Cambodia to Laos - Temples, flat tyres, bribes and hammocks

We got off the bus, we went with one of the many persistent chuck chuck wagon drivers. Our hotel Hak's House was a little far out, a fifteen minute walk maybe from the town. We booked a room with a fan for the first two nights and because of Emmet's unnatural and profuse sweating, we booked the next two with air conditioning.

The first room was a bit of a cockroach flying at your face room, which was exactly what one did when it saw Niamh. Mating season I reckon. So we proceeded to try and kill it, after waiting for it to get out of the fan. We bashed it with a towel, threw it over it and stamped on it a few times. We were both screaming like girls, Niamh included. Nothing compared to the yelp we let when Niamh slowly pulled the towel back, only to see it, guts hanging out, still crawling. It was like the Terminator! Niamh danced on it, nothing fancy, just a quick reel. Then Emmet stamped on it again until we were satisfied 'he wouldn't be back'.

We hung around the town the first day. Siem Reap has lots of shops and restaurants and a Pub Street, which obviously does what it says on the tin. There were a few markets too, which we got some bits on different occasions, a nice dress for Niamh and another pair of flip flops for Emmet. We stopped off at a fish pedicure place where you put your feet in a big tank with fish that eat your dead skin. Yum! Niamh tried it out. Unfortunately, she has the most tickly feet in the world and spent most of the time dipping one toe in and collapsing into stitches laughing. The fish were not well fed on this occasion.

Two of the days there we went to see the amazing temples in Angkor. We bought the 3 day ticket, which was $40. The temples were very impressive and would definitely recommend anyone go see them, but maybe get the one day ticket instead for $20. You could do the lot in a day really, unless you were really into the whole history and wanted to stare at every thing for hours or head further out to see more of them. Unfortunately they don't let you rent scmoped's anywhere in Siem Reap, to keep the Tuk Tuk drivers in business.

The first day we hired a Tuk Tuk for 12 dollars and went to some of the temples just beyond the most famous Angkor Wat. We went to Preah Khan, Preah Neak Poan, Ta Som, Eastern Mebon, Pre Rup, Banteay Kdei, Sra Srang and Ta Prohm (we are aware this list is incredibly boring for anyone who hasn't been there, skim over it and stop moaning). Our favourite of the day was probably Ta Prohm, where Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider were filmed. The jungle has started to reclaim the temple and some of the walls have big trees growing up through them. It is quite eerie looking. The ambience is enhanced by the flocks of chinese tourists in matching hats. See if you can spot them in the pictures. It's like Where's Wally without the hiding.

While we were in the temples, we saw a spider almost the size of a small hand, Emmet's hand to be exact, with his little Mary Flinter hands. Bless. So Niamh got the camera ready, I threw my hand up very quickly, picture taken and gone like a flash. Excuse the pun.

The second day we rented bicycles and cycled out to Ankor Thom, which is a complex with several temples within it. It was great cycling around and then walking off to explore more when we felt like it. Our last temple of the day was Angkor Wat. We decided to save the best for last. We parked our bikes beside a food stall, filled our bellies with some biscuits and then headed over to the temple. It was a beautiful building and most of it was still intact. Intricate inscriptions covered the walls. We were advised by a Korean fella we got chatting to, to go at lunch time when the tour groups go off to eat, so luckily the place wasn't too busy when we were there.

When we emerged from the temple we went back to collect our bikes. However, they were no longer where we left them which worried us a bit. We found them moved a few feet in between some other bikes. We checked them and thought they were not damaged until Niamh hoped up on the bike and realised the air had been let out of the back tyre. This created an immediate sad face. A Tuk Tuk driver mysteriously appeared and offered to drive us back, we decided to walk the 8km instead. At this point, we realised Emmets bike also had an airless back tyre. Coincidence or something more sinister. After about one kilometre some lads on a bike told us that there was a fella with with a pump down this little dirt track and sure enough there was. He started to change the tyre until we pulled out our well honed signing skills and told him we just needed air. Five minutes later and one dollar lighter we were back in business.

That night we went to see traditional Cambodian dance in a restaurant. The costumes alone were amazing. Khmer dancing is all about the hands. They bend them back into awkward and mad looking positions. The kids have their hands strapped back from a young age which is slightly cruel, but it looks deadly. One of the dancers was particularly good, some of the others were very amateurish and spent most of their time pissing themselves laughing.

Our plan was to either get a massage or do a cooking course on the last day. However, we were both reaching burn out again and ended up watching CSI for the day and planing our route to Laos.

The next day we got a bus to Kratie. It was another epic bus trip. 8 hours quickly turned into 12 and we arrived in the dark without being sure if we had a booking. Sounds familiar. Luckily the guesthouse had got our email and reserved us the last room. We even had free pick up! We met a sound German couple, Suzie and Sven (or seven to the Vietnamese). We were staying in the same guesthouse and the next day we rented mopeds and went to see the rare Irrawaddy fresh water dolphins. We didn't expect to see many, in fact we thought we would be lucky to see even one. But there were loads, even some calves. It was amazing. We spent an hour and a half going 'oh', 'ah', 'look over there'!

On the way back we stopped at a little food stall and bought some famed sticky rice in a bamboo stick. It was delicious. We ate it beside the stall owner and had a sign language conversation with her. We started back to the hotel. On the way we noticed an ominous looking rain cloud. Then it started to rain in the river alongside the road, but not on us, which was fortunate. This stroke of luk was not to last however. All of a sudden we spotted rain on the road ahead of us. It was very strange, driving from dryness into a horrific rain storm. The downpour only lasted about ten minutes, right up until we arrived in the hotel in fact, but managed to soak us to the bone. Needless to say, we proceeded straight to the showers and into clean clothes.

That evening we went out for dinner and had a few beers. We said goodbye to our German friends and got ready for our next adventure in Laos.

The border crossing plan was to take a mini van to a nearby town called Stung Treng. Then get a bus to the border, then a mini van to the port and then a boat to the island Don Det. Luckily the hotel was able to organise a ticket that covered the complicated transport changes. When the mini van arrived to pick us up it was already over crowded. We just about managed to squeeze in. We thought we would be the last people picked up, how wrong we were. They must have packed twenty something people into a twelve seater minivan without air conditioning. This was fun enough until we got a flat tyre. Our second flat tyre of the week, including the bikes! We stood in off the road beside houses on stilts, cows grazing at the side of the road and half naked children. A good send off from Cambodia!

The sketchy conductor kept trying to sell us tickets for the next leg of our trip. He told us we couldn't buy bus tickets on the island, which doesn't really make sense and told one of the lads who was going to cross the border the next day that it would be closed. Our bull shit metres were immediately on alert. We decided, strangely enough, not to hand over fifteen dollars to a stranger we may never see again for a ticket that didn't make sense. We found out later that you could buy tickets on the island and the price he offered was too much. Shocker.

He offered to change money to local currency kip and told us that people wouldn't accept dollars on the island. We didn't believe him but decided to get some kip anyway just to have it. Afterwards we were kicking ourselves thinking we had been slightly scammed. We have learned to be very cautious of friendly charming strangers who tell you there is a problem, but they have a solution! We mentioned it to an expat we got talking to later on the island, and he told us the rate actually wasn't that bad which made us feel better.

We arrived at the border, which was a dirt road with a metal barrier and walked up to the Cambodian office to get our exit stamps. We had been warned about bribes at some of the smaller border crossings, but have been lucky until now. The officers asked for two dollars each to stamp our passports. They were so blatant and unashamed. They had their briefcase that they put the money in sitting on the table in front of them. We had kept a dollar each in a separate pocket. We told him we only had a dollar and after thirty seconds of saying we had no more money he relented, gave us our passports and sent us in our way to the Laos side.

We had discussed the whole bribe issue prior to arriving at the border. The corruption is quite frustrating and it feels wrong giving into it. However, we are not in Europe and things work differently in this part of the world. We could stand there and argue, but at the end of the day, they have the power. They decide whether we can get through or not and for the sake of a dollar it was not worth the fight for us. On the optimistic side, at some of the crossings we had been warned about, we came across no problems. It does appear that things are starting to change at some of the more popular borders, so you can only hope that with time, this corruption will be tackled.

We then went to the Laos side to get our visa, which cost thirty five euro. In Cambodia, everyone pays the same amount for a visa. In Laos, it depends on where you are from. We were not able to find out how much Irish citizens have to pay in advance. We knew it would be between thirty and forty two dollars. We then paid our second bribe. Again, he wanted two dollars each. We said we only had one each; after thirty seconds of repeating this we got our passports back and boarded another mini van, not dangerously overcrowded this time, and drove to the port.

We went to the dock to look for our 'ferry', which was actually a small wooden kayak. A German expat steered it to the island. We decided to go to the south of the island which is quieter than the north. We didn't have accommodation booked. We checked out a few places and found some wooden bungalows with hammocks looking out over the Mekong. That was our bed for the first night. We went for a walk while the room was being cleaned and found some beautiful huts further down with a great chill out area and booked in for the following night. The bungalows were great and we really enjoyed a few days of sitting in hammocks, reading, chatting to the other travellers and generally chilling out.

We went out for dinner the first night to King Kong restaurant, which is run by a Scouser and his Laos wife. It was a cool place, good music, good food and good company. We had a few drinks with the owner and a few travellers who were hanging out there too and were great craic. We ended up going back every evening.

Feeling refreshed and relaxed we set off on a bus for Savannakhet. Little did we know, this bus journey was to undo all of our chilling out. It was the single most frustrating journey either of us have ever undertaken. Considering we have gone overland to get here, this is quite an achievement. We got a mini van from the mainland to Pakse, which of course was over crowded, sure how else would you travel? It arrived in late. We then boarded a big bus which was to bring us to our final destination. This bus proceeded to stop every 100 yards to pick up passengers. Why these people didn't go to the main bus stop literally just down the road is beyond me. It took us about an hour just to get out of the town, which at this stage meant it was time for a food break of course. We then repeated driving and stopping every ten to twenty minutes for the rest of the journey. Luckily the driver was a maniac and made up some of the time while playing with our lives. We arrived to the bus station two and a half hours late. We were tired, grumpy and ready for bed.

However, our 'adventure' was not over yet. The Tuk Tuk drivers told us that our destination was too far away and wouldn't bring us. We were at a loss, we thought we were 2 kilometres away from the town centre. We assumed they were trying to just get more money out of us. Then some people with a mini van told us they would bring us. We weren't entirely comfortable with the arrangement, but didn't really know what else to do at nine o clock at night in the dark. He told us we would leave at ten, so we had another hour of waiting time to enjoy. At ten a large local bus appeared and we were loaded onto it. I think they were just letting us sit in the van until the bus arrived. The whole thing was very confusing, but they really helped us out. We climbed over the sacks of rice and squeezed into our broken chairs. It turns out our bus never stopped in Savannakhet like it was meant to, but let us out 30 kilometres away in the middle of no where without telling us. The conductor was a rude dick anyways, but leaving two people stranded is pretty shitty. I hope he believes in karma and comes back as one of those grilled chickens that were stuffed in our faces at every food stop, all five of them.

So we finally arrived at the bus station, which is two kilometres from the town centre. We flagged down the only Tuk Tuk and asked him to bring us to the guesthouse. He told us it was closed, but he could bring us to another one called Leena Guestouse. Our immediate thought was 'hmm, we have heard of this before, I suppose you know a fabulous guesthouse, which in reality is not so fabulous, but will give you a nice commission for bringing us.' We asked to be brought to the centre instead and we could find somewhere from there. In the centre we saw a westerner. Niamh bolted off the Tuk Tuk faster than lightening and asked him about the place he was staying. He said a lot of he places were closed and his was meh. So the Tuk Tuk driver was telling us the truth after all. The second time in one day a Tuk Tuk driver told us the truth and we thought he was lying. Maybe they don't deserve the bad rap! We took his advise and asked him to bring us to Leena Guesthouse. Stat. The place was grand and was our home for two nights.

The main reason for stopping in Savannakhet was to break up the long journey north and use the Internet to do some research and make some bookings, that we had been putting off for a while. We had been without the Internet for almost a week, so some Facebook and email time was also in order. The town itself is pretty mediocre and not really worth visiting. We took a quick cycle around it in the afternoon and had lunch in a small Thai restaurant. Luckily, we were occupied with our Internet jobs most of the day.

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