Kampot pepper

Left beautiful, slow Laos a few days ago to come to mad, bad and dangerous Cambodia. Well Phnom Penh is at least all three of the above. We spent a few days in Siem Reap to have a look at the awe inspiring and amazingly impressive Angkor temples. There's not many tourists in Cambodia now so we got a lot of the temples to ourselves, well us and all the little kids trying to sell you things. The girls and boys and their big eyes are a bit hard to resist so my bag is full of little things now, but they are so poor so hopefully a few of my dollars have gone a long way for them. I know people say you shouldn't encourage begging or child labour, (not sure if what they do would be regarded as such but nevertheless they are working albeit for their own families) by giving them money but what are those kids and their families to do until things change in this world and they are not left to do humiliating tasks to feed themselves. Both Lao and Cambodia are so poor and it's heartbreaking to see, but also an incredible eye opener.

Took another mad bus trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, we had three near crashes with other vehicles and almost killed three people trying to cross the road. Even the bus driver was freaked out and had to stop at one point, after almost hitting two girl, to go out for a break. Vietnam is supposedly worse, might use the trains there.

Anyway, Phnom Penh is a cool place with a lot of character, but it also has a very dark side with prostitution, child prostitution, street kids, corruption and well just pure poverty and desperation.
But despite that I liked it a lot, it's got great restaurants and quaint little shops, big boulevards and a lot of tuk tuk drivers and mad people on scooters. We will go back there in a couple of days for our Vietnam visa.

We are in Kampot now and will be here for a couple of days, it's a charming old crumbling resort town where there's not a single thing to do. A few good restaurants though so at least we wont go hungry. We are going up to Bokor Hill on Sunday which will be the highlight of Cambodia (well I hope anyway), it's an old french hill resort that is now just a ghost town, it's up in the mountains and it's apparently very very spooky! Can't wait!