Wednesday 6 May 2009

Bokor National Park + Kampot

Hello again

Now I'll give you all a longer update.

After leaving Bangkok we got a bus from the eastern bus station to the border for 2.60 quid, a five hour bus journey, bloody cheap! This was our first border crossing, an interesting one, from which I learnt alot! You soon realize that being in a country such as Cambodia no one will do anything for free! This guy just grabbed my passport and started filling in the forms for me to hand into the officials, i thought he worked for the border team, no the cheeky bugger wanted me to pay him for filling out my forms! Basically we told them to piss off and just walked to our taxi and drove off. The taxi is another story, taxi's everywhere over hear take you to a hotel of their choice where they get commission for dropping you off. In the end you just have to say no and walk off! We didn't stay in Koh Kong for long as we arrived by night and it did not seem to be that good of a place. After that we got a bus to Sihanouk Ville for 9 bucks.

Sihanouk Ville was even worse, the place was a complete dump. The beach was filth and the area just seemed to be full of bars for the tourists, of which there seem to be hardly any in this country! The beach was full of rubbish and effluent from the bars seems to be pumped straight out onto the beach/ sea! We had to go here though to get our Vietnamese Visas as this is meant to be the best place to get them. The visa is quite expensive at $40 but it took 20 minutes to process!

After Sihanouk Ville we got a share taxi from just outside the local market to Kampot, a much nicer town, for around $6. Kampot seem to be a nice place, a little run down if I'm honest but full of really old French colonial buildings. Yesterday afternoon we chartered a boat to take us up to Techou rapids, about a 1 1/2 hour boat. There were some amazing views across the valley, loads of riverside fishing villages, your stereotypical stilt houses with reed roofs! The rapids were a bit of a disappointment as we found out only once we were up there that the government have decided to build a dam up river just around the corner effectively slowing the flow so much that the rapids seemed to be just a trickle of water!

This afternoon we got a tuk tuk to a buhddist temple that was built in the middle of a cave. The local village kids took us round the caves and deep into them crawling through some rather small gaps to get back out, only by torch light for about 12p, they were happy though!

Tomorrow were trekking through the jungle with a a local guide to Bokor National Park which is meant to be really nice, it takes two days and you sleep up there in the old rangers station!

After this I think that we're off to Kep and Koh Tonsay Island then we head for the Vietnamese border at Hat Chien (only opened recently to johnny foreigners) through the Mekong Delta to Saigon.

I'll hopefully be able to update once I am in Vietnam.

Adios for now.

Hope all is going well at home.

Jared

2 comments:

Kim said...

Sounds like all is going well so far. Have fun on your trek through the jungle. Careful of spiders and snakes!!

Jealous Uncle said...

Even though you wonder what the bloddy hell you are doing in some places I bet you are still loving it. Enjoy Vietnam (my favourite country from all my travels) - upload some pics from Saigon. N.