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We left Don Dhet and Laos on Friday October 9th with enough money to pay for our visas and the customary 'admin' charges (ie bribe) that we heard the officials asked for at the border ($2 each) and not a penny more between us. Actually that's not true, I had 5 Thai Baht.
We rushed our breakfast that morning to get down to the ticket office for 9am, then had to sit around and wait for someone to get off their arse and take us to the mainland for 45mins. They're not lying when they say Laos is laid back... We got a boat ferry to the main land, then a bus to the Laos/Cambodia border. The road was even worse this time because it had rained buckets the last 2 nights.
We got to the border very quickly - we were in for a long drive but it was only down the road! No wonder it only cost a few dollars. We got out of the bus in front of some barriers to get our passport and departure cards checked by the Laos officials ($1 'fee'), and when we turned around our bags were dumped on the road and the bus was gone! We didn't realise that bus couldn't cross the barrier, so we had to get our bags and walk in the heat through a no man's land between the Laos and Cambodia checkpoints to get our visas and the onward bus. We were charged another $1 to get our temperature checked in case we had swine flu, then the officials told us it would be $23 for our visas...which we didn't have. A German couple we were travelling with ended up giving us $5 so we could pay, the bus was waiting! The official gave us back a dollar each so we could pay the 'fee' when the police checked our passports, haha, they do have a heart!
Next on to the next bus to Kratie. Out of about 40 people on board we were the only ones not carrying on to Kompong Cham. Last time we were the only ones going somewhere was to Ayutthaya, so I panicked a bit, picturing horrible poo covered, smelly, rainy streets with nothing to do - but it was quite nice there actually! We went out for dinner the first night and tried what we've heard is the traditional Cambodian dish, amok. It's ace! It's a peanut curry type dish - basically the same as massaman if it was Thai, and quite like satay if it was Chinese. I love massaman and satay so I've been overdoing the amok. It wasn't long before we realised there wasn't really anything to do in Kratie, so we had a few Angkor beers and got an early night so we could explore on Saturday. The only thing Kratie is famous for are the endangered Irrawaddy dolphins you can view on the Mekong about 15km away, so we took a trip out to see them. We sat in a boat for an hour and they came quite close, but they were too fast for any pictures! Ryan spent the whole time trying to get a picture, but if he puts up anything other than a photo of ripples in the water and the top of a fin he's downloaded it off the internet - don't believe it! I gave up after a few minutes of ripple photos, less patience... There wasn't much else to do in Kratie so we decided we'd leave for Phnom Penh early the next day so we could get some sights in that afternoon.
By the time we got to Phnom Penh on Sunday we asked the tuk tuk driver to take us to Lakeside Guesthouse 2, but as usual he brought us to wherever he thought best... oh well. We checked into a guesthouse that smelled of wee because we were tired and it was cheap, but decided to look for another one that night and move out as soon as we could the next morning! The guesthouse ruined our moods and it started pouring rain, so we just bought some postcards and spent the afternoon in a nice little cafe with a cat and a pug and very good hotdogs. The main backpacker strip (Street 93) in Phnom Penh really doesn't look much, more like a back alley really, but once the sun's gone down it's really quite nice. The food, beer and cocktails are awesome and cheap, and one of the places had cheap Jameson and Wild Turkey so I was happy. I'm not used to drinking anything other than whiskey or wine, I miss it!
First thing we did on Monday was find another guesthouse with no shady characters in the lounge which cost us a whole $1 more between us per night. We'd decided to have the day at Tuol Sleng and Cheoung Ek Museums - not a recipe for a very cheerful day. Tuol Sleng Museum is on the site of the former Tuol Svey High School, which was then used as prison S-21 by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had abandoned it in 1979, after killing the remaining 14 prisoners, and it was then discovered by two Vietnamese reporters. The books say the blood was still warm on the ground when they found it. The prison was open for 4 years and approximately 20,000 people passed through there. 7 survived, the rest were brought to Cheoung Ek (The Killing Fields) and left in mass graves. The first building has a cell in each room, with a bed a shackle and a bucket. On the wall in a few of these are the pictures taken by the Vietnamese reporters of the last 14 victims, as they were found in the room. Another building has rooms which are crudely divided into smaller cells for the less important prisoners, you can still see blood stains on the ground in some of these. Throughout the four buildings at the site there are different exhibits. When they found the prison, they also found the archives which contained a biography of every prisoner and attached photographs, and all of these are on display. There's a shocking number of kids on these photo walls, some of them still toddlers. They also have paintings by a former inmate which show the torture they went through, and have the tools used to torture the victims, big glass cabinets of bones and a forensic exhibition of 10 skulls with various injuries. Going through the museum is one of the most upsetting things anyone could ever do, but it really drives home what Cambodian people went through under Pol Pot's regime. The whole place is a pretty accurate description of hell.
We took a tuk tuk out to the Killing Fields at Cheoung Ek, where the inmates of S-21 would have been dumped. The huge stupa filled with 8,000 skulls is the first thing you see when you enter the site. The bottom level is filled with clothes recovered from the graves, the next 9 levels are filled with skulls, and the top few levels contain different bones. During excavations they found almost 9,000 people at Cheoung Ek, but there's a huge area of the site which is wetland and hasn't yet been excavated. Around the site are signs stating what each area was used for, how many people were found in a particular grave etc. When you walk along the pathways between the pits in the ground you can still see clothing, bones and teeth jutting out of the dirt. There were some bones (found after the excavations I suppose) propped up against a tree towards the middle of the sight, and I could tell that some of them didn't belong to adults. That's the worst part of it - seeing the photographs of little kids in S-21, and seeing kids bones laying around in the dirt.
If anyone's ever going to Cambodia I'd hugely recommend going to these two sites, as long as their prepared for a very bad day.
Obviously not in much of a party mood that night, we hung around a few restaurants and bars on Street 93, had dinner and a few drinks, and got some sleep in our nice new guesthouse. I slept much better that night - in the other hostel the night before I could hear something scurrying about inside the walls, it worried me awake at various times through the night.
On Tuesday we decided to check out the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda (Temple of the Emerald Buddha). We stopped off at the post office on the way and by the time we were finished it was raining harder than I've ever seen! We legged it to the tuk tuk and got fairly soaked, but the whole drive to the Palace the rain was coming in the gap in the waterproof sheet. I had to hitch my skirt right up my legs so only skin would get wet - that dries faster! Ryan got it worse though - a van drove past on his side and sent most of the contents of a huge puddle up his side haha! When we got to the palace I realised I'd forgotten to cover my shoulders (knees and shoulders on show aren't allowed) and it would cost me $9 for a tshirt and entrance fees... we gave the palace and the pagoda a miss. We figured we'll be at Angkor Wat soon anyway, who needs any other temples when you get to see that! We got a drink to shelter from the rain, took a walk, and met our tuk tuk driver. That whole day in Phnom Penh all we saw was the post office! What a waste.
We decided to get out of the city and to the beach for a few days. We'll be seeing loads of beach soon in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but a few more days wouldn't hurt! We booked a bus to Sihanoukville on the south coast for $4 each for Wednesday morning at some stupidly early hour. We figured we could get to the beach before sunset if we got there early enough! So one last night on Street 93 at BKM Restaurant for dinner (that place is amazing) and we leave Phnom Penh!
I'll have to save Sihanoukville for an entry with Siem Reap because there's no toilet in this internet cafe and I might explode. I don't need to explain more...
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