Cambo-land

I forget how friendly the folks are here, in this country. Just a simple smile and a wave gets the people going. We took a bus into Phnom Penn the other day. A real little junker of a bus picked us up from our guesthouse, Johnny and i both thought it was the bus we were taking to Phnom Penn. Soon the little bus was filled all the way to max capacity with a few people even standing. One of my favorite accents is the Australian one. There was this young kid that got on which ruined it for me. Had i had to listen to him much longer and it would have made me hate even my favoritest of Aussies, Christian. He was loud and had a peircing laugh. I finally turned and told him that maybe he needed to use his inside voice. This worked for a couple of minutes. Soon we were at the main bus station, and i was happy to learn that the bus was over booked and Johnny and i were asked to move to the next bus along with two Germans. We sat alone on this bus a few minutes while we watched the guys in charge run around? With in a few minutes another guy came on and asked us to move to the next bus? Whatever we don’t care. We sat around for about 30 minutes and finally left. The bus had great AC and really loud Cambodian movie blaring for six hours. Johnny and i were stoked that we got seats in the front. I’m not sure why they decided to design the bus with the horn on the inside of the bus, but it was right under our seat. I shoved my ear plugs in and it brought the volume down to just ‘High’.
No one needs worry about me getting onto the back of a motorbike. While in Siem Reap we witnessed two motorbike wrecks, one of which the lady did not walk away from. On the 5 hour road to Phnom Penn i counted 4 accidents. Only one involving a car. The road into town was the craziest traffic i have ever encountered. The road can barely fit two cars, one headed in each direction. Yet here we are in a big old bus passing four or five rows of motorbikes while at the same time being passed by two rows of motorbikes and the same happening in the oncoming lane of traffic, this mixed in with bicycles, dogs, food carts, pedestrians, and cows. It makes for a crazy time. Sitting in the front seat i’d think to myself there is no way we are going to avoid slamming into that cow or that family of five on their little scooter. But somehow we avoided them all. I thanked my bus driver for not killing us when we pulled into the bus station at Phnom Penn. We had the address of a guest house and took a Tuk tuk there. Yesterday we turned in our passports to start the Vietnam visa process walked to go and get breakfast. I happy that the French Colonized this area because they can brew a mean cup of Joe, unlike those Thais and their Nescafe. We met a nice Tuk Tuk driver named Sam and hired him for the day. He took us to the S-21 museum this is the school that the Khmer Rouge converted into their torture prison. I’d seen this five years ago and it is quite disturbing so Johnny went in by himself and i walked around the corner and got a really bad halfass massage. After that we went to the grand pallace but we were denied cause we wore shorts. it is 180 degrees here. We headed back to the guest house and put on pants. Next we went out to the killing fields and the gun range. If only i had more money. Johnny fired the Tommy Gun giving me the last five bullets. Then we both split 30 bullets each and Anti-aircraft gun. Wow was that thing fun. Blew the hell out of the little paper target they had set up. Next time i am budgeting more money because for $200 and the price of a barrel of gasoline you can go into the field and shoot a rocket launcher into the can of gas. They also had available hand grenades, RPG’s AK-47 and pile of handguns and even an M-60 machine gun like Rambo. I know that donating blood in a country like Cambodia wasn’t the most responsible thing i could do but tossing a thirty year old grenade would have topped that. Our driver Sam was eying the shotgun and had never even picked up a gun so Johnny and i paid for him to do that. It was pretty funny to see him fire that. Oh yeah to add to the fun you can drink beer while shooting these guns too. We enjoyed Sam’s company. Next on the list was the grand palace, once inside lots of people were in shorts. I guess it depended on the mood of they guys at the gate. I saw a couple of women get denied cause their bare arms were showing. I was none too impressed with the palace, most of the cool stuff had been stolen, maybe we will see it when we get to Vietnam. At the national museum i remember seeing an awesome display of bats. The roof of the place is said to hold more bats than any man made structure in the world. After we had dinner at a little street place with Sam, I had chicken soup which was mostly just bones and cartilage, yummy. But then three cokes, soup, some mushroom in gravy and rice for $1.80 can you really complain. We paid off Sam and had him drop us in front of the museum. We set up Johnny’s video camera ran and got a couple of beers and waited, and waited , and counted maybe 10 bats, and waited and got of waiting, then it was too dark to see much and we left. Maybe the bats snuck out the back, i don’t know.
Today we don’t know what we are doing. Waiting for our visas and we will leave tomorrow. We are going to take a boat from Phnom Penn to Vietnam down what i thought was the Mekong but is actually called something else?