Waz and Gavs on Tour: Kingdom of Cambodia

After hearing lots of people big up Cambodia we were really excited to head onto our 6th country. Not only is it a beautiful country, but there is a huge amount of history here that neither of us knew anything about, and loads of bloody annoying animals.

We headed out of Laos, deciding to bus it through Thailand to get to the west of Cambodia rather than down through the south. We had an overnight stop in a small town in Thailand where as always we dined in style among the cockroaches at a local street stall. Thankfully it was after we had finished our dinner that the rat came out of the pipe beside us to get the leftovers.

Although the Cambodian people in general are lovely, there are a lot of del-boys, and on reaching the border we were the targets of 3 attempted scams within the space of 3 hours. Only one succeeded.

Our first stop in Cambodia was Siem Reap- the town nearest to Angkor Wat:

Its a site of temple ruins basically, but it is a really incredible. We cycled it all- about 40km- OLSG training!

Whilst walking through Angkor Wat admiring the ruins, Wayne thought he was being robbed of our plastic bag, only to turn around and find that a fat monkey was tearing out of his hands. Wayne was petrified- and in hindsight his face was hilarious!!! The monkey tore apart the plastic bag, ripped one of the rain coats, and opened and drank from the bottle of water! When the fatty was satisfied there was no food in the bag he sauntered off. Wayne was pretty smug that he had brought a spare plastic bag collected up our stuff and headed off. But fatty came running after Wayne again!!! Wayne sprinted off and was chased for about 100m before losing the monkey- all the time Keelin was shouting after him to please not get rabies!

From Siem Reap we headed to Battambang and then the capital Phnom Penh where we learnt about Cambodia's history. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge (The Cambodian Communist party) took over Cambodia and with Pol Pot as the leader, had a mission to create a peasant-dominated agrigarian cooperative. They drove everyone out of the cities and forced them to work in slavery on farms in the countryside. Besides this from 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge killed 2 million Cambodians who threatened their position. These were intellectuals (all doctors and teachers), people they thought to be intellectuals (anyone who could speak another language, people with fairer skin, people who wore glasses), and people of other nationalities such as any Vietnamese and Chinese. Battambang and Phnom Penh gave us the opportunity to visit the sites of mass genocide, mass graves and one of the most famous prisons, that was originally a school.

Old school used as the prison S-21

Cells in S-21

Some of the skulls found in the mass graves at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh

We headed to Sihanoukville on the coast for some R&R, but due to some UK-style weather didn’t see a great deal of the beach so we decided to head to Kampot which is famous for two things Black pepper and a spooky abandoned hill top resort called Bokor hill station.

Bokor Hill Station...

Kampot Town

Us on the bamboo train...

Dismantling the bamboo train because we met one coming the other way

When we got to our last stop before the Vietnam border, Kep, we had a day of brilliant sunshine so trekked around the national park-fighting off lizards, centipedes, snakes, wild monkeys and a pack of 4 angry dogs that were protecting a group of nuns!