Celebrating Australia Day Laos style

The journey from Kratie to the 400 islands was well co-ordinated despite my fears (mini bus - big bus - cross the border - big bus - boat - island) and immigration was a breeze. Ban Nakasang, the jumping off point for Don Det and Don Kohne is not very prepossessing but once you're on the water the first sight of the islands takes your breath away. To think I'd be calling this home for a few days! And apart from a bike ride or a boat tour there is not much to do here but reacquaint oneself with the hammock. I started my stay on Don Kohne where I was told the older crowd stay (damn those pesky kids!). I found a lovely room at Pan's Guesthouse - it was $12 a night but it had its own bathroom with hot water. I would later see the original type of accommodation on the island - flimsy bungalows with dodgy shared bathrooms - which is fine if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately I could only stay one night on Don Kohne as most of the accommodation had been booked out by a large tour group. So I spent the morning finding and moving to new digs on Don Det. I ended up at the most expensive bungalows on the island but they were the nicest with a comfortable hammock and breakfast included. So now I could relax and enjoy the serenity.

The following morning I got up early and hired a bike to explore the islands. I headed around the sunset side of Don Det which I had not yet seen. This path linked up with with the bridge to Don Kohne. After paying the toll of 20,000 kip I headed down the old rail line to what I'd hoped would be some waterfalls. Not having consulted a map I ended up on the rockiest, bumpiest path with seemed to go on forever. It was quite picturesque but I had to keep a careful eye on the road. I amazed (and very lucky) that I didn't get a flat! I did end up at some waterfalls thanks to some helpful people I met along the way - nothing was signposted. The falls were rather nice even though its dry season. All up I spent 2 hours exploring on a badly adjusted, bone rattling, single speed bike. But I loved it! On the way back I saw a sign outside the bakery advertising an Australia Day BBQ. I'd completely forgotten it was Australia Day! I ended up spending it next to the Mekong, drinking Beer Lao and eating duck cooked on the BBQ followed by a beautiful sunset (images right). Its a tough life!

Waiting for godot - I mean dolphins

After a delicous time cooking in Phnom Penh I moved on to Kratie, my last stop in Cambodia. My bus being at 6.45am I caught some breakfast at the now familiar bus station near the central market. 2 baguettes - one with Laughing Cow spreadable cheese and the other stuffed with pork floss - perfect travelling food. This particular bus was going all the way to Pakse in Laos so I met many people stopping at various points along the way. I'd prebooked my accomodation as I do on travel days to make life as stress free as possible at the other end, trudging around a new place with a heavy pack in the afternoon sun is not much fun. Anyhoo - we arrived in Kratie and I got my first glimpse of the mighty Mekong. I was met at the bus stop (a new experience for me!) and tuk tuk'ed to The Balcony Guesthouse. I met many interesting people on Balcony's balcony. A few of us banded together to go and see Kratie's famously rare Irrawaddy dolphins. After a half hour tuk tuk ride through villages along the riverside we arrived at the boat launch. $7 got us a 90 minute ride during which we saw plenty of dolphins though you have to be pretty quick to spot them. As for taking photos I had no hope with my old camera so you will have to take my word for it that I saw them! It was lovely being out on the water listening for the sound of dolphins surfacing.

The next day i headed over to Koh Treung an island in the middle of the river. Its has no tourist infrastructure and the thing to do is hire a bike and do the 9km circut around the island. The path is mostly shaded and relatively smooth. It was the perfect end to my time in Cambodia. Next stop Laos and the 4000 islands.

Making an amok(ery) of the local cusine

Back to Phnom Penh for the third and final time and I had enough energy to get to the National Museum. Its rather lovely and contains statues from the Angkor temples putting them further into context. There was an animation made by Monash Uni visualising Angkor in 1200 which was really interesting. Equally interesting was a display of an archaelogical dig undertaken on a mound in the middle of the West Baray that is only uncovered in times of severe drought. It revealed a pre-Angkorian necropolis adding more data to the prehistory of the area. I was most taken by a statue that had been situated at "The Gate of the Dead"at Angkor Thom. Must find out more.

The next day was cooking class day and as far as I'm concerned a must do. Called imaginatively enough The Cambodian Cooking School, it was a full day of cooking Khmer classics and included a guided tour of a local market. The market was amazing - watching a live fish get thumped on the head then cleaned and scaled was certainly an eye opener! Learning about the variety of eggs was fascinating too - for the record duck eggs are very popular here and come in fresh, embryo and preserved states. (Image right: dried fish) Then it was off to the kitchen to get our hands dirty (word to the wise - fresh tumeric stains!). The first dish was fried spring rolls with a taro and carrot filling. I wrecked my first one but the rest turned out fine. This was followed by banana flower salad with chicken which is a bit like Vietnamese coleslaw. And then the main event - fish amok. Amok is a classic Khmer dish of fish in a yellow curry sauce steamed in a banana leaf (below right). We bashed our own curry paste in a mortar and pestle (a good upper arm workout!). We shredded, sliced, stirred and steamed until it was ready. Words cannot describe how good amok is - well, there are two, deliciously rich. Then, just when we thought we couldn't eat any more it was time for dessert - fresh mango with sticky rice, coconut and a caramel sauce made from palm sugar and coconut cream. All in all a gut bustingly good day. And as it was pelting with rain probably the best place to be. I slept well that night which was just as well as I had a 6.45am bus the next day to Kratie - my last stop in Cambodia before crossing into Laos.

Kampot - part the second

The great visa hunt concluded it was back to hang with some friends I'd made in Kep andKampot. Its been a bit of to-ing and fro-ing from Phnom Penh but who am I to pass up great company? There was much Beer Lao drunk (I prefer it over the local stuff Ankor and Anchor - and as for the stout they call Black Panther, well lets just say the people at Guiness have nothing to worry about!). More lazy times with BLTs to sustain me. I did manage to get on a bicycle for the first time on this trip. I circumnavigated Kampot from the old train station, across the new bridge, down to the big wat and the spot where the fishing boats dock and back over the rickety old bridge. Rumour is that in the near future the old train line from Phnom Phenh to Shianokville via Kampot will reopen for passengers. I'd love to ride the rails in Cambodia when the time comes. That said its easy to get around on the buses (Blakey) and the roads are good. But it was time to say goodbye and head back to the big smoke for a cooking class - finally (the class not the goodbyes).

The great visa chase

Got to Phnom Penh, checked into my expensive, lets treat myself hotel (Goldie Boutique), a bit of pre dealing with bureaucracy lunch and it was off to the Vietnamese Embassy. To my surprise and delight my 3 month multiple entry visa would be available the next day. And the following day I managed to get my Laos visa the same day. Brilliant! That said I didn't do half the things I meant to in PP. I did get to Wat Phnom, had a walk past the Royal Palace and had a beer at the real FCC - I marked the visit by buying an FCC stubbie holder (my first ever believe it or not!). I finished my book group book and strated a very amusing Kinky Friedman adventure about Willie Nelson and an Indian curse. I got a $4 haircut (quite a successful one too!) and drank beer on a rooftop watching the peak hour traffic around the Independance monument. This lead to an"Ï'm in Cambodia"moment - the point where you pinch yourself, forget the trivalities and and remember where you are.

In Kampot in an $8 room

My expectations of what I thought I needed in a hotel room have been confounded in Kampot. I travelled on from Kep with one of the people I met at Botanica who is on a much tighter budget than me and we managed to find a couple of $8 rooms with a fan and cold water that were clean and comfortable (The Little Garden for the record). Kampot is a bit more happening than Kep, it has lots of bars run by expats with happy hours and western comfort food that play music that makes you turn to your companions and exclaim "oh my god, I haven't heard this song for ages!". I certainly didn't do much over the 2 days I spent here - a walk to the market, watching the sunset over the rivers with a beer in hand, reading. That's about it really. But becoming aware I need to get my arse into gear to move on to Laos I decided to go back to Phnom Penh and sort out both my Laos and Vietnamses visas however long that would take then head back to Kampot for the weekend to hang out with friends. So back on the bus I went.

Hammock Time!

I left Phnom Penh at some ungodly hour bound for Kep. After a pleasant enough journey (Penhom Penh Soyra are the best I've travelled with so far) I reached the seaside. My flagging spirits were lifted at the first glimpse of the ocean. Kep is a tiny place, its the sort of place you check into a bungalow and hang there for however long you stay. That's what I did! I stayed at Botanica, run by a Belgian guy with great food and a well stocked bar. I met a wonderful cast of characters including a fellow museum AV tech from England! Kep really only became a destination in the early part of the 20th centruy when the French built villas along the coast and named it Kep-sur-Mare. These villas were looted and burnt by the Khmer Rouge and most remain burnt out husks - but the most photogenic husks (left)! Callum Morton may have put a ruin outside the Arts Centre for Melbourne Festival but Kep has the real thing! However there is progress and some of them are being renovated awaiting Kep's inevitable transformation into a resort town. It has no beach to speak of but the walk along the coast road past the crab markets is lovely. One of the highlights of my 3 days in Kep was a visit to a restaurant at the crab markets to eat crab with green Kampot pepper. People rave about the crab and the pepper and they are justified on both counts. Kampot pepper (specific to this part of Cambodia) has a gentle heat when dried and is mild and delicious when green. Oh, and the sunset from our oceanside table was beautiful (left). Seriously, if you come to Cambodia go to Kep, its the perfect place to recharge after too many temples and the hustle and bustle of Phnom Penh.

Books read

Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Took about 40 pages to get in to and one bit made me cry.  A bit too esoteric to be a really good book.

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Fabulous.  So meticulously written, it took him 5 years to write and it shows (in a good way!) and absolutely engaging.

The Club Dumas - Arturo Perez-Reverte

A nice diversion - Reverte writes intelligent whodunnits, this on is a riff on The Three Musketeers.  Makes me want to read the original.

In Phnom Penh yearning for the beach

This is what you get for not booking ahead.  After a six hour bus journey where we stopped not once but numerous times I arrived in Phnom Penh.  I was the only foreigner on the bus and one of the stops involved the bus getting washed.  I also got to reaquaint myself with squat toilets (oh, the joys of travel!).  So I land in the busiest bit of a sprawling, bustling metropolis, tired, hungry and in need of a bex and a good lie down.  After a mad attempt to find a hotel on foot and after seeing rooms with no windows or windows that overlooked the foyer I sat in a cafe and let my fingers do the walking.  I ended up at The Bodhi Tree, a

small oasis in the middle of the madness even though its over the road from the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum.  I realised I couldn't handle Phnom Penh just then - I'd been going full tilt since I arrived in Cambodia so I spent the next day organsing to move to the beach.  I booked into a place in Kep where I planned to sit in a hammock for a few days and read.  I did get a bit of a look at the city. I wandered through the old market, tracked down a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for my book club reading, and looked to solve my clothing crisis.  I'd not stayed anywhere long enough to get laundry done so it was off to the Russian Market, a rabbit warren of a place and a chance to sharpen my barganing skills.  I left with a very nice sarong and a sundress (yes, a dress) in a lurid purple pattern that doubles as a skirt - travel demands flexible clothing!  I will come back to Phnom Penh and now I have a bit of a feel for the place it won't be so hard next time around.  So hang out the gone fishin' sign, I'm off to the beach!

Battambang and not finding the killing caves

From Siem Reap I moved onto Battambang.  I successfully bought a bus ticket and undertook the 3 1/2 hour journey through villages, small towns and past many farms.  I arrived arrived around middday and running the gauntlet of touts and drivers found the Seng Hout Hotel a recommendation from the forums.  A bit featureless but for $12 a night with AC and cable TV I wasn't about to argue.  So I did my usual thing after getting settled and went for a walk.  Unfortunately my first reaction was "what a hole".  Everything looks grey and run down - not what I expected for Cambodia's fourth most visited city, not many tourists seem to make it here, from what I saw there were only a couple of dozen so if you want that frontier feeling check it out.  

But Battambang had two saving graces.  The first was the only gin palace in Cambodia, Juniper run by an English expat.  A double shot of Tanquery and tonic cost $3.  Its definetly the place to get the local lowdown.  The owner also gave me a guide to Kep that he'd written as I said I would eventually head that way after Phnom Penh.  The second saving grace 

was a couple from Perth that I met on my first night there.  I think without them I would have got the hell out the next day.  With only a few more hours experience of the town than them (they'd 

arrived on the boat from Siem Reap that took 9 hours - my bus took 3 1/2!) we headed out for mystery meat rolls at the night food stalls next to the river and drinks at Juniper.  Apparently the countryside around the city is very nice with some temples and also has some "killing caves" used by the Khmer Rouge.  I wasn't big on the idea of the caves but I liked the idea of the temples (it appeared that Angkor had not completely templed me out!).  It was nice to have some good company so we planned to head out the next afternoon.  

What an afternoon it turned out to be!  I thought it was going to be a nice chilled afternoon in the countryside but I ended up doing more climbing of hills and mountains than I think I've done in my life.  Phnom Banan (below left) is a ruined temple up 300+ stairs with great views from the top.  The temples looked like they'd collapse at any moment - I'm not sure if it was natural subsidence or if they'd been rebuilt in a vague approximation of a structure.  We then sped along some dusty roads to Phnom Sampeu which has a collection of wats on the top of a small-ish mountain.  I naively thought we'd be driven to the top but  it's so steep the tuk tuk wouldn't have made it.  We could have paid to go up on a motorbike but I don't trust myself on those things so we elected to climb.  And climb.  And climb.  And this is where the fun really started.  

There was no signage at all, just a labyrinth of stairs, paths and roadways.  There are active wats dotted all over the mountain of which we saw many, but the killing caves elluded us.  There was a lot of misdirection on the part of the local kids and between false starts and dead ends it felt like we climbed the mountain twice over.  What made it more confusing was our party got seperated so there was a lot of backtracking and searching.  Long story short, I didn't find the caves but the other of the party did.  We found a very eerie, deserted grotto with caves but with no evidence of human remains (she says casually).  The real caves turned out to be half way down the bit of the mountain we didn't explore.  The guide book had the right directions but I hadn't bought it with me. All in all, it was a grand adventure as well as an exercise in frustration!  Completely exhausted we returned to the hotel for some farewell drinks on the rooftop -  I was off to Phnom Penh and they back to Siem Reap.  So that my friends was Battambang!

Tips for travellers

Handwashed socks and undies +

Mosquito net +

Fan =

dry by morning

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while

I do owe you quite a few but I need to find a decent internet cafe so I can add pictures etc.
In brief, after leaving Siem Reap I went to Battambang for a couple of days the highlight of which was drinking gin and tonic in perhaps the only gin palace in Cambodia called appropriately enough Juniper. Then two nights in Phnom Penh where I basically arrived and staight away wanted to leave. I'm now at the beach chilling in a hammock. More to follow.

Blackouts and temple fatigue

Happy New Year everyone!
Its been a busy couple of days since I last blogged. At that time I was finding my feet on this new adventure that is South East Asia. But I'm running now! So far I've done the temples (well, some of them), eaten $1 noodles, watched the new years fireworks over the temples from my hotel balcony, experienced dodgy Cambodian power, been a tourist attraction myself and drunk a fair amount of the local beer.
First, the Angkor temples - Siem Reap's reason for being. I won't bore you with too many details but I've done what is called the small circuit around Angkor Wat and have been further afield to Banteay Srei and the like. Angkor Wat - the grandaddy of them all is quite something - from a distance it looks like a postcard. (Left: temple fatigue) Inside it is meticulously maintained and swarming with tourists - its everyone's (including my) first stop. But I discovered my own favourites. Bayon - the one with the faces - is nuts, not just for the carvings and the jumbles of stone that have not been restored but also for the human circus that surrounds it. And it wouldn't be a circus without elephants which plod dispiritedly around the outside. Ta Prom - the famous "Tomb Raider" temple (the touts sell bootlegged copies of the DVD as well as water and pineapple on a stick) has platforms in front of the best tree roots which are never free of snap happy visitors. It is also the most (for me) claustrophobic place, it felt a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock, a person could disappear and never be found. Miranda? Mirandaaaaaaa! But my absolute favourite is Banteay Samre (at left), off the main circut and when I visited there was only a handful of tourists so it was peaceful and still. What really made it and the temples in general make sense was when I found the grand causeway with its lines of Nagas sweeping up to to temple. I can imagine the grand processions of people walking the same route as I am doing many centuries later (Sarah K correct me if I'm wrong!). It was a real "I get it" moment. My description may be brief but the slide night will be epic - I probably took 200 photos at the temples along not to mention the other 150 or so since I got here! But they're so photogenic!
Equally photogenic but in another league entirely is the Cambodian Cultural Village an over priced tourist trap on Airport Road that felt like an abandoned amusement park (image at left: your guess is as good and mine!). It is supposed to show Cambodia in minature with waxworks, model village and "cultural" performances as well as a restaurant and foot massage centre (!). I was the only western tourist there but there were plenty of package tourists from Asia whooping it up. As the only white skinned, blond haired person about some of the young guys decided they wanted my photo. More fool them - all they got was me with mad hair, sweat stains and my hand up to my face in a "no pictures, no comment" pose. I went there with low expectations and they were well met but sometimes you've got to try these things!
I've also experienced my first blackout. The power to the whole block went out early new years eve and didn't come back on until late the next day. I've learnt how not to deal with it (complain) and how to build a bridge and get over it. For godsakes woman, you're in a country where most of the population don't have running water, let alone electricity, so just go with the flow - mainly of sweat. (left: blackout supplies provided by the hotel)
I've been trying the local food. I've found a good place around the corner where I can get a stir fry and rice for $2. The local green of choice, morning glory tastes like a cross between spinach, mustard cress and cinnamon - quite interesting. My drinking hole of choice is a hotel down the way where I can sit on a day bed type arrangement and drink the local brew with an industrial fan blowing welcome cool air in my general direction. A couple of beers costs anything from $2-4 depending on whether its happy hour or not. (left: fried fish with ginger, soy beans and morning glory)
I'm loving my time in Siem Reap. Its such a diverse interesting place. I'll be moving on in a couple of days. Tomorrow's challenge? Buying a bus ticket.
Until next time...