flights of stairs to our room which was gorgeous. It towered over the area, giving great views of the pool area and the murky beyond.

While Ian fought the urge to die on the bed, I took to the bathroom to attempt to remove the 6 or so hours of travel grit my skin had accumulated. My first thought was to soak in the bathtub, but after finding the water was the same colour of my skin, I gave that a miss. My second thought of showering looked to be the better option of the two, but a minute after standing under the welcome waves of scalding hot streams of water – it became apparent that the drain was clogged and I was basically flooding the room. By this time I hadn’t even worked myself up to soap, so naked and cold, I lathered up and then doused myself in another quick jet of water. Least satisfying shower EVER, however I was clean and could drift off to sleepybyeland. 

The next day we discovered that though still slightly nauseous, the worst was over for Ian and he could indeed continue living. We made our way to the dining area for our complimentary breakfast – we both chose ‘Breakfast 4’ out of 5 choices. Sustenance ingested, we went to meet our travel advisor for a fun filled day at the temples – or so we thought. Before we’d even left, the guy quizzed us on how long we’d be staying in Siem Reap and after telling him, he decided that we wouldn’t be going to the temples that day. We’d be going to the floating villages and the crocodile farm instead. Feeling as though we had no choice but to agree, we did so and away we went in his glorious little tuk-tuk.

We chatted to the man in brief periods all the while waving our wonderful little cameras around, recording everything. I loved those things. After all is said and done, I will edit that footage into one great behemoth of a film (or a few episodes). It wasn’t long before the man said that if we were to continue to the floating villages, we would be better off in a car. We agreed once more (why bother arguing?) and within minutes, we were at the guy’s house picking up his 1980’s-esque Toyota Camry. It came equipped with air-conditioning, electric seat belts for the driver and passenger side seats and bright blue LEDs installed in the vents on the side of the car for some reason. As we were being whisked away from the house and towards the floating villages, we saw a young girl playing with a trio of puppies the way any other toddler would – by throwing it over a waist-high wall to see if it would fly. We left her, knowing that she was satisfied with the results of her experiment and that the puppy would probably have lasting brain damage.

The Camry pushed its way past throngs of Cambodian traffic – tuk-tuks, people on bicycles and other cars – before we arrived at the side of a very shallow river in the middle of nowhere. A giant smile plastered to his lips, the man began:

                ‘My friend, my friend! You now pay for ticket for boat ride! $30 US! 

You give money to me and I give to them for you ticket, no?’ 

So we did. Like we were going to come this far and NOT do what the man said. So he took our money and disappeared, leaving Ian and I in the car while our anxieties began to grow that the man was potentially ripping us off somehow. We needn’t have worried however as the man soon reappeared, tapping on the window and gesturing like a madman to exit the car. Upon doing so, he ushered us towards some random Cambodian – again, he assured us he was 23 but I think that was a bit of a cheeky fib – who then took us to his very own boat. He handled the thing like a pro, sending us first into the stern of another boat anchored nearby and then into the bank on the opposite side of the river. Soon though, he found his flow and we were away downstream.

AND THAT'S ALL THE BLOGGING YOU'RE GETTING OUT OF ME FOR NOW MY LITTLE PRINCESSES!

It's 2am here and I've been writing this solidly for far too long. Goodnight cherubs, until next time. 


Follow the link to part 4:
http://ponderingoblong.blogspot.com/2013/06/2013-world-trip-part-4.html