Home » Cambodia » 3 countries, 1 day, a knocking shop and more madness

We get to Pakse to try and organise a flight but Laos Airlines doesn't do online booking and the shop closes at the weekend so we've the opton to wait in Pakse for 5 days or do overland into Cambodia through Thailand. There's nout to do in Pakse at the best of times so we decide to do overland into Eastern Thailand and South into Cambodia. We leave Blair in Pakse cos he's too lazy or still drunk to get out of bed. Time goes well and we reckon we can make Siem Reap in the same day.

3 countries, 1 day, a knocking shop and more madness

Gareth Penpraze
2007-04-20 22:46:39

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car, get some logs jammed in and after 40 mins we get the taxi out. We don't care about the
4X4's and tractors getting stuck behind so we're off again. But its now 4 of us in the back (the new taxi has a lazy fat kid in the front, probably the reason we got stuck in the first place) of a Toyato Camry speeding down the worst roads I've ever been on - its makes the roads in Cork seem like a airport runway!! There's pot holes every 2 feet and mud up to the ankles so its a slow and painful 5 hours to Siem Reap!! For anyone ever thinking of travelling Northern Cambodia take your own 4X4 or even better take a plane!! We find out that the Minister for transport owns the national Airline and doesn't invest in the roads, just lines his own pockets with the proceeds.

Finally Siem Reap, its full of beggars and amputees. The worst we saw was 2 kids passed out on the street no older than 10 with a pot of glue lying beside them - just like Glasgow then! Whole families seem to sleep rough here. Probably because of the Ankor Wat temples its the best way they can get money. We're trying to organise a Tuk Tuk
to take us round the temples as a small kid with one leg keeps using my foot to stomp his crutch on. A woman with her kid begs me to buy some milk for her but I don't have the money in my pocket so I just give her what I have. I found this really hard to deal with.

So off to see the mecca of temples and we managed to just about fit everything in, in a 12 hour blitz. Its hard to descibe the temples if you haven't seen them but basically they were built over 1000 years ago in a 1000 square km area and took in total 600 years and countless number of slaves, monks and sculpters to complete. At all the temples there were kids trying to sell bracelets, postcards, water, T-shirts and anything else that they could annoy the tourists with. Their English was unreal and some even new the difference between Eire and the N.I. (more than some dumb American dude we mest last night who thought we were from "Belfast, England"!! So I had to ask him if he's Canadian!!). I gave in and bought some postcards from a small girl only cos she counted ten postcards in 7 different languages to me!! So if you get a daft postcard don't be surprised.

There's not much more to tell about Siem Reap except for anyone that goes there go to Molly Malones at the top of Bar street and tell Thierry I sent you (customary to have a French man run the only Irish pub in town!!) Next stop is Phnom Penh.

Gareth Penpraze
http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/ASBO-Holidays/