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Today we are doing our own self guided tour of some of the sights of Hue. We are aiming to see Ming MangTomb, Khai Dinh Tomb, Tu Duc Tomb, Trieu Tri Tomb, Tu Hieu Pergoda &Thien Mu Pergoda. Not sure if we will get to see all of them, depends on time & if we can find the places we want to go to, without getting lost. Ok, getting lost is a given, but doing a tour of the sights ourselves will be much more enjoyable then being herded about with a large group.

We decided on getting a scooter again, its reasonably cheap & allows us to see things in a reasonably efficient manner. We could do boat & scooter, but the boat trip would cost just as much as the scooter hire & it’s not a very long ride anyhow - that’s what you get for being a tourist.

We catch the night bus to Hanoi this afternoon (5.15pm) & arrive tomorrow morning (around 8am) so I better get going, it’s nearly 7.30am now.

We dropped off some laundry yesterday, which should have come back last night, but it didn’t. They told us to come back this morning to get it & it still isn’t there. They don’t have the most secure of methods for people to collect their laundry, they leave it out & people just grab their bag of clothes, so possibly someone has pinched it after it was washed or it is still be washed - longest washing time ever though, if it is.

To top it off, the door to our room won’t close. We opened it this morning to check on our laundry & the door has shifted, so now we are in a room with a door that won’t shut or lock.We had thought of staying here one more night, but it appears that we are checking out today, we could change rooms, but it’s probably a sign that we need to leave.

From here we will head off to Hue. We hired the scooter again today, so hopefully we will have some time to check out the Old Town a bit more & the beach before we head off, will need to check into the bus times I guess.

Hope that the laundry shows up, we did a load of all our “best” clothes, my only pair of jeans & only bra (yep my idea of only having one bra for this trip is suddenly seeming a little dumb) & Geoff’s good trousers and shirt, amongst other things were in the load of washing which is missing - DOH!!!!

Today we hired a scooter (what they call a motorbike) and headed off to see one of the attractions of the area, the Cham ruins at My Son. We hired the scooter for 100,000 dong, and then had to fill it with petrol, a full tank cost us 65,000 d, (petrol & hire approx $9 AUD) we weren’t too sure how much we needed, in the end 1/2 a tank would have been fine.

You can get to My Son a few different ways by bus with a tour company (not our style & the cost only covers transport & sometimes a guide, still have to pay entry), taxi (a bit pricey), bicycle (need to leave pretty early, which we didn’t at best it’s 35km each way) or scooter. We liked the scooter idea because it gave us the flexibility to do what we wanted in the time that we felt like doing it in.

Originally we had intended on going to see the Cham Ruins early in the morning, but we had a bit of an easy morning, getting up and getting ready in our own time, which was really nice.

One thing that has been lacking on this trip has been some down time, when we aren’t rushing about to do everything, we tend to try to cram so much into our days that we always seem to be exhausted before the day has really begun. If we didn’t have a time limit (Geoff has to be in Canada by a certain time) then we wouldn’t be doing this whirlwind adventure of Asia, but hey, at least we are doing it at all.

After getting some breakfast & some spring rolls to go (for our lunch) we headed off to Cham Ruins via the petrol station. At least we have experienced going to the petrol station Asian style before, in Mongolia when we were traveling by Jeep & other places on various buses. There is no line, you pretty much push your bike in, where there is space & wave some cash in their face to be served. We fortunately didn’t have to wave the cash in his face, but we did maneuver to bike as closely as possible to the pump around a couple of other bikes already there. You wouldn’t do it in the West, but here it’s the only way to be served.

W had been told that to get to the Cham ruins we would take a left onto the highway & then turn off at a sign for the ruins, but we seemed to miss the highway, probably good as we saw signs for a toll (30,000 d each way). I am not really sure how you could take only a couple of turns to get there, as we took quite a few more, it was a relief to find the sign to My Son when we did, but in reality it was pretty easy to find, even if we did miss the highway. We had plenty of petrol to use, so even with us going the long way it wasn’t a bad thing. Apparently it’s about 30km from Hoi-An, but we would have driven about 40+kms.

Our ride through the countryside was really nice. There were heaps of people in the fields harvesting rice & drying it on the road. They cut the stalks, then put them in a little machine which removes the heads of rice. The remaining stalks are then scattered about the empty rice paddies & burnt. The grains of rice are then taken and scattered on the road to dry. Sometimes they have sheets of plastic which the rice is spread out on, other times it’s just spread on the road itself. The roads were reasonably wide, you could fit a couple of lanes of traffic in each direction in some parts, but once the rice is spread on both sides, it reduces the traffic usage area to one lane, with a little room for scooters/ bikes if you are lucky. Most people seemed to avoid driving on the rice, the only ones that I saw that did ride over it were people on bicycles.

There were also heaps of people drying out corn as well. Most were still on the cob, but there were some where the corn kernels had been removed & the kernels were being dried separately. They also dried out the husks in huge piles. I thought that perhaps they were drying them out Laos style to be used as papers for rolling your own, but discovered that they were simply burning them. The corn didn’t seem to be covering the road as much as the rice was though, they seemed to place the corn to dry by the sides of the road, not sure if that was just because the road was a little narrower (although it didn’t seem to stop those drying rice) or perhaps corn is just worth more, so they were being more careful.

The scenery was nice too, some mountains in the distance, homes & fields of rice, lotus flowers etc really did make it quite interesting to see.

The Cham ruins weren’t too expensive to see (60,000 d each), which was good, to be fair there isn’t much to see. I think that we saw them back to front as well, we saw the most preserved ruins first, when it would have been nice to have seen them at the end. Some people liken them to Angkor Wat, but the Cham Ruins don’t even compare. They are much smaller, & used small bricks, instead of the big blocks of stone at Angkor. Cham ruins are still nice, but there is only one area that has any ruins that resemble any sort of buildings & gives a hint of their former glory. It was nice to see them, but once we had seen the good stuff & realised that it just went down-hill from there we got over it pretty quick - Same Same, but different.

We were heading out when the rain that we had been watching approach, actually hit. It seems that most afternoons are when the rain comes & it lasts for about 1/2 an hour or more. We found some shelter (a parking area for Jeeps etc to ferry tourists about), which had some tables & stools & had the rest of our Spring Rolls. Once we had finished them, we set about finding ways to entertain ourselves, eventually deciding to settle upon building different structures with the abundance of stools at our disposal, we came soooo close to getting a complete arch that we could ride the bike through, we put the last 2 stools in & it collapsed twice, but in the end the rain had stopped, so we decided to head off, after waiting out the rain for almost 2 hours.

On our way back to drop off the bike, we stopped in to see the Japanese covered bridge, which was ok, interesting to see,but that is about it. We also went down to the riverside & had a look at the buildings a bit more in Old Town. We ended up having dinner down there which was nice. We have rented the bike again for tomorrow & will check out the beach & probably stay one more night, it’s so nice here, perhaps the day after we will go to Hue to see the Deaf cafe’s they have there.

Traveling around different parts of Asia & experiencing the effects of the internet filters that they have in place certainly makes me wonder how fucked up the internet filter will get to be in Australia. In China you can’t access Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, & Blog sites, whilst Vietnam doesn’t allow access to Facebook & Blog sites. I wonder what Australia’s Internet Filter will block access to in the future?

It’s funny that Australia is following in the footsteps of communist countries. What happens to freedom of speech & expression, when you try to mold people into what ‘is best for the country’ by sheltering people from what is deemed to be inappropriate? Speaking from personal experience, the more people are sheltered from things, the more curious they become.

As much as I love Australia, it seems that freedom of speech and expression is becoming more of a rarity & I am a rebel through & through, I don’t like anyone telling me what I can & can’t say - screw that!

I seem be “losing” a lot of things of late, although I suspect that some of the items had a little help out of my bag. The most recent I discovered today, my little book of address’s & names of people that we have met along the way - FUCK!!!! I didn’t have any other copies of that information, which is a real bugger.

So far a few things have gone missing…
Water Bottle
Bandana
Underwear (not just one pair either)
Small Soap Dish
Chinese Phrasebook
Pencil
Notebook with address’s

I am not the only one to have stuff go missing, though all that Geoff is admitting to losing is his hat, which is why he has a green felt one from Mongolia - featured heavily in our photos.

I am a bit bummed about the notepad with all the address’s in it. I really wish that I had copied the address’s out of my book. If you are one of those people that I have met along the way in our travels, can you please send me a message, so that I can get your contact details again? Thanks

I am pretty over the food situation at the moment. It’s just such a pain in the ass to get food. I am over having to explain my food allergies, over trying to gauge if they understand, over having to start the whole process again when I have to walk away from someone who doesn’t understand, over getting food that isn’t ok for me to eat & over often getting food that tastes truly awful when it is ok for me to eat.

We rarely eat out at home because it’s just too hard to organise it, and I can converse in a language I am comfortable with there. To be eating out everyday for many months, several times a day is getting a little wearisome, yeah there are no dishes & stuff, but it’s so not worth it, at least not for me. It’s causing me quite a lot of stress & to be honest I am forever feeling hungry.

I have had countless close calls, and some pretty crappy food. I might have had lots of veggies in Mongolia, but no spice & I did have an anaphylactic reaction, which I should have gone to hospital for & didn’t - I can self medicate. China no-one spoke English & to be fair, I did have some good food there, but they use a lot of extra sauces and stuff, all the soy sauce contained wheat, so I had to steer clear of anything with flavour other than chili (or so it seemed at the time). Laos wasn’t too bad, but when I had my allergies translated by some of the locals (had it done 3 times) I was suddenly allergic to all field vegetables, rice & beans - that took a lot of explaining. Cambodia wasn’t too bad, except people thought that I was allergic to bay leaves, rice and coconut.

A lot of the translation mistakes are to be expected when you have people who know a little English translate your allergies & I don’t know that it would necessarily be any better if I had a professional translator write out my allergies, at least the locals use words that are familiar in their area. A piece of paper can only convey so much & when you write down all my food allergies (Milk (all dairy), Wheat, Rye, Oats, Barley, Eggs & Peanuts) on paper, it takes up a lot of room, (although Rye gets bumped off the list a bit, they don’t know what is in Asia). You can’t have anything written down that is so long that people lose interest before they even start to read it. Of course when you do that, you miss things too & then there is usually some clarification needed & without knowing the language well enough it makes it hard.

Food is important in life, you need to it survive, and as much as that is true for me, it is also my enemy. I can live or die by eating it & most people have trouble grasping the idea that if I eat or even touch some things that I am allergic to, it can kill me. The chocolate cake incident of 2002, when I only touched the cake still gets wide eyed expressions of awe, as does the pina colada incident last year, when some idiot thought that adding dairy cream to my drink would be ok - 2 epi-pens were used & I stopped breathing & went blue. You can’t convey all that on a little piece of paper.

I would love to have my own kitchen, none of the hostels or hotels have any sort of cooking facilities in them, which is a pain in the arse. In the past when we have been traveling, we have managed to cook most of the way, but this time, not so much. The closest that we have come to cooking anything, is when we have gotten some hot water & made up potato soup (we got some flaked potato, which you make into a soup with hot water) or vermicelli soup (vermicelli with hot water & some veggies) - funnily enough, I only ate that in China.

Finding places to actually get food to cook realistically isn’t an easy feat either, especially if you move around a lot, you usually get it all sorted (know where to go for what) & then you move onto the next place. It seems to take at least a couple of days to get it sorted, but you can do it.

If we did this again, I would get an electric hot plate, (all the places we have stayed have had at least one powerpoint & most have fridges too) & cook myself. At least then I know exactly what is in my food. I am sure that I could ditch some of the stuff that I am carrying, like my mattress (which I haven’t used at all) & bring a smaller sleeping bag to allow for more space to carry food supplies.

Phnom Penh has an interesting street system, all the streets are given numbers, but they aren’t in any sort of order, but it gets better, the numbers are all out of sync as well on the street. You will find number 1 next to 456, there is no odd or even side of the road, it goes by who ever got their first, so number 1 could be at the middle of the street & number 2 at one of the ends - & they often have the same number twice (which is what happened when we were looking for DDP) needless to say it took us ages to find where we needed to go.

DDP is located at No 7A Street 101, Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh - they have a website too.

DDP is linked with a church organisation at the moment, although they are not linked with the church, that is just where some of the funding comes from.

We spent a lot of time talking to Justin, who is originally from England, he has been working at DDP since 2003. It was so nice chatting to him, he said that he really enjoyed chatting to us because I was using Auslan which is very close to BSL, & I enjoyed interpreting for him as well (mostly voicing for Geoff) because BSL is so similar to Auslan.

DDP was established in 1996. There are at least 2,000 known Deaf people in Cambodia, who go to Krousar Thmey schools or have contact with DDP, but there are estimates that there are about 50,000 deaf people in the country, however there isn’t any reliable data available. DDP is working hard to try to find as many deaf people as they can.

DDP has 7 projects currently underway….

1/ Education of Adults
Krousar Thmey (KT) is focused on the education of children, but once they are too old to go to a KT school, then the only option that they have for schooling is to go to DDP.

DDP often takes in many students who drop out from KT schools, often because their parents need them to work in the fields & help to support the family or perhaps they have failed.

We met students in grade 1 & 2, who were aged between mid-teens to early 20’s. They have had students in their 50’s though. Last year, Justin told us that there was a first for Cambodia, 2 Deaf students graduated from KT, athough it was only 2, it’s a good start.

There is a HUGE need for teachers of the Deaf to help with schooling of their many students.

2/ Interpreting

They have 7 of the 8 Interpreters (Professional Interpreters) work at DDP. All of them know English, as many of the NGO meetings involve people who speak English.

3/ Job Training

DDP helps to find Deaf people jobs & provides them with interpreters so that they can do job training for their jobs. Some of the jobs that they find for people are - hairdressing, metal work, motor mechanic, sewing etc.

4/ Linguistic Research

DDP is doing research into Khmer Sign Language & working towards making a SL dictionary. They have 4 booklets completed in a proposed set of 6, which will ultimately be combined into one dictionary. There is a linguistics expert from America, Tash, who is working with locals to collate the signs & a local Deaf (man) artist who draws all the signs.

5/ Finding Deaf people

As I mentioned earlier there are only 2,000 recorded Deaf in Cambodia, but the real number could be as much as 50,000 (maybe more) so there are a lot of people to find, it’s a big job & a job that Justin is in charge of.

Many deaf people, have not had any exposure to other deaf people. If they can get them to come to DDP to study it takes them a couple of months to realise that the room of people (their class that they are studying with) is full of other Deaf people just like them. They have no real mode of communication, as Justin said, he has never seen so many Deaf people without the ability to communicate in any way, normally mime or gesture can be used, but they can’t even do that - WOW!

6/ Establishing Community Cultural Centres/ Deaf Clubs

Many Cambodians are more focussed on working to live in the fields, rather than any sort of social affairs. DDP is trying to encourage Deaf people to come together & build a cultural history & foundation like so many other countries already have. Many have a history that focuses around sporting events & that is what Justin would like to see happen here too, but it’s a bit of a battle to achieve.

Justin would love to see some younger Deaf involved in sport in come over & help with this project - perhaps some from Australia?

7/ Welfare

This is a new project area, which has come about to provide “help” when required by members of the community need it, such as for hospital or doctor visits.

It was nice to have a tour of the building and meet everyone there, including the students. DDP is in need of people and money to assist in getting the work done that needs to happen. I would really like to do something there. Hearing about everything that is happening & all that they are trying to achieve, has really inspired me to look into working for an NGO, such as DDP.

I enjoy working as an interpreter in Australia, soon to be Canada, but there is such a need in Cambodia & other countries, maybe I could do something more. I enjoy working in the Deaf community, but am also aware of the fact that I hearing & a NERD (Not Even Related to Deaf) so I don’t want to be branded a “helper”. It’s a hard middle ground that has to be found, but I feel like maybe I could be of more use in countries like Cambodia, Mongolia etc.

I am determined to find out more about NGO’s, & if I could do any sort of work for DDP. Not sure how long I could do it for, Geoff has his permanent residence visa for Canada & he needs to spend at least 3 of the next 5 years in Canada. Justin mentioned that many people like to volunteer for 1 or 2 weeks, but that really isn’t enough, I was thinking maybe 6 months to a year or so.

I would love to work for DDP itself though. If some of my talents could be used &

Our last day in Cambodia was memorable & had a big impact on me, much like my last couple of days in Mongolia.

After visiting Tuol Sleng (S-21) we headed to The Killing Fields with our Tuk-Tuk driver, you couldn’t walk, it’s not exactly close, nice ride through the back streets and into part of the countryside.The Killing Fields ($2 each) were a little like a park, which is partially maintained & other parts look fairly overgrown & unkept. There are hundreds of mass graves here, with hundreds of victims in each, there are estimates that betweeen 750, 000 to 3 million people were killed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. This was the final stop for anyone at S-21.

Prisoners were blindfolded & to save bullets bludgeoned to death with whatever tools were available. Often they couldn’t kill the prisoners fast enough, so they were kept overnight in a small shack, to be killed in the morning, with blindfolds so they couldn’t see what horrors were in store for them. As for the noise, they had a tree, which they attached a megaphone to & blasted music to drown out the screams & killing.

When you come in the wet season like we did, you see bones, teeth & clothing that come to the surface, it really brought it home that this was an area of genocide. I lost track of all the teeth & bones I saw & clothes were everywhere as well, even on the paths.

There were a few little signs about the place informing you of different areas of importance, some of the buildings were pulled down after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, so all that remains is a small sign. The Killing Tree was probably made all the more gruesome by the clothing, bones & teeth scattered about the place. The tree was used to kill children, who were held by their feet & bashed against the tree until they were dead. Their reasoning for killing whole families (including little children & babies) was so that they couldn’t exact any sort of revenge for the deaths of their parents.

There is a museum on the grounds, which is worth a visit, it has a small exhibit & also shows a 15 minute movie about the area (it is included in the cost). We didn’t have a guide for the Killing Fields, but we overheard a lot of them & the information that you get in the short film is exactly the same as a guide will tell you.

The tower of skulls is pretty amazing, and it only contains a fraction of the victims bones & it is only one of the many that can be found around the country. The brutality was gruesome at best, very disturbing to see these areas in person & moving. It would be nice if humankind could learn from events such as this & stop further acts of genocide occurring. Unfortunately, since this one ended in 1979 (from 1975-1979) there have been many other acts of genocide already, we don’t live in an ideal world, but perhaps if more of us have the guts to stand up for what is right & band together against such acts it can make a difference.

Wow, What a day! We visited Tuol Sleng & The Killing Fields, so it was a rather somber day. Highly recommended as a place to visit, on any trip to Cambodia, in particular Phnom Penh. A visit to both areas really brings it home about how inhumane some members of society can be.

Quite a few touts & even the guesthouse where we are staying (Sunday) tried to convince us to go to the Killing Fields first, & then head to Toul Sleng, but we were determined to see Tuol Sleng first, then head out to the Killing Fields, as that was the way the “prisoners” would have seen both areas. It was the right way to see both places too. Unfortunately we missed the movie which shows at Tuol Sleng at 10am & 3pm & lasts for an hour, it would have been nice to have known about it before we arrived, but such is life.

It was $2 entry & you received a little pamphlet with some information about S-21, you could get a guide, but we didn’t, we like to do things in our time & the groups that we saw appeared to be rushing about from room to room. Walking around the former school turned prison was quite moving, even though there is an obvious lack of any informative signage, but I think that is part of the experience. It helps to do some reading beforehand & I am sure that watching the movie would help too.

A block mainly consists of (a few) rooms with only a bed, shackles, a tin case for prisoners excrement & in some cases photos of some of the corpses they found at S-21. When the Khmer Rouge fled S-21 (code name for Tuol Sleng) to avoid capture, there were 14 prisoners corpses discovered in various degrees of decay, none of them could be identified, one was a woman. They were buried on-site at S-21, in a courtyard area just outside of A Block.

B Block had a large collection of images of the prisoners kept there. There are images of people posing for their mug shot & amongst them you can find images of people that have been murdered there. Some were obviously bludgeoned to death, starved or driven to suicide to escape from the never ending abuse that they were subjected to.

There are many photos of little children, including babies that were brought here mixed amongst all the pictures of the adults. Whilst prisoners died here, many more were murdered at the Killing Fields. There were a few images of that will stick with me, like the little boy with chains wrapped around his neck, mothers with their little babies, and images of those who had already been subjected to abuse from their captors before their official photo was taken & they were recorded as a part of S-21.

It was interesting that they had NO SMILING signs about the place, I don’t think that anyone could really smile in such a somber environment (even with the limited information available).

The cells that people were kept in were tiny & when you realise that they were shackled so that they couldn’t walk around in that limited space (which you could barely lie down in) & that they only had a tin for excrement & possibly a dish for food to furnish that cell it’s quite depressing. These people did nothing, they were the victims of a leader who went insane with paranoia.

The same block that has the movie showing (on the 3rd level) has a photo exhibition on the other 2 levels, with some stories of some of the Khmer Rouge, which was interesting, most of them didn’t see any other option to secure their own survival, other than to join the Khmer Rouge & many went missing.

Here are some interesting links….
Chum Mey: Tuol Sleng Survivor (BBC article)
Article - “S21″: Cambodia’s Bloody Hands
Photos from Tuol Sleng

After packing up our stuff (we have a few souvenirs to cart around, well more camera gear that we have to post back after the incident in Laos) & then getting some breakfast, we caught a taxi to the northern bus station (at least this time the hostel wrote out the right place, unlike what happened in China). We had to pay the toll + the fare, which was a little different, but we wanted to get over the border & into Cambodia as quickly as possible, so taxi was the only way to do that.

When we arrived at the bus station we were told to go to the first floor (we were on the 3rd floor), we took the stairs down, not sure what was on the 2nd floor, but there was an armed guard there & we were waved on (”nothing to see here”) pretty quickly.

We weren’t 100% sure about the availability of buses to Aranya Prathet, the first counter we tried had a bus that left at 2.30, but we found another with a bus that left at 11 (15 minutes wait for us). It took us about 4 hours to get to Aranya Prathet. Then we had to catch a tuk tuk to the border (6km away), which we made pretty clear, the going rate is 80 Baht for a tuk tuk, which was almost 1/2 of our individual bus fares, but one of the only ways there. You could get a motorcycle/ scooter to the border as well if you were traveling alone & not much luggage.

We had heard that there are scams on the Thai side for Cambodian Visas, so I was pretty vigilant along the way following the signs, so when he turned off, when I knew that the border was straight ahead & told us that it was in some building on a side street, I was prepared. Geoff didn’t have to say anything, as I was pretty quick to tell him off. He insisted that this was the border & I told him under no uncertain terms that this was not the border & that we did not agree to go anywhere else but the border & showed him which direction the border was in, more to let him know that we weren’t the big suckers he thought we were.

In the end we made it to the border, the Thai side was fairly easy to get through, as we expected. Although I do wish that immigration would use some of the first 3 pages that they always seem to skip, before long they will just start to randomly stamp the back of my passport.

We ignored all the touts on the way through, well, I did alright. Geoff said Good Afternoon to one of the guys that said Good Afternoon to us & he latched onto us like a Leech that just won’t stop sucking. I was not amused, so over being screwed over & Poipet is well known for the corruption & scams that occur, so I was trying to be fairly careful. We managed to get rid of him & yet another latched on. They work in organised groups, which makes things interesting & quite annoying.

We found the visa office (on your right after you walk across the border) with some officers hanging about both inside & out. Inside there would have been 8 officers (that we could see) milling around. We asked for a form & said thanks (Ahh Koon), which they seemed impressed with, filled it out & handed it back, only to be told that the “advertised” price of $20 USD for a tourist visa (each) now also needed 100 Baht (each) to be paid in order for the visa to be processed now, our first BRIBE. Those who know me, know that I don’t like getting screwed & as much as I wanted to give them a piece of my mind & tell them that the extra cost of 100 Baht (about $3) was crap & they couldn’t do that, we also wanted to get into the country.

Once we received our visas, wee had to proceed a bit further up the road to get the visa stamped etc & fill out more forms. Collecting yet more touts on the way, oh crap! They did lead us to a free bus that dropped us at another bus station, which was kinda helpful, but we know they screwed us. Turns out that Capital tours (which seems to be recommended in Lonely Planet) runs a bus to Siem Reap & that is where we were herded to, their bus station. It was such a SCAM from the start, yes, the bus to their main bus station was free, but the tickets were over-priced (buy them across the road) & if you need money changed do it across the road too, the rate they give is shite its not even 1/2 the rate you should get.

Unfortunately all the touts got on the bus too (found out later they were all tuk-tuk drivers), we decided not to talk to them, unless we had to. They found out that we were Australian & got a little upset with us, “Australians are so nice, but you are not, why?” My response was frank “We don’t like getting screwed”, which we don’t, I won’t encourage someone to rip us off.

The scam bus stopped at a restaurant along the way, but we didn’t get off, it would just be another over-priced expensive place like the bus stop was (yep, we are getting a little cynical aren’t we?). The 20 minute stop, turned out to be 40, but we did still arrive in Siem Reap in 3 hours (we were told 2.5 - 3 at the start). They made one stop, at Popular Guesthouse - sooooo happy we didn’t decide to stay there, which is also the office for Capitol Tours.

Prior to arriving, we had decided to stay at Mandalay Inn, which just happens to be across from Popular Guesthouse, which now seemed to be a bit of a blessing & a curse. Good for us because it was so close, but bad for the same reason. We just hoped that we would be able to get a room at Mandalay & not have to walk back out again. Luckily we did & wow what an Oasis.

The hospitality here is amazing, we felt so welcome. They were very friendly & we even managed to get my allergies translated into Cambodian, well most of them. They don’t know what Rye or Barley is here, which is fair, they don’t seem to use those ingredients in Asia in general.

Dinner was at the food stalls at the end of Pub street & for $5.50 (USD) it was pretty good, apparently it’s one of the cheaper places to eat at. Tomorrow we check out the temples - wohoo!