Thursday, July 28, 2011

Final Destination in Asia

Cambodia is absolutely amazing, the people there are so incredible nice. You walk round the streets and ride around in the back of the Tuk Tuk's and people smile and wave to you. There is a much smaller presence of Caucasian people there then there is in say, Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur.
I guess that comes from the fact that most people visit Cambodia, and in particular Siem Reap and Phnom Penh to learn about the people, as opposed to party and buy fake sunglasses, flip flops and rolex's (Thanks Phuket).
The traffic there is more insane than anywhere else, the drive on the opposite side of the road to begin with , there are no stop signs, no give way signs, maybe three sets of traffic lights in the whole city and perhaps one round about.
It is chaos, you are more likely to see 3 or more people on a Scooter then to see someone riding solo, the road is covered in pot holes and you will see truckloads, literally, of people, standing in the backs of trucks on their way to work. This morning we seen a truck which would have had perhaps 40 people standing and clinging onto the sides of the vehicle. its incredible.
Besides the traffic, Phnom Penh is generally fairly sleepy and wasn't too much of a night life.
That said, i had a couple of my biggest nights drinking in Phnom Penh, but it is much different to going out anywhere else that i have been, we settled in at the bar each night, it was the same pub in which we were staying.
Beers were about a dollar and you could get a really good scotch for around three dollars. One of the nights, the bar manager allowed us to bring our own bottle of Vodka to share with our friends, which was totally awesome. We met a bloke named Steve, who was a couple years older then us. He had been travelling from New Zealand for four months, he'd been all through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and hadn't planned a single thing, he was just living day to day. I really envy that.
Oyur Our final night in Phnom Penh was spent in our room, sleeping, which was definitely the order of the evening due to our early morning flight the next day back to Kuala Lumpur.
Jarrad and I spent a couple hours in the City, wandering around the markets, he needed to buy some last minute gifts for family and friends, we played some pool and said our goodbyes to each other. Jarrad is heading home today, it was very sad to see him go, a bloke who I've shared the last month or so with. I don't know what it's gonna be like without him, we've built onto an already rock solid friendship, and its sad to think i'm not going to see him for a long while. But while we were together, we had an absolute blast, we have a million new stories to tell our mates back home.
This leaves me alone in Kuala Lumpur for four days, i don't really know what to do, as Jarrad and I did most of the touristy stuff on our first visit three and a half weeks ago, i think what i need to do is to start planning for my trip over to Europe, which begins on the 1st of August, with me landing in London and heading down to Maidstone, Kent to see and stay with a friend of mine from school.
I really can not wait.

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