Cambodia I: Capital to Coast

Sunday, April 20 - Bus to Cambodia

Our bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City to Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh features our first border crossing by land of the trip. Kaila did some research and figured out we could get a visa on-arrival through the bus service if we were willing to pay an extra 10 USD described to us as "$30 visa fee, $5 fee for the driver, $5 corruption fee to the Cambodian government." At least they were up front about it!

This is what we opted for, so the bus driver took our passports (and those of the rest of the folks on the bus) and 40 USD at the beginning of the ride, talked with the border agents on all our behalfs, brought us to the visa desk, got our passports stamped, gave us our documenst back, and we got back on the bus. Overall a very easy process with their help, and the driver definitely earned the extra money they charged.

Once we cross the border, the signs change from written in Vietnamese to written in Khmer, the local language which features a very curly alphabet. There are also many signs written in Chinese, which we at first assumed was for tourists, but learn that is because of CHinese investment in the region. This is the first time either of us has traveled in a country that doesn't use the Roman alphabet, so I think it will take some getting used to. There is also a new method of transport on the road: the tuk tuk! Sort of a blend between a motorbike and a car, these little three-wheeled vehicles are extremely charming.

We stop briefly at a restaurant on the Cambodian side of the border where I get some chicken and rice and we sit at a table and eat with Oscar and George from England and Laura from France, before getting back on the bus for the last fourish hours of the journey.

We arrive at the bus station in Phnom Penh and get Grab (local rideshare) to our hostel. It's called Mad Monkey, and seems to be a bit of a party hostel, so aren't surprised to arrive to loud music in the open air lobby with a connected restaurant and bar. We check in, and go up to our private room, which is actually pretty nice! We drop off our stuff then go the street to a restaurant across the street called Pu Rock Cafe for some Cambodian food. I get a chicken stir fry dish with curry seasoning and rice called chhar krerng and Kaila gets a beef stir fry dish with a lemony sauce, rice, and a fried egg called Khmer loklak. Food is good and the owner Rock is nice and talks to us for a while.

We head back to the hostel to grab a beer at the bar and run into Oscar and George from the bus, who are also staying here. We chat with them and a few other folks staying at the hostel for a few hours while a beer pong tournement happens (apparently this is a thing every Monday). After the beer pong tournement, a couple of the folks that were bartending come out in wigs and do an impromptu drag show which was really fun to watch and funny to have going on in the background while we are talking to the other travelers. These folks are giving it their all, jumping on and off of tables, one of them even doing a couple dead-drops on top of the beer pong table, which must have happened before because they did not doubt the structural integrity of the table at all. Definitely glad we got to see them go all out, even though it's so hot out. Eventually we turn in for the night when the hostel bar closes around 11 pm and the folks that want to keep partying go off to a club.

Monday, April 21 - Getting a lay of the land

Today we get up and go back to Pu Rock Cafe for breakfast. Kaila gets a fruit and yogurt bowl that's absolutely stacked and I get the Khmer loklak she tried last night, mostly because the owner Rock the night before mentioned that's the dish he usually eats for breakfast. It also means we get to see how it was different from the gluten-free version Kaila got last night, which is mainly that the beef came in a different sauce that was more umami than lemon-peppery, maybe because it has worchestershire sauce (which has gluten). That's a total guess because the sauce tasted almost steak sauce-y. Very tasty though, and mine still came with the lemony sauce on the side! We also get some Cambodian coffee, which at this place at least means strong coffee with condesnsed milk, but not as sweet as Vietnamese milk coffee, which was welcome.

We meet a Cambodian man outside our hostel that asks us if we want a ride around some of the sites of the city in his motorbike with passenger trailer (we assumed this was still considered a tuk tuk until we saw a category for this on the Grab app called "remorque", which is just the French word for "trailer"). He has a good pitch, saying he'll wait for us outside each location so we can spend as much time in each spot as we like, and for a fair price of 15 USD for the whole day. We take him up on it, and set off for our first stop: Wat Phnom.

Wat Phnom is a big Buddhist temple in the center of the city. When we arrive to prayer flags strung out in a radial pattern from some tall stairs leading up to the pagoda that features the main shrine of the temple. Behind the pagoda, we can see the spire of the largest stupa of the temple.

The next stop is across the Mekong River to the Mongkol Serey Temple, also known as the Golden Temple because it is a Buddhist temple that is painted gold. This is the first time I see the half-serpent, half-human creature called a Naga that appear in Hinduism and Buddhism. At this temple, there are huge Nagas acting as guard rails along the front of the main structure of the temple. Along the stairs leading to the entrances, there are human-like creatures holding up the Nagas.

We were busy this afternoon, so I won't go into detail about all of our stops, but we also visited Wat Ounalom, the central market (where I got a basic watch since I don't have a phone to keep time anymore lol), the Royal Palace. We get some lunch at a restaurant called David's Noodle where I get a soup dish with some really tasty homemade noodles and Kaila tries the popular Cambodia curry dish fish amok. Then we go up the street to the close-by National Museum of Cambodia. We hoped to learn more about Angkor Wat since we'll be going there in a week or so, but there was surprisingly not a lot of info in the museum about the artifacts. We did learn later that many of the statues from the temples in the Angkor region are kept in that museum for safekeeping though, so we are still glad we went!

After the museum, we're feeling pretty exhausted from walking around in the sun so we take a tuk tuk back to the hotel to rest for a while. Kaila takes a nap, but I'm incapable of waking up from naps the same day I take them so instead I work on my blog, then read for a bit while I upload some of Kaila's photos from her camera *to the cloud* so she can access them on her phone.

Eventually we get hungry and are in the mood for french fries, and Kaila luckily finds a restaurant with non-gluten-cross-contaminated fries on her Find Me Gluten Free app! It's a Greek restaurant, and it's pretty close! We take a tuk tuk ride that's about a dollar. We share a feta and watermelon salad and I get a beef meatball gyro while Kaila gets some chicken souvlaki. They have ouzo on the menu (a Greek star anise spirit that tastes like black licorice), and besides ordering it as a shot, by the glass, or by the pitcher (!!!), you can also order it as a cocktail mixed with fresh squeezed lemon juice! This is what I do, and I'm excited to tell the Greek half of my family about it.

We're close to a street called Bassac Street, which is a narrow street/alley that has many bars and restaurants along it. We walk over to find a place to get a drink, trying to decide if a street level or balcony table would be better for people watching when we notice a bunch of people crowded in the outside space of one of the bars. We get closer to investigate, and notice that most of the folks that aren't standing are seated and facing the same direction. We see a projector, and we walk in at perfect timing for a person to pick up a mic and say that they're going to be continuing with the show, which ends up being Nerd Nite-type show, which is a presentation series we know from the states that has chapters around the world. Think TED talks but more goofy and boozy.

This show is actually Nerd Night, and operates in mostly the same way, except this one runs fortnightly instead of monthly and each show has four to six presenters giving seven minute talks. They have an interesting structure that I thought worked well where each presenter makes a presentation of exactly 20 slides where each slide advances on a 20 second timer. It meant that every presentation kept to its alotted time! We get there for the second half of the show and see two presentations: Gay Animals and The Magic of Potatoes. The gay animals talk is about how many animals don't conform strictly to heterosexuality, bunking the idea that homosexuality isn't natural. The potato talk is about how potatoes were adopted into European society from South America and then spread into cuisines around the world, using potatoes as a way to also talk a bit about history and global politics. Afterwards, we talk to one of the co-hosts for a while (Hayley from the UK who now lives in Phnom Penh). They even give us some free drink tickets! A nice experience overall and I'm grateful we happened upon it to put a lovely end to our first full day in Cambodia.

Tuesday, April 22 - Learning more about the Cambodian Genocide

We start our day once again at the Pu Rock Cafe, more fruit and loklak. Today I try the chicken lok lak, but I preferred the beef. Rock says that's the traditional version anyway, but he includes the chicken on the menu since some tourists don't eat beef. Nice guy!

Today we're going to the Cheung Ek Genocidal Center, also known as the Killing Fields. This is a memorial site to remember one of hundreds of execution sites and mass graves that were located throughout Cambodia durign the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's. In this time, the regime was responsible for the death of three million of the then eight million people living in Cambodia. More than one in every four people were killed. Seeing one of the places these atrocities were committed was sad but extermently powerful.

Listening to survivors of these events describe what we were seeing (through our audio guides) was a stark contrast to the grounds that now appeared peaceful. Light dappled through the leaves of trees where birds sat chirping. Fish jumping in a pond at the edge of the grounds. Nature moves on, despite the events that unfolded here less than half a century ago. Yet here we are, standing in front of pits where the remains of hundreds of people had been exhumed. Told to watch our steps because the rain still urged things to the surface, bone fragments, rags of the last clothes these people wore. Teeth. We saw these things and yet we walked through and were allowed to leave this place that so many people were not. The start of the tour mentioned how we would be able to go back to our normal lives after visiting here, even though millions of people never escaped the nightmare. They asked us to take this history with us and remember what happened here.

The self guided tour ends at a stupa at the center of the grounds unlike any of the other stupas we've seen so far. The stupa has glass windows, and inside you can see stacked layers of more than 5,000 human skulls from the mass graves at this site. A somber image of the lives lost here.

We continue learning more about the Cambodian Genocide by heading back into town and going to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known as Security Prison 21 or S-21. This was a former high school that was converted into a facility for imprisoning, torturing, and eventually killing an estimated 20,000 people between 1976 and 1979. The people arrested included former soldiers and government officials, academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks, and engineers. Basically anybody the Khmer Rouge saw as a threat to their new form of rule, and before they were murdered, they were coerced into giving names of their family and friends as their "associates" who were then also arrested. The living conditions here were awful as you probably expect. Their were arrest photos of many of the people that were murdered here, as well as paintings depicting the heinous acts, created by an artist that spent time here and was one of few that made it out.

It's hard to transition from talking about the horrible things that humans are capable of, so I ask that you take a moment of silence before continuing on, or maybe come back for the rest of this post later.

(Taking a moment for the victims of this violent time)

Please excuse the lack of a transition. Here is a photo from earlier in the day of a minivan towing a motorbike in a way you probably won't expect.

After resting at the hostel for a bit, we get some snacks for later then go to Banteay Srey Restaurant, where we both get some fish amok (Kaila says they were better at David's Noodle, unfortunately for me). There's a picture on the wall that looks like Gordon Ramsey with who we assume is the head chef, because she is also sitting at the back of the restaurant. Eventually she comes over to our table and introduces herself as Nina, telling us she teaches cooking classes with an organization that trains disadvantaged youths, and confirms that it's Ramsay in the photo. She comes back a few minutes later with this YouTube video pulled up on her phone, showing her telling Ramsay he didn't add enough palm sugar to the curry she teaches him to cook. Good stuff!

After dinner, we walk along the nearby river walk. There are lots of people out enjoying the evening, and we find a street vendor selling a bunch of fried bugs! This is something I've been wanting to try, so I ask for a small serving and they put a scoop each of crickets, grasshoppers, silk worm pupae, dried shrimp, and whole fried frogs, into the bag with some sugar, chilis, and a spice blend. They shake it all up and give it to me.

We're right by the lit up park in front of the Royal Palace, so we find a place to sit at the edge of a wide paverstone path and I enjoy my creepy crawly treat. They're pretty good! The spice blend is balanced nicely between sweet and spicy. I work my way up to the frogs by trying the other critters first, and at first it's intimidating to eat a frog whole, bones and all, but it ends up tasting like the crispy bit at the end of a chicken wing. Overall would recommend!

After my snack, we call it a night and walk back to our hostel.

Wednesday, April 23 - Off to Koh Rong Island

We wake up early to pack then head over to the Pu Rock Cafe one more time for some more coffee, fruit, and loklak. We tell Rock it's our last day in Phnom Penh and thank him for his hospitality the last couple days (even though the looping playlist could use some more songs). He sends us off with some ice cold water. So nice!

Today we're heading to Koh Rong, an island of the southern coast of Cambodia that's supposed to have some beautiful beaches. We pack into a van with some other folks from the hostel and set off for what is a hot and tight ride. I spend the first bit of the ride talking with the guy next to me, John, who's a mechanical engineer from England. He also spent a few weeks in Vietnam, so we compare our experiences and he gives me some tips for Malaysia which is welcomed!

The ride takes four hours, getting us there at 2:20 pm, real close to the 2:30 pm time we were told the ferry would leave, making some of our travel companions nervous (Kaila even saw the person next to her on her phone looking for hotel rooms near the ferry station lol). The worry is for naught though, as the ferry doesn't actually leave for 40 more minutes. The ride to the island takes about another hour, and once we arrive, the hostel is only a 10 minute walk up a path beside the gorgeous beach. The sand is bright white and the water is clear and shallow, which makes it a really pretty, light turquoise color.

We check into the Mad Monkey, and this one seems immediately more like a party vibe. The reception is a small desk at the edge of a big open air bar and dining area, with the bar running the length of the "room", which I'm sure will be loud tonight. That thought feels validated when we see a sandwich board that says karaoke starts tonight at 9. We're walked past the bar to a sandy area off to the side where there's a beach volleyball court, then beyond this to our room, which is a cute little beach bungalow!

Once we're settled in, we look for a place for dinner. To our surprise, there's a Mexican restaurant called La Cocina back by the pier. Mexican restaurants are usual pretty safe for Kaila since there isn't soy sauce or much wheat to be worried about (besides flour tortillas, which are usually just for burritos or as an alternative to corn tortillas). We get some nachos to share and enchiladas. It's actually really good Mexican food! Better than a lot of places in the States even, which is a surprise because the States are so much closer Mexico!

When we get back from dinner, John from England (who's staying at the hostel next door) is at the bar with a couple other folks from the bus: Erica from Norway and Izzy and Elle also from England. Actually it turns out most of the folks that are staying here are British. I think it's in part because Mad Monkey was started by some British people, but I think Cambodia is also just a more common vacation destination in the UK than it is in other places. Anyway, we join them and chat about our travels until karaoke starts, which we all decide to stay for. Kaila & I are some of the first to go, & we decide to sing "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers like good Americans.

After staying for a healthy amount of karaoke (including a British guy dedicating the next song to his penis & then proceeding to sing "All the Small Things" by Blink 182), John tells us he heard about a "jungle party" hosted by a hostel up the beach, so we decided to take some drinks on the road (sand) & walk the 30 minutes to the Nest hostel. As we're arriving, we see some more guys from the bus that the girls recognize. They're hanging out at a picnic table on the beach in front of the hostel. One of them, an Australian, is juggling, & he asks if any of us want to try, or juggle with him. I'm not great at juggling, but I can do it a little bit so I tag in & he tosses me one ball at a time that I throw back. Was pretty fun! In the meantime, he tells us he's been traveling on & of for the last four years, some of that in the States. He guesses correctly that our accents are Coloradan, saying it's like "California but gritty" which is a fun description.

We go into the hostel, and immediately see that the main open air area is fully dedicated to a dance floor. It's full of people, standing/dancing room only, and there is loud house music. It's actually pretty fun, & we spend a couple hours dancing, then Kaila & I have a nice & peaceful walk back to the hostel. It seems like all the Mad Monkey folks are sleeping or at the Nest, so it's quiet here now & we retire to our bungalow.

Thursday, April 24 - Surrounded by Brits on the beack

The theme of today is beach! We sleep in, then get some American breakfast at the hostel: a plate of eggs, bacon, & a hash brown for me, and a smoothie bowl for Kaila. Then we go out to the beach to swim & read. Our hostel has some chairs out front where we can keep our stuff while we swim. The water is so warm that I don't even feel it as I wade in. A relaxing temperature for sure. It's shallow enough that we have to go 30 or 40 meters out before it's even waist deep, and the water is so clear that even at this depth we can still clearly see our feet at the bottom, along with some little fish. We bounce between the water and the chairs for a few hours until we feel like we've had enough sun, then we retreat to some hammocks between trees on the beach for another couple hours, before going back to the bungalow to rinse off. I'm making progress on Gone Girl (a book I found in English at a used bookstore halfway into our time in Vietnam), but I'm a slow reader so I still have a lot to go.

At sunset, we go for a walk on the beach, and enjoy the colors reflecting off the water. There's a couple small boats bobbing up and down, and a small, forested island maybe a kilometer off the beach that make for scenic views.

We were so enamored by the Mexican food last night that we go back today (only slightly influenced by the fact that the enchiladas didn't make Kala sick and there really aren't that many other options on this small island). Tonight I get a chicken burrito, then we walk back to our hostel and read a bit in our bungalow before going to bed early. Unfortunately, upon before-bed evaluation, we have both gotten pretty sunburnt. Not great for the first day on the beach.

Friday, April 25 - Disaster on Coconut Beach

Today we decide to check out another beach on the small island, Coconut Beach, that has a dedicated gluten free restaurant/hostel kitchen called Rafiki's. We get some coffee at the hostel and I get some avocado toast (that I jealously watched people eat yesterday) but Kaila holds off for a GF breakfast.

There are no cars on this island, but there are some motorbikes. Next door is a tour company with a remorque for hire, so we pay them to take us over there. It's about a 15 minute ride, but that's only because the dirt road to get over there is pretty bumpy. When we get there, we are met by another beautiful white sand beach, this one basically empty! We sit in some papasan chairs in the sand under a tree and Kaila goes to check out the menu. She orders us some coffee, but the kitchen is apparently closed til 1 pm (it's a little before noon) but the guy says he'll make her a smoothie. So we get some more coffee and Kaila gets her smoothie and we sit in the shade drinking these for a little while until we're brave enough to go back into the sun...

The problem with getting sunburned in a beautiful place is you still want to be out enjoying the beautiful place! We brought our long sleeve sun shirts over to this beach, but we still want to go into the water. It's simply too turqoise to ignore. So we lather ourselves in sunscreen, wait for it to dry while we finish our coffees, and get in (but only for a bit because we're still afraid of the sun). The water is amazing though, I think as clear as it possibly could be. Over here is even warmer, to the point where when walking in, it's even warmer than body temperature. Truly wild! I've never experienced ocean water like this before. We have to go even farther out to get to the deeper water, which is probably why it's so much warmer here.

We continue the cycle of putting on sunscreen, hanging out/reading while it dries, going into the water, coming back out, drying off, reading, and repeating for most of the day. We order a couple of the casava flour pizzas when we're feeling hungry enough: one with veggies and one with king oyster mushrooms. The pizzas are great! We sit and eat, then continue our cycle. A funny indie rock song comes on over the hostel speakers with these lyrics:

I walk a mile in your shoes
Now I'm a mile away
And I've got your shoes

I don't know why exactly but this really made me crack up. Good vibes.

Unfortunately, vibes do not stay good for long. An hour or so after eating the pizza, Kaila starts to feel sick, and has to book it to the hostel's bathrooms. Now this place isn't exactly a luxury establishment. Their rooms are actually canvas tents, and there are only two bathrooms stalls in small, cinder block rooms that double as the hostel's only two showers. On one side of this structure are two sinks directly across from two urinals, arranged such that two people using the sinks would have their backs nearly touching two people using the urinal at the same time. Anyway, Kaila is feeling sick enough that she has to spend a very unfortunate amount of time in and around these bathrooms. It's almost certainly a gluten reaction, but talking with the folks running the hostel situation, it's not clear what the contamination was. They don't actually seem to be that certain that the casava flour is only casava, and mention they recently got a new supplier, so that is most likely the culprit. If it's new, that could also account for other people on Kaila's GF app not getting sick.

Eventually, Kaila is feeling stable enough to get a ride back to our side of the island. We take it easy the rest of the day, with Kaila half resting, half napping while she recovers. I get some dinner at our hostel, which honestly wasn't great. We go to bed early and hope Kaila is feeling better in the morning!

Saturday, April 26 - Back to Phnom Penh

Today is mostly a travel day. Our next destination is Siem Reap to see the ancient Angkor Wat complex, but it is a 12 hour trip there from Koh Rong, and the only direct options are overnight sleeper buses. That sounds pretty awful on its own, but we've also heard some horror stories of two people getting assigned the same bunk even with two separate tickets, so we decide to avoid that experience entirely by splitting the travel day in two. We book a van back to Phnom Penh where we'll stay a night before finishing the trip the rest of the way to Siem Reap. So today we just pack up, get some coffee and breakfast: bowl of fruit for Kaila and bai jrouck (pork and rice) for me.

We eat at a pinic table on the beach then spend another hour or so looking out before we head to the concrete pier to wait for the ferry. When the ferry arrives, it ends up being quite the clusterfuck to get on as there is no line and the pier is only 6 or 8 feet wide. We eventually manage to get on without losing either of ourselves or our bags to the water (although it is close). We make it back to mainland and grab some coffee while we wait for the van that will take us back to the capital.

After a pretty uneventful four hours in a minivan, we make it back to Phnom Penh. Tonight we're staying in a hostel called Onederz over by the river and Royal Palace. After we check in, we go back to David's Noodle and I'm able to try the fish amok Kaila liked so much the other day! It's just as good as she built it up to be. A very flavorful curry with fish that practically melts in my mouth. After dinner, we walk back over to the river walk where I got the bag of bugs a few days ago, and it's totally packed! On Saturday evenings, a bunch of vendors line the streets and there's tons of food and people. There was even an area with music where a bunch of people were doing a group line dancing kind of thing. Super cute to see. After dinner, we head back to the hostel and turn in.

Sunday, April 27 - Off to Siem Reap

We're only doing a brief stop-over in Phnom Penh, so we have to pack back up first thing. We go up to the roof of the hostel to get some food from their restaurant: I get the "deluxe" omelet, which comes with some veggies and bacon and Kaila gets a bowl of fruit. There's a cat hanging out on the roof, and it suddenly gets a lot friendlier when our food arrives. I throw it a piece of bacon, and immediately a second cat appears. I share the rest of my bacon with them, then we head out to get some snacks for our bus ride to Siem Reap. We go back to our hostel, check out, and wait in the lobby. Since we booked our bus tickets through the hostel, a van comes to pick us up and bring us to the bus station. We booked an Air Bus through a company called VET that was recommended to us by one of the Phnom Penh Nerd Night hosts. The bus is really nice! The seats are like fancy airplane seats, & there's enough space that we can recline without having to worry about getting in the space of the person behind us. There's even a foot rest that pops out for our legs!

As we roll out, someone comes down the aisle and hands out paper bags with a croissant and a juice box for each of us! This isn't the only thing we get either. They also came around later and asked what we wanted for lunch! They didn't have any GF options, so I got a chicken burger and also got to eat a ham and cheese sandwich that Kaila ordered for me. Nice to have both of these things included! The bus wasn't even much more expensive than other options. Only 30 USD for both of us. Five and a half hours and we'll be in Siem Reap -- home of the world famous Angkor Temple Complex!

Thanks for reading!