The G.S.E.A.S. adventure continues.. After Saigon, we hopped on yet another bus, prepared to leave Vietnam, and headed west to Cambodia. Country #2!
Cambodia was the poorest out of all the countries I visited. I thought Thailand was dirty, but Cambodia definitely takes the cake. The amount of poverty around you is so blatant that it's astounding. There's just a huge lack of infrastructure, especially roads. In Thailand, when you take an overnight bus, they make fairly regular stops, and they will even wake you up in the middle of the night for a pit stop. In Cambodia, we took a sleeper bus (beds, but no bathroom!) from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. At some point as we went bounding over the unpaved rural roads, I realized we were't stopping, probably because there was nowhere TO stop. Around 2am, I couldn't take it any longer, so I made my way up to the driver to ask, "Toilet?" What does the man do? Pulls the bus over to the side of the road, which is surrounded by nothing. I think I'm the only one who's hopping off the bus and squatting next to the road to do my business, but it's only when I'm standing up that I see other people (mostly guys) also getting off to relieve themselves. Hi, nice to meet you, here's me peeing. That's probably an experience I won't be forgetting soon.
Anyways, we ended up calling it CamBROdia because we were reunited with our travel buddies from Hanoi, and let's face it, a lot of ridiculousness went down in this seemingly lawless land.
Our first stop was a brief one in the capital of Phnom Penh, with a visit to the Khmer Rouge killing fields at Choeung Ek. This is one of the most heart wrenching and moving places I have ever been to. Read about the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge between 1975-1979 here.
The next day, we headed south to the beach at Sihanoukville, or as we like to call it, Snooky. Because it is that kind of place that deserves to be named after a Jersey Shore character. This is like the Jekyll and Hyde of Cambodia, if not all of Southeast Asia. Literally, the two sides of Sihanoukville are night and day.
My, what a lovely beach town we have come upon..
It looks so innocent, but deep down, this place is just raw and unfiltered hedonism, and it's dangerous. Lovely beach during the day, but at night Snooky will suck you in and crush your soul/liver, so it's better to not linger too long.
After a stay in Snooks that saw me get 603 bug bites (yes, we counted) on my legs, we headed up to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. The temples are beyond belief, so that will have to be for another post.
