Cambodia - First Impressions

It was a relief to get into Cambodia after the hecticness/ noisiness/ stressfulness of Vietnam. The border crossing wasn't a bed of roses though, we took a 3 hour bus to the border and then had to wait at the immigration office in a queue for about an hour and a half whilst they messed with everyone's passports and dished out visas. A few hours later and our bus pulled into Phnom Penh, capital city of Cambodia, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief – it was so much calmer than Ho Chi Minh City. We checked into our gorgeous hotel (we splurged and got a posh one for £10) and then we went out for tea. We needed cash first, but cash points aren't easy to come by (well not as easy as they are in Vietnam), so we had to walk for a while to find one, in the pitch dark. Whilst Cambodia is a lot calmer than Vietnam, its also a LOT poorer, and the streets are not very well lit at all, which can feel slightly dangerous. I think Cambodia is the poorest country we've visited on this trip – it actually seems poorer than Laos or Bolivia. For example, you have lots of people begging you for money, and you see women washing their naked babies with bottles of water in the middle of the street. There is also a hell of a lot of litter and rubbish – an overwhelming amount. I don't think they even bother to sort out rubbish – they seem to just toss it in the street, and it all piles up everywhere, which makes the towns look quite ugly (this was my first impression of Phnom Penh). However, despite all of this, Cambodia certainly has a charm – the food is really tasty (like Thai, but even nicer!) and the people are friendlier/ warmer than Vietnam. You don't have to worry as much about constantly being ripped off. One thing that has shocked me about Cambodia, is the amount of western old men/sugar daddies with young 20something Khmer (Cambodian) women – its actually worse than Thailand, which I wasn't expecting.

The countryside in Cambodia is stunning, and it was a relief to see the Thai style architecture again (temples, Buddhas etc) as you don't get any of that in Vietnam. I like all of the greenery: we are here in rainy season, so everything is lush and in full bloom. As you drive along on the bus, you see lots of rice fields, green banana trees and villages made up of little wooden shaks, babies running around naked etc. Its how you imagine South East Asia to be, well, at least how I imagined it to be, and its a country I've always been interested in. As we are here in rainy season, we have had a lot of rain, including some very scary thunderstorms which woke us up in the night and we had to check on the internet to make sure it wasn't an earthquake. I'm really enjoying all of the differences and there is a lot to see and do, but at the same time, I think we're getting tired now; tired of all the dirty squat toilets, long uncomfortable bus journeys and insect bites. It's not Cambodia's fault – its more the fact that we've been on the go now for 10 months, which is a long time to be on the go by anyone's standards and I never thought I'd ever get to the point where I felt like I'd had enough but I think we are nearing that point now... which is really convenient because we are nearly at the end now anyway. However, now we're near the end of the trip, I'm really savouring every minute and taking it all in more than ever. I know that as soon as I get back to the UK, I'll be daydreaming about trading in home comforts for foreign cultures, so I'm trying to remind myself of that now, because you don't know what you've got till its gone, and no doubt I'll read this blog a few months down the line and lament the lack of noisy buses and smelly toilets in my life.

Bus in Phnom Penh