It’s a fact that the one and only reason people visit Cambodia is just to see Angkor Wat. In order to reach this world famous sight, my friends Richard, Craig and I decided to take a two day tour from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh via the Mekong Delta.
After a long time on the bus and a slightly disappointing floating market boat tour, we had a nice sunset Mekong cruise along the Hau river to reach our nights destination in Chau Doc which surprisingly provided us with a highlight.
The three of us plus another guy called Hyo went out for a wander and came across a group of men sitting around watching English Premier League action. I’m not sure if it was a bar or just someones house (as the Vietnamese don’t really drink alcohol so much) but we piled in to this open area just off the street, and the pregnant wife of the owner was sent out by him to get our beers each time we ordered which we felt a little guilty about so we only ordered the five drinks each!! There is often no refrigerated beer in Vietnam so ice is sometimes added to keep it cold which ruins the taste a bit, and with the huge blocks of ice added it took quite a long time to consume each beer.
The next morning we went to a floating village and floating fish farms via local rowing boats which certainly satisfied our expectations of what we felt the delta should have been like.
Once at the village of Cham, I mixed it with the locals for a game of Vietnamese-style volleyball featuring a shuttlecock-like object being used rather than a ball which made it difficult to play. It was good fun though despite the best rally only being about six or seven! The rest of the morning and the afternoon was then spent on boats taking us into Cambodia where a load of us were squeezed into a mini-bus that went along a very bumpy road to complete the journey to Phnom Penh.
We persuaded a tuk-tuk driver to give us an hour tour of Phnom Penh while we drank our beers. Credit has to be given to the driver as he did awfully well to make it last an hour as it’s a quite a small place. He had to resort to showing us the seediest bars in town or maybe that’s the standard given the amount of sex tourists who visit such places!
The following morning we were straight out of Phnom Penh and in a shared taxi ($30 between us for the 4 hour ride) going to the beach resort of Sihanoukville in the south west of Cambodia. That was an adventure in itself given some of the ridiculous blind overtaking that these Michael Schumacher-wannabe taxi drivers do.
Once in Sihanoukville, we did another fairly unimpressive tuk-tuk tour before ending up at a beautiful beach resort which was rammed with tourists. That was quite surprising as we had hardly seen a soul anywhere else! As soon as we stepped on to the beautiful beach, we were accosted by the locals trying to sell us fruit, massages, manicures, t-shirts, drinks and the usual cr*p. It wasn’t so easy to really relax but once the sun started to go down they did begin to disappear.
After just the one night there, we were in a taxi heading back to Phnom Penh the next morning where we would then get another taxi up to Siem Reap; the gateway to the temples of Angkor.
Along the way we stopped at a couple of little places at the side of the main road (friends of the driver who wanted us to spread our tourist dollars among them??) which gave us a bit more of an insight into the lives of the Cambodians as all we had really experienced was a country which had sold a little of its soul in return for the dollars that are basically made off the back of the awe-inspiring Angkor Wat.
Tokyo Fox (東京狐) 