thewills'wanderings

The bus ride from Vietnam(Saigon) to Cambodia(Phnom Penh) takes 6 hours including the hour or more it takes at the border to apply for visas. The whole idea of crossing land borders is still very exciting to me probably because NZ is surrounded by sea, I guess. The bus company we travelled on also helps you with your visa application, take your passports and processes them for you at the border. Because we’re now seasoned SouthEast Asia travellers and want to save every penny we can, we told them we’d do it ourselves which saved $5US per visa and in the end did it just as quickly as everyone else. We even managed to get the girls under 12, free visas after some inside knowledge from the Ayres family(thanks!) . There’s no official information saying so, they just take your money and hope you don’t notice the ‘gratis’ stamp on the visa. Because we knew this Tim just marched up and told them 6 visas, 3 gratis, right? They looked grumpy but didn’t argue. So nice to win a fight(or not even have a fight), after a few weeks of fighting in Vietnam.

The bus trip was pretty cruisy, not a bad road and I didn’t even fear for my life, so that was good. Driving through the border and into Cambodia where gradually things start to look a little different is quite amazing. The outlying small towns are so poor, reminding us of Nepal, yet arriving in Phomn Pehn there’s plenty of signs of wealth with some very grand buildings and expensive cars. Tim kept pointing out the Hummers to anyone that was interested.

Right away we could feel a difference between the Vietnamese people and the Cambodian people. The Cambodian’s are still very keen to sell their wares and try quite hard to do so, but they do it in a much nicer way. They are warm and friendly and very easy to like. We’ve been shocked at the good level of English here and the willingness of people to help you out for nothing in return.
We spent 2 nights in PP. The girls spent a lot of time just relaxing and playing which they definetely need to do after lots of travel. They really do cope amazingly well with it all and I think the key is making sure they can have down time and just do normal things like make up shows and film them , or for Charlotte to play with her Polly’s or draw. We’ve been really glad to have the lap top with us, so the girls and us too can watch movies. We have to confess to buying quite a few dodgy copies of movies. We normally are really anti “stealing” movies or music but figure that while there is no way here to buy a real copy we can live with it. One of the mornings I stayed back at the guesthouse with the girls while Tim went to the genocide museum. We decided the girls didn’t need to see it. They’ve heard enough about what happened under the Pol Pot regime and we talk about it a lot. It’s hard not to when everyone you meet has a story of family members who died. Today, our tuk-tuk driver told me about his grandparents who were killed. It’s hard to believe when you look around today that it was only in the 1970’s that around 3 million people died either from brutal killing or starvation. Apparently the trials of some of the war criminals are taking place now in Phnom Penh. Now, Phnom Penh seems like an up and coming city with lots of development going on and obviously quite a bit of wealth. It’s hard to reconcile the wealth with the deformed beggars on the streets and the poverty in the country areas. I know we talk about the gap between the rich and poor in NZ, but it’s just not the same when the poor here are so desperately poor.

From here it’s off to Siem Reap to explore the ancient ruins!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 12:20 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.