Indo-China 2

An update on the traffic in Phnom Penh.   Although functionally redundant, there are pedestrian crossings with lights on.   Now, we once saw an exhibition of the different types of figure used on these pedestrian crossings for a wide range of world-wide cities.  Bet you didn’t know they were all different.  Well they are and the ones here are different from any we’ve seen elsewhere because the little green man runs.   Musing on world-wide cities made me realise that even with the relatively small group who are blessed/cursed with getting this email there are people in or soon to be in various places.  This is being received (I didn’t say read) in Laos, Australia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, the Maldives, England and Scotland at least.

Exotic fruit, now that’s what I like.  Mangoes, best eaten in the bath, have only been touched sliced at breakfast.   Ripened bananas in different varieties taste nothing like the ones we get at home.   Lychees, popped out of their reddish prickly covers are good on journeys, as are Longans.  These taste and look a bit like Lychees once out of their brown skin.  Well they look a bit like eyeballs really.  All this is leading up to Durian, a brownish spiky thing about the size of a football and a local delicacy described as ‘an acquired taste’ or ‘rather fetid’.  They’re too big to just try one so I had a spoonful of Durian icecream and I can tell you that Durian crumble is definitely not on my list of desserts to try.  This fruit  stinks.  There is no gentler way of putting it.  It smells like a gently fermented sewer in a heatwave and I am not exaggerating.   What we had thought were the drains here I now think may have been a durian-monger on the loose.

We have now headed NW to Siem Reap, gateway to the temples of Angkor.   Angkor Wat is the best known but there are a host of temples spread over 400 square miles.  I doubt we’ll take them all in.  Our bus took 6.5 hours against an estimated 5 hours on a road that in places could only be described as corrugated, but we arrived safely, even if we were just how James Bond doesn’t like his dry martini, ie shaken.   Hotel supplied complimentary tuk-tuk (saving about $3) waiting at the bus station with our driver holding a printed sign with our name spelt correctly, just like at an airport.  Very smart hotel, large stone flagged foyer, dark tropical woods, uniformed staff, beer brought to reception for us and a large air conditioned room good enough for any hotel.  $22 a night including breakfast.

We’ve spent a hot and sticky day templing with our hotel tuk-tuk man for $15 a day.   Angkor Wat is  bigger than I thought with a 200m. wide moat, far bigger than any European Castle and I think it runs a 7.5 km circuit.  Once inside, the main temple is a 500 or so metre walk and is very impressive.  Built around 1150, round about crusade time, 50 years or so before Richard the Lionheart, the basic construction seems quite crude in that covered areas are small with narrow arched ceilings, even smaller than those we see with Norman Arches.  However the ornamentation and carvings are stunning.  Unfortunately it’s a bit like Brigitte Bardot, you can still see she was stunning once but has now been ravaged by time and sun: that and a googol tourists who are still allowed to walk in many areas that seem quite badly worn.   Completely templed out at the moment.

A tuk-tuk driver to get us to town last night nearly had a heart attack when I asked him for a lift before he could speak.  He’s 40, training to be a teacher, studies English Literature having already been to college to study French, and he’s driving a tuk-tuk.  My guess is that by Cambodian standards, it probably pays quite well although some tuk-tuks are clearly superior to others.  We saw one with a Rolls Royce logo on it and then I saw the driver sat in the back on his laptop.  Tonight’s driver told Heather that she looked just like his mother who turns out to be 76.  Ho, ho, ho.  It’s even worse when you know that 76 is about 15 years past the average life span here.  Still, the lighting was particularly poor.   As a counter to that H has been taking photos with my ipod and there are a number of a fat bald bloke who looks vaguely familiar.  It’ll come to me sooner or later.

We’ve had another $15 round the temples day today during which we had a downpour heavy enough for our driver to shelter in the back with us and for us to have a chat.  It turns out that he doesn’t like Koreans.  Apparently they bring their own guide who hires a local guide to fetch and carry and do the awkward bits, only stay in Korean hotels and eat in Korean restaurants, only speak Korean and “none of em speak inlish”.  Mind you a Korean guide apparently does all the buying for the group and wildly overcharges them, thus making a packet.  So, is this real or are they the Jews, Irish, Poles and darkies of Cambodia ?   Something else we found out explained some of the driving with vehicles just joining the road without looking.  It suddenly occurred to me that this had been French and they still used the priorite a droite in it’s pure form, which in English is ‘get out of way, I’m coming’.  Our driver confirmed it.

We had seen lots of roadside stalls with fruit, drink and sugar palm for sale plus what we’d taken for grubby bottles of palm syrup alongside the Cokes and suchlike.  Until that is our driver pulled up, bought one and the stall holder poured it into the fuel tank.  Each of these stalls had about 10 gallons of petrol sitting in ordinary plastic bottles on the roadside, some in the sun, some not and all next to their thatched shops and the next thatched shop with it’s own 10 gallons.

I know many people would find our way of doing these trips unnerving and I never quite get completely unpacked which means my dinner jacket is creased all the time.  Still, it works for us.   We’ve just sorted out our exit tactic for here which means going through Phnom Penh again to get to the coast at Sihanoukville.  Hotel booked on internet and skype by H.

Some Observations/facts.

Our record now is 5 on a moped and 10 in a tuk-tuk.

Oddest sign, ‘do not go backwards’.

Phnom Pen was empty for 3 years 8 months and 20 days – a ghost town as a capital.

Fish ‘pedicures’ everywhere, many marked “no piranhas”.