a small taste of my travel adventures around this planet

When we came to phnom penh and spendet more money for pot and food, we started to make our calculations of time and money.. which were horrible. We had almost no Cambodian money left because they tricked us on the border so we had to be reaaally careful.

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. And really poor. We crashed in a street near the lake, kind of a small backpacker district. Kind of a small and early version of Bangkokgs Khao San, but better 🙂

Phnom Penh is full of controversity. The modern center is modern and clean, the national museum and the government are made could make u believe u are in a modern city. But we started to explore the sideways of the city, and saw a lot of poverty and misery. After we visited the killing fields and S21 we were shocked, we didnt expect that. Western press did never told us how extreme the Red Khmer destroyed cambodian lifes. And the scars could be seen everywhere around us.

We decidet to leave Phnom Penh because we were short on time. We had less then 10 days left..

We had to decide either to go south to the coast or north.. to the .. hmm how could you describe it .. offroad track? 🙂

When we read about a lake in a old vulcanic crater somewhere in the northern provinces, the decision was easy.

We took a bus up to Krati to see the dolphines in the Mekong rivers. Then we got a ride to ban lung with one of the worsest vehicles I ever travelled with.

Too many hours and too many people 😉 With me and Cris there were 8 other people in this car, I still cant believe how we had space in there. The driver was sitting on another guy and crashed with full speed into the very deep holes of ratanakiris “roads”.

Ban Lungh is my favorite place in Cambodia. At the time we went there, there were only a hand full of backpackers hanging out there. There was lots of adventure up there, off road tracks, off the beaten track.. everything a backpacker dreams of.

And plus we could manage to hold our extreme budget, it was 1 dollar per day now for food and drinks. For that we buyed 2 baguettes, 2 liters of wather and a pack of cigarettes each. Thats how u save money..

At day we went to the crater lake to swim and get some cooling from the heat, in the evening we went to play football with the lokal kids. They went crazy when we said we are from italy, they kept on screeming WORLD CHAMPION, WORLD CHAMPION!!! singing the song of the Worldcup 08. We teached them some tricks with the ball and showed them how to play hacky-sack.

The next days we spendet finding waterfalls in the outback around the town. We could just afford to rent a bike, so we were going around for hours to find the waterfalls, while other backpackers overtook us with motorbikes.

The days up there went by way to fast. And then we were back to the long way to phnom penh with a lot of puking cambodians who were not used to theyr horrible roads.

The busride takes only a few hours sir, I promise sir!

What a bunch of bullshit! when we took off from bangkok to cross the boarder to cambodia, we had a nice small bus and perfect streets, leading us to cambodia in around 4 hours. Then we crossed the boarder and cambodias charme started to hit us.. with another additional 8 hours busride on a horrible street (if u can call it street, just a lot of sand with holes), crazy cambodians who ripped us of with money-changing on the boarder and so much dirt that I grew a second skin .. out of dirt 🙂

So we arrived in Siem Reap to see the Angkor Wat, the temple area of whitch every backpacker in South-east-asia had heared about before. A paradise for everyone who likes to explore ancient history. Apart of the other thousands of tourists who fly directly into siem reap and stay into their bunkers of 5 star hotels with AC.  Me and Cris crashed in a cheap hostel for a few riel and planned our trip to the temples, we wanted to see sunrise and sunset on the same day because we did’t had so much time left to stay in cambodia..

The Angkor was reeeeally impressive. We got the sunrise on the main temple are, together with all the other tourists which were after the clichè.

We used the day to explore the area on our own, and even with all the tourists there we found some nice places of the beaten track, about half an hour walk from the main area, where we chilled out and imagined how this place would have been a few houndred years ago..

After the sunset we were completely destroyed and shiped back to the hostel. The next day we proceedet to the capital, Phnom penh.