First, we have to apologize for the long gap between our last post and this one! We’ve had a friend traveling with us for the last couple of weeks, and it’s been a whirlwind without a lot of time to write. We’ve also been lounging recently on a remote island that, despite being extremely beautiful, has pretty poor WiFi. We’ll do our best to catch up!
After a topsy turvy 5 weeks in China, we finally set off for the comparative ease and splendor of Cambodia. Our flight from Zhangjiajie was pretty early in the morning, so we departed from our hostel at 6am for the airport…where we came upon a super eerie sight. Have you ever seen a large airport structure seemingly completely empty, with no lights on inside or people outside? Well, we can now say we have. We were dropped off and the building literally looked abandoned. Quite new, but still: abandoned.
People emerged when we finally entered the building, which was a bit of a relief. However, we were still left with a second problem that couldn’t be rectified so easily, which was the massive amount of fog enveloping the airport. Unfortunately, this fog lingered and it postponed our flight to Guangzhou, causing us to depart late and miss our onward connecting flight scheduled for 11:30am to Phnom Penh. When we worked to resolve this with the airline, they rescheduled us for the next available flight…at 9:30pm. Wonderful. [Editor’s note: This marks the first missed transportation of the trip, albeit due to weather and not our fault. How many more will there be? No one knows….]
Typically a 10+ hour layover would cause one’s soul to shrivel up and die a little, but we were lucky to have acquired free Priority Pass membership with our Chase Sapphire Rewards credit card. This enabled us to spend the entirety of the layover in fancy, private lounges, eating surprisingly tasty food and drinking (lots of) delightfully adequate wine for free while we waited. Easily one of our best layovers ever.
Phnom Penh and Cambodia at First Sight
We finally arrived at Phnom Penh at 11:30pm, made our way through customs and exited the airport. As usual, we were met by a swarming gaggle of taxi drivers and people greeting their family members. This wasn’t shocking in the slightest, but what was, and what caused Jess to squeal in wonder and delight, was the fact that it was warm even at midnight. In fact, warm is an understatement – it was damn near muggy, humid and too hot. VICTORY IS OURS! We also found that our taxi driver spoke excellent English, which was a stark departure from China. Cambodia stole our hearts within these first 5 minutes and reassured our weary souls that everything was going to be awesome.
When we awoke the next day in our hostel in Phnom Penh, it was exciting to slowly take in a new city and culture. Phnom Penh represented many things that China wasn’t, but also some things that were the same but different (if that makes sense). Whereas most Chinese cities are well built with modern construction and infrastructure, Phnom Penh is a little more “ragged” and unkempt. This provides a dirtiness and lack of polish that would simply never be permitted in China, but with that comes a charm that China lacks. Part and parcel with this, Phnom Penh has a certain energy and flare that China lacks, perhaps from the easy and open way that people intersect in life and buzz around on scooters. Most people are turned off by these jarring traits (and, in turn, tend not to like Phnom Penh very much), whereas we really welcomed the changes and enjoyed the city because of it.
A fruit market in Phnom Penh
Riding in our first Cambodian tuk-tuk.
While I’m at it, I’ll highlight a few other differences between China and Cambodia that were quickly apparent after our first 48 hours in Phnom Penh:
-
- There is much more western tourism in Cambodia, so there is a robust “soft” infrastructure in the country of people who speak English and services that cater to the needs and desires of westerners who are visiting the country. In short, this makes it WAY WAY WAY easier to navigate than China was.
- As mentioned, the “hard” infrastructure is vastly underdeveloped. The roads are pretty paltry, the train system is largely non-existent and everything is far more makeshift than in China. Getting anywhere is an adventure of dodging motorbikes, tuk-tuks, and cars. [Editor’s note: there are wide sidewalks in Phnom Penh, but they seem to be used for everything except walking on. They’re completely blocked and covered by parked cars, bikes, vendors spilling out of their stalls, and generally so much stuff that you have to just walk in the street to get anywhere anyway.]
- Cambodia dually employs their own local currency – the Khmerian Riel, which is valued at 4000 Riel for $1 USD – as well as the U.S. dollar. This is highly convenient since items and services can be purchased in either currency, but it also leads to amusing instances where purchase prices are cobbled together using both currencies (especially because they don’t accept U.S. coins, so they use Riel for smaller denominations). [Editor’s note: this means that you might pay for lunch using, say, $4 USD plus 2000 Riel if your bill is $4.50. It took a little while to get used to, but means that everyone in the country is really good at mental math and conversion.]
- Prices are super, ridiculously low, which is delightful. Our lodgings are roughly the same price, but all foods and services are far cheaper. Meals cost roughly $4-5 per person, beers are $0.75-$1, a haircut and beard trim for me was $3 and an hour long massage costs as little as $7. It’s glorious.
- Because of how cheap it is to visit and how pervasive English is, the result is that a lot of 20-something backpackers tend to come here from around the world. This means that there is a far more aggressive drinking and partying scene in Cambodia than in China, which is off-putting for “old” folks like us that typically are in bed by 11pm. Additionally, we stumbled upon a seedy red light district full of prostitutes and strippers (where young Cambodian women were draped upon dirty old western men) and, once night fell, we were propositioned by seemingly every tuk tuk driver to buy drugs of various types. It’s simultaneously super sketchy and quite sad.
A surrounding view of the traffic from inside a tuk-tuk. Road rules are suggestions at best.
A monk in traditional orange robes at a roadside pharmacy.
We only spent part of a day in Phnom Penh before catching an afternoon bus to Kampot, which is a riverside city in the southern part of Cambodia.
Kampot
Prior to departing China we saw that the weather forecast showed thunderstorms for Kampot, so we frantically researched alternative destinations with better weather. Despite scouring most of Southeast Asia, we failed to find the winning combination of weather, cost and ease, so we settled on going to Kampot anyway. This ended up being a wonderful decision, as rain was limited to less than 30 minutes a day and we were able to have our first truly relaxing stretch of our vacation. [Editor’s note: Rorie really did spend several hours researching potential destinations that would be warm, with good weather, but not ridiculously far or expensive to get to. After our 5 weeks in China of cold, gray, and drizzly weather, all we wanted was sun and warmth, and we were afraid we wouldn’t get it. Luckily, though, the thunderstorms were brief and far between, meaning that our original plan worked out just fine.]
We ended up booking an eco-hostel located just outside of Kampot for our time in the city, which involved us riding a rickety tuk tuk down a pot-holed dirt road in the dead of night before coming upon our cool lodgings. It contained an indoor/outdoor common area (with fickle WiFi) to hang out, eat meals and generally just chill, as well as adorable bamboo yurts where we could sleep under mosquito nets while bugs buzzed around and geckos/lizards crawled around our room. Albeit a bit rustic, it was exactly what the doctor ordered.
Our hostel was so relaxing we didn’t even take pictures of it, but we did manage to get my Seattle Seahawks streaming live with my morning mango lassi drink. Not too shabby, right?
Because we had three full days there until we had to return to Phnom Penh to meet up with our friend Giannis, we sought to allocate them in the most logical manner: 1 day to completely lounge around, 1 day to be busy/active and 1 day to explore in a leisurely manner. This division of time was perfect. The first full day involved laying around doing nothing, with the notable exception of me getting to play in an impromptu poker tournament that night (don’t worry, I won money), so we really couldn’t have drawn it up better.
The weather on our second day looked particularly clear, so we joined up with a couple American gals and a French fella to rent scooters ($5/day, which is awesome) and explore the scenery of the nearby Bokor Mountain. This ended up being more amusing than anticipated for several reasons. First, riding a scooter in Cambodia (and probably anywhere in Southeast Asia) is pretty sketchy, mainly because it’s a free-for-all where roads are in disrepair (or non-existent) and traffic laws basically don’t exist. While I adjusted pretty well to these conditions, poor Jess spent the better part of the day hyperventilating and quietly freaking out on the back of the scooter as she dug her fingers into my shoulders to hold on and yelped at every tight turn and whiff of danger. [Editor’s note: This is true, though I maintain those yelps were well justified. Basically, Rorie’s scooter came with two brakes: the mechanical one, and me.]
Us and our noble steed/terror-mobile.
Jess was a trooper about the whole scooter experience (though she absolutely hated it) and we generally enjoyed the day. The mountain had beautiful views of the valley from the top, while also having cool sights to see along the way such as a waterfall and an abandoned casino. With the American gals serving as our navigators, we were able to follow up that activity with an evening wandering around Kampot to have drinks and food. For all the success of the day, the wheels came off the wagon at the end of the day as we had to return to our eco-hostel with our scooters. Because the sun sets super early in Cambodia (around 5:45pm), we ended up riding back in a rain storm in the pitch black of the night. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that the rain made the dirt, pothole-filled road leading to our eco-hostel into a treacherous mud pit, which we navigated carefully/ably but which caused the American gals to tip over twice (though they were largely uninjured, aside from some deep gashes). Quite an eventful end to a lovely day.
Our intrepid group
For our third day, we decided to just spend the time leisurely hanging out in, and exploring, Kampot. We rented another scooter to get there and spent the time having drinks on river barges, enjoying lunch, wandering around and playing darts in a bar frequented by expats. It was easy to see why so many foreigners end up settling in Kampot – it is a charming, laid back city which lacks the party scene ubiquitous in other parts of Cambodia, is inexpensive and is near a lot of nice sights. I think it was certainly a nice way to be introduced to Cambodia and is a worthwhile place visit for those who have a bit of extra time in the country to explore.
Next, we headed back to Phnom Penh to meet up with our friend and explore the city some more before heading to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. More on that to come soon!
