Phnom Penh – Deluge
Saturday, June 24th, 2006After my thought provoking sightseeing day in Phnom Penh, I was really glad to bump into Matt, from the boat to Battambang. We chatted over food (after the harrowing day, I was aching for comfort food, so you can imagine my delight when I saw that the Lazy Gecko did both mashed potato AND apple crumble – not together – two of my all-time top comfort foods). We then headed down the road to the lovely Moskito Bar, run by the lovely Eddie. It’s only been open a couple of weeks, but it should do well, for a few reasons. Eddie is a great guy, and makes everyone feel welcome. He’s got a good spot for the bar – right by the lake, which is the emerging backpacker area in Phnom Penh (but not so much that it feels like Khao San Road). Most importantly, though, he makes a drink called a Long Vodka. I used to drink these by the bucketload back in my uni days in Aberdeen, back when my liver was as young and forgiving as I was, but soon realised that you can’t get them outside of Scotland. After a few attempts to talk a barman through making them, I gave up and had forgotten them entirely until I was chatting to Eddie. I had found my mecca.
(For those of you wanting to share my joy, here’s how you do it. Put a couple of icecubes in a tall glass, and add a few drops – just a few – of Angustora Bitters. Swirl the ice round the glass a few times, then throw them away. Put more ice in, a shot of vodka, a large dash of lime cordial, and top up with lemonade. Trust me, it’s a drink of gods and goddesses. You’re welcome).
It’s most definitely rainy season right now here in Cambodia. Usually that means intense heat and sun most of the day, followed by an hour or two of heavy rain in the afternoon. However, it’s being taken to extremes in Phnom Penh, and we had two solid days of the heaviest rain I have ever seen in my life. The road running by the lake is being surfaced (I asked Eddie if it was being resurfaced and he said, “no ‘re'”), so all is mud and, when it rains, the mud gets very deep indeed. We splished and sploshed up to the bar, settled ourselves in, and, several long vodkas later when I left, it was still raining, though the rain seemed to matter less.
The next day, Matt and I decided to go for a walk along the riverfront, such a nice part of Phnom Penh. It actually reminded me of Colombo, as there are verdant green patches of lawn lining the river walls, punctuated by antique lamp-posts – very much in the style of Galle Face Green in Sri Lanka. Stopping for lunch was an experience. Not so much into the customer service at this restaurant – the waitress wrote our order on her hand. To experience the other side of the coin, we ducked across the road for a drink in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC), a gorgeous, old institute with massive comfy chairs, not-too-extortionate beer, big old ceiling fans, and lots of geckos. Actually, everywhere in Cambodia has lots of geckos, it was sort of comforting to see that the FCC gets them as well. The rain still hadn’t let up, though, and it was so much fun to go wading, ankle-deep, through the puddles, and see the cars and bikes up to their middles in the really deep ones. It’s times like this that emphasises how far Cambodia has to go, infrastructure-wise; the drainage system was just so slow and ineffective that the water took an apparent age to drain away.
After a quick spot of shopping, we headed back to the lakeside, and arranged to meet up later in the Moskito bar, already my local, and it was ace just to be able to say: “Can I have the usual, please, Eddie?”
Matt and I were both heading next to the same place, Sihanoukhville on the South coast, so it made sense to go down together. We’d booked a ticket for the 8am bus (somehow, he seemed less enthusiastic about this than I did), although when I rolled out of Moskito at 3am, having to get up at 6.30am, even I started to question the wisdom – or otherwise – of my early-bird-ness. Still, against all odds, both of us were packed and ready to go and, even though they didn’t collect us when they said they would, which had me virtually hyperventillating, but we made the bus, and the journey – amazingly – passed without incident. Except the film shown on the bus, of which, the less said the better.
So that was my first farewell to Phnom Penh. However, I’ll be passing through there at least once, very probably twice more before I leave Cambodia, so already I’m looking forward to going back. Those long vodkas are calling.
Suzanne