After a few days in Kep, I decided to move on. I didn’t know where I would go, but I would stay on the coast. The management at my lodge wanted to call a tuk-tuk to transport me to wherever I needed to go, as all the other travelers seem to do, but I wanted to hitchhike out.
When I got to the end of the dirt road that met with the main road, I set my bags down and waited for a car. Unfortunately, I could see an excited tuk-tuk driver approaching in the distance. When he got to me, he assumed I needed a ride. I tried waved him along, but he stopped anyway. “Where are you going?” he asked, looking at my bag next to me. “Nowhere, just keep going,” I responded. He did not want to take no for an answer. Just then, I saw a van approaching. I picked up my bag and tried to walk away from him, but he followed. He was totally obstructing justice of the hitchhiker! It’s not the first time I’ve had this happen, but it is especially obnoxious when you are on a road with so little traffic. I waved my arm wildly at the van, while the tuk-tuk driver yelled at me saying it’s not a bus and they won’t stop for me. I just kept moving and waving my arms. The van whizzed past me, which I had expected. Then, it slammed on its breaks and I ran running towards it, missing the chance to make an “I told-you-so” comment to the tuk-tuk driver. They opened the window and I saw it was a van full of students. The driver asked where I was going, and I said Kampot, the nearest sizable town. He said I could come along and they opened the sliding door. I hesitated, seeing that it was jam packed with kids in their early teens. Just to be clear, I hesitated about how crowded it was, not that it was teenagers. My pack was huge and dirty, but the driver instructed them to make room for me.
The kids were pretty shy, but I made small talk with the driver. It turned out that he was actually their teacher and he was taking his students out on a field trip to Kep and they were just heading back to their school in Kampot. An hour or so later, we arrived in the town, and he dropped me off near the bridge in the middle of town. Kampot has a good reputation among travelers as a relaxing and quaint town set upon a large river that flows into the ocean. It did look interesting, and I was tempted to hang around and check it out, but for some reason, I decided to press forward. I walked across the long bridge and continued on west through the smaller half of town. I stopped for a bowl of noodles since I had skipped breakfast, and continued on my way. When I got to the edge of town, I put my arm out and waited for a ride. After an hour or two I still hadn’t gotten a ride. I ended up settling for a passing shared van that would take me to the main highway an hour away, where I could get transportation on to where I was heading. I have to say, it is a lot more difficult to be a persistent hitchhiker if you are alone (or have enough in your wallet for a ride).
At the junction, I got into a big old beater of a car. It was a sort of shared taxi that they crammed about ten people into. My bag was on top, and I was in the middle row. After a while, we dropped off some people that were sitting in the hatchback area with the gate open. I moved into that spot, which seemed less desired, but to me, it was more comfortable. I sat on top of a load of cargo, but had the whole space, plenty of legroom, open air, and a great view of all the people that were about to pass us our crawling vehicle.
We were going to Sihanoukville, one of Cambodia’s larger cities and a significant port town. It is also one of Cambodia’s biggest tourist attractions. People on a two-week style vacation will usually spend half of it seeing the temples of Angkor Wat and the other half on the beaches of Sihanoukville, avoiding Phnom Penh as much as possible. It has a reputation of being as close to spring break as it gets in Cambodia. I had met a couple of Swedish girls back in Kep who had passed through and spoke of it with disdain, saying it was obnoxiously touristy and not even worth going to. I had seen the worst kind of tourists around Siem Reap that wore t-shirts claiming that they had been to Sihanoukville. I had read about it and it seemed almost like Cancun, but more lawless. So why would I come here in the first place? I still don’t really know. I have a long history of avoiding places that are touristy for tourism’s sake. Yes, Angkor Wat and other major ruins or monuments, are touristy, but sometimes you have to grin and bear it, while you learn and immerse yourself in the history behind the significance of the place. Sihanoukville is not one of these places. It is a place you go to for white sand beaches, island tours, lots and lots of cheap beer, and, for the less considerate, jetskiing. Maybe it was my curiosity that brought me here. Perhaps I saw it as simply a different cultural phenomenon that I had always steered clear of. Or maybe I was just a little lonely already. I had spent the past year in the company of people that I knew well. Now I was on my own and, having a few days to kill, figured I would go and meet some other travelers. It was a pretty youthful place and maybe, as touristy as it was, I would meet some good people. I had spent so much of the last year avoiding tourists, or at least away from them by chance, to the point where I was curious what other people were like. Whatever the reason, I was on my way, and I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive. I halfway assumed that I would go crawling back to Phnom Penh the next morning.
When the taxi dropped us off, I assumed we were somewhere near the market that I saw on the map. After all, it seemed that it was a bit of a transport hub. It was a long walk, maybe 3 km to the beach spot that I had decided to go to. This part of town could have been any mid-sized town in the developing world and it was in no way the touristy beach paradise it was billed as. With my increasingly heavy pack, it took me nearly an hour to get to the beach. The closer I got, the more people were offering me tuk-tuk rides, hotels, and occasionally drugs. I was planning to go to a place called “Chivas Shack”. It was a beach front bar that supposedly had $2 rooms that were sure to be on the grimy side of basic. It would be on the far end of the beach, so I walked all the way to the end without finding it. In fact, there were almost no hotels directly on the beach. It was mostly a strip of fairly similar and modest beach bars and seafood joints. I was getting extremely exhausted, but I kept searching. At the end of the beach, I turned around and walked all the way back. Still didn’t find it. I tried to ask around, but the only people who were around were the people stalking me to sell me a hotel room. I didn’t want to tell them what I was looking for because there was a good chance of scamming. Finally, I gave up and checked into a place off the beach, Utopia, that offered $2 dorm beds. I would later find out that Chivas Shack had been closed down after a late night shooting incident. Apparently this place was a victim of its own success. One of the other local bar owners was unhappy that this place had become the top spot to party. Word on the street was that somebody well-connected, who had the law on their side (and government connections as well), arranged for somebody to “sort out” Chiva and his shack. There had been a shooting months before, and this time, it was the same shooter. He started firing his gun in the air outside the bar when security wouldn’t let him in with it. Then Chiva, the owner, showed up and put two bullets in him. Although the police at first called this self-defense and said it was justified, he was later arrested and charged with attempted murder. Anyway, it sounded like an unfortunate story for old Chiva, and I was sorry I missed it.
So now I was at Utopia, a place that seemed like it was picking up the slack from Chivas Shack. It was the kind of big hostelly complex that had everything. Dorms, rooms, bar, coffee bar, pool, hot tub, noodle shop, sandwich shop, wifi, dance floor, dance club, etc. If someone here didn’t feel like going to the beach, there was no real reason to leave. It fit in nicely to the kind of place I would normally never go to. I mean, it had a pool! Why in God’s green earth would I need a pool when the ocean is two blocks away? It was owned by a Kiwi and most of the staff were travelers. I generally try to support places that at least are locally owned and staffed. In the end, though, I was keeping myself to such a tight budget and this was probably one of the cheapest places for me to stay in the entire country. So how was it all? I guess I will come back on the next blog with some anecdotes from my time in “Snookie” as some have come to call the town.
I spent a couple of nights there, but soon had to return to Phnom Penh to, hopefully pick up my Thai visa. Unfortunately, I arrived too late in the day (the bus ride is about five or six hours) and wasn’t able to get it in the same day. This time, back in Phnom Penh, I decided to stay in a different part of town, known as Boeng Kak. It is also know to some as “lakeside”, since it sits, or once sat, next to the lake known as Boeng Kak. I was expecting a lake, but now it is more of a mucky puddle. The city has been filling it in to make room for new development. It was a pretty slummy area, and still is, but they are also evicting the people that live along the lake and demolishing their homes. I could actually see the machines carrying out their destruction through the night from the window in my room.
Compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, drugs are widely tolerated and it really showed in this neighborhood. I couldn’t walk down the street without being offered a variety of drugs by the sketchiest of all dealers. One time I was even offered a gun. I returned to stay in this neighborhood several times, but always had mixed feelings about it. It was more humble and ragged than the other places to stay, and the price matched. I liked this. It was also one of the only areas that I went to in Cambodia where I didn’t feel entirely safe. I had a couple of awkward encounters at night in the neighborhood that I think could have easily been near attempts at robbing me. My favorite part of this neighborhood, and Phnom Penh itself, was the ability to rent a bike for the day for $1. To explore the city by motodup would have added up quickly. On a bicycle, though, I was able to move across the flat city quickly and go wherever I wanted. I also never had to bother with getting lost. It must be the most navigable city I have ever been to (after Phoenix) and I felt like I had a strong grasp on it within a couple days. The moto drivers, on the other hand, still didn’t seem to have it figured out. The problem with this, though, was that they wouldn’t let on that they didn’t know where they were going. Even if they didn’t understand where you told them to go, they would either expect you to guide them, or sometimes just take you to the neighborhood that tourists were most likely to go to. I had several occasions where I had explained where I was going, and suddenly realized he was taking me to the quay, where most tourist activity is centered.
So my main purpose for coming back to Phnom Penh was to pick up my visa for Thailand. I was still
planning on spending the next few months volunteering with refugees near the border with Burma. I took the long ride across town to the embassy, and hoped that my forged bank statement and letter to explain why I didn’t have an onward flight would work out. Sure enough, I secured my shiny blue 60-day Thailand tourist visa and was on my way. Nothing was in between me and Thailand except waiting for my references to get back to the volunteer recruiter.
I spent the rest of the day riding my bike around the city. I found a dirt road that ran parallel to some old train tracks, and decided to just follow this all the way out of town. This turned out to be a pretty interesting little slice of town. In most places, the property hugging train tracks is not the most valuable or desirable, and this is no exception. Some of the shanties were just feet from the train tracks, making me wonder how long trains actually come here. The country no longer has any operating passenger trains, but there is the occasional cargo train. Whether they even use this particular track, I do not know. It didn’t look like there was much respect for the potential danger though. The atmosphere was much more like a friendly village than a capitol city. Eventually the dirt road turned into a rocky, occasionally muddy, path that criss-crossed over the berm that the tracks sat on. After another thirty minutes, I realized I could probably just follow this for hours and eventually I would actually be in a rural village built next to the train tracks. I turned around and headed back to town.
I went back to Sihanoukville the next day. The best part of that bus ride was I discovered something magical. Duck eggs. There were a couple of kids selling hard-boiled duck eggs at a rest stop. I wondered why they looked weird. They were a little longer and bigger. The white had a different texture and didn’t seem as opaque. The yolk was almost creamy. Absolutely delicious. I would make a point of getting a couple of these eggs from them every time I passed through this rest stop.
In Sihanoukville, I waited anxiously for a few days for my references to respond to the volunteer coordinator. When I finally got word of my acceptance, I was informed that the next orientation for new volunteers wasn’t for a couple more weeks. This would mean that if I wanted to make it home for Christmas, I would not be able to fulfill the organization’s three-month requirement. I responded, asking if there could be an exception for me. They told me that they are very strict about their three-month policy, which is completely understandable, and that if I couldn’t commit, I would not be able to volunteer.
This new development put me in a very tough spot. I had enough money to get home, but not much more. I wasn’t quite ready to go though. I considered working at the hostel in Sihanoukville. They would pretty much take anyone to do a variety of jobs. Basically an employee works 4 hours a day in exchange for a dorm bed, $5 towards food, and free drinks at the bar while you are on the clock. Yes, that’s right, free drinks DURING your shift. It seemed like something I could pull off for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but a couple of months? No, no. The thought of that scared me.
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