Journey to Peace Village

This week Tracy and I made our way into the Kingdom of Cambodia. The first couple days have been an adventure. First we were hassled at the border crossing at Had Lek. The procedure is--you give the authorities a passport and a small wallet sized photo. You fill out a form. The border guards stamp twice to confirm identity and payment of the 1100 baht visa fee. Well they pulled us aside. I thought they would complain about mine because I have all those visa renewals in Vietnam. But they had a problem with Tracy's: one of the guards had forgotten to stamp it paid. The tuk tuk driver was going to take it back for 20 baht, but Tracy didn't want to part with passport and was afraid to get on the motobike. So I ended up going and we got it cleared up without having to resort to any serious bribery.

The first night we stayed in Koh Krong. This is a border town with the reputation as kind of a "Wild West(ern Cambodia)"place. It's well deserved. There were a lot of dicey looking westerners in one of the restaruants and one of the locals offered us some marijuana. Proably a scam for a shakedown by the cops or a robbery. There were flyers for bars offering "Babes, Booze and Billiards." At the restaurant, we were seated next to a jaundiced German who alternated between belching, a hacking cough and bellowing for service from the waitress. The streets were totally unlit. Except to go to check emails, we stayed in the room and watched "The Legend of Curly's Gold"(City Slickers 2).

Then it was off to the main city on the south coast, Sianhoukville. The journey was surprisingly smooth, the highway system has been created by the Thai army in recent years. Last year, four bridges were completed, allowing uninteruppted travel between the two cities. (Before one had to use ferries four times to complete the journey to Sianhoukville. The drawback, we had to sit behind the stairs to the bathroom, which was decorated with a sign reading "Piss Only Please." It stank and we were relieved to get to Sianhoukville.

This city has a reputation as an up and coming Margaritaville, appealing mainly to backpackers and middle aged men looking for the illusion of virility. But one of the guests in Trat said that there was more to it than that, and I really wanted to have a little beach time on this vacation. So we booked a room at the seaview hotel. It was a very nice hotel, only yards from the beach, but it no longer had a seaview because a building was going up directly in front of it. Sianhoukhville is experiencing runaway growth as a cheaper alternative to the beaches of Thailand.

The beach was very crowded and there were a lot of shady types. As my friend and supervisor, Eliza said, it's a good place to go for body piercing and tattoos. This being said, the water was nice and we had a fabulous meal at the restaurant in the evening. The hotel is run by a very nice British family and their chef is French with 30 years experience in gourmet cooking.

So Cambodia is gradually improving. For even more stories go to Tracy's new blog at:

http://travelingtrue.blogspot.com

Labels: Cambodia, tourism