Phnom Penh - nice to have been but nicer to leave

So I said I may aswell give this blog some semblance of literary credibility by posting on the Phnom Penh leg of the journey. Apparently requests for more posts are coming thick and fast so either everyone is bored or Darragh and Mark did something right.


Anyway, our journey from Siam Reap to Phnom Penh was pretty bad. The first 4/5 hours consisted of a game of chicken along the main road with cars, trucks, cows and motorbikes coupled with an a/c breakdown (the driver had to fix a pipe under Mark and Ed's seat so you can make your own mind up on who broke it). After that it started to get interesting when the road started to look like the surface of the moon. Rookie mistake by us sitting at the back of the bus! We landed at the bus station to literally a scrum of tuc-tuc drivers offering hostels and spins into town. This kind of set the tone for the next two days whereby you cannot walk by someone without having something shoved into your face or being harassed for a tuc-tuc. Us Irish are sceptical at the best of times so now we thought the entire city was trying to rip us off. The road system there is mental. Everyone just drives until they can't go any further, stops and heads off again. We saw about 6 sets of traffic lights in 2 days.


We ended up staying at the Capitol hostel for about $3 a night in clean but not exactly luxurious surrounds. They took care of our Vietnam visa for us which was very handy and saved us a lot of hassle. That night we headed into Sisowath quay which is the area with the most pubs and restaurants. We found a couple of nice bars and settled in for the night and we ended up in a club called Heart of Darkness about 10 blocks away. Whilst Kevin Ed did clean up at pool we wouldn't be recommending the club or that general area.


The next day we decided to go to the shooting range. There were only four of us as Darragh was suffering from a less than compliant digestive system. The range is an actual army barracks, not that it makes it any less mad. Just outside the entrance there were a load of swans, ducks, geese and chicken running around which we thought slightly odd but nevertheless we proceeded to peruse the "menu" handed to us. The guy then asked us if we wanted to shoot one of the chickens. We declined but plumped for the AK-47 in the end. As you can see from the video, Mick got a little carried away.

We went out that night again but after talking to some locals they directed us to a better club called Emerald. Quite expensive but we were able to relax and watch Man Yoo destoy the Gooners in comfort. The next day we hired a couple of tuc-tucs and headed for the first museum of the trip - the Toul Sleng museum. It was used as a detention and interrogation centre before the detainees were transported to the killing fields. Fairly harrowing stuff if truth be told. No one knows quite how many people died as a result of Pol Pot's genocide but it's between 2 and 3 million. After that we headed out to the killing fields which are about 15k outside Phnom Penh. The memorial building in the picture is full of the skulls of all the victims exhumed here. They were taken from a truck, knelt down over a pit, had their throats cut and pushed in with the rest of the dead bodies.

That night we booked the early bus out of Phnom Penh for the next morning to Saigon and went out for a very tasty meal in a Japanese restaurant called Gingha for $3 a head. As the title of the entry suggests, Cambodia and Phnom Penh in particular is somewhere I'm glad to have seen but I wouldn't go back. Still it could have been worse........I could have been in work!