After finishing off in Bangkok, we had to make our way to Cambodia. Due to money restrictions and time not being a huge issue, we took the bus, well a few buses! For as little as £26 we took a 15 hour journey which included accommodation over night. I'm not sure I'd recommend this journey, definitely not when you book through a travel company. One thing I've found since travelling South East Asia is that most of the tourist companies are useless, you can get very little information out of them.
Before our journey we were told to meet outside the travel company at 8am. We rushed there only to be waiting 15 minutes for someone to tell us where to go, to then realise the bus station was in fact closer to our hotel! The bus itself wasn't bad at all, however it turns out we weren't on there that long. After around 6 hours we arrived at a port where we had no idea if we were to get off at this stop. In the end after attempting to communicate with the staff, we had to wait aside from everyone else for a taxi, a taxi that turned out to be a truck which we got on the back of, very sketchy!
When we arrived at the hotel they had booked us, it seemed pretty average, the rooms were nice but the hotel was fairly run down. However after attempting to sleep (we had a 730 am bus the next day) we found a cockroach crawling across the bed!! You can only imagine this delayed us from sleeping and in the end we only had around 3 hours sleep
We awoke in the cockroach infested room wrapped in our duvet sheets, got ready, grabbed breakfast and headed back on route to Sihanoukville. At the time that was the longest on road journey I've done, so I was extremely pleased when we reached our beach hut and could finally relax. That evening, after food, we decided to stroll up and down the beach, seeing as it was our back yard (and there wasn't much else to do there.)
The following day was a pretty chilled day. We vowed to make the most of the beach, and the sun that day! It turned out that the weather was on our side for our stay at Otres Beach. The next day, we woke up to sunshine yet again and spent the day, similarly sunbathing and dipping in and out of the warm ocean. For lunch we grabbed a pizza seeing as we were both really craving western food. It was nice to sit on the beach, watching the waves while eating pizza. Definitely combined two of my favourite things!
After a lovely couple of days, we woke up to no electric. This means no lights, no wifi, no hot shower and NO FAN!! We woke up early because we were due to travel to Phnom Pehn that morning, so no electric really wasn't ideal that morning. However after an hour or so it finally switched itself on so we hurried to get ready. It's fair to say travelling has its ups and downs. We made it to Phnom Pehn, this was really just an overnight stop for us as we only wanted to visit the killing fields and I'm glad we stayed as short as we did. I really wouldn't recommend staying in Phnom Pehn long, the city doesn't really have anything special to offer. It's like visiting the UK and going to Manchester. During our stay in Phnom Pehn, we stayed in quite a nice hostel and strangely enough met some girls who went to uni in Nottingham.
As I said we only really visited Phnom Pehn to see the killing fields and I'm so glad we did. The 1 out of 300 sites we visited was located on the outskirts of Phnom Pehn, so I'd recommend finding a couple of people to share a tuc tuc with as it only costs 6 baht this way. Tuc tuc is definitely the best way to travel there as they wait for you, also take you to the prison, then take you back to your hostel aswell. The killing fields is 100% worth a visit. You're provided with an audio tour, which allows you to go around at your own pace and repeat anything you may of missed. It was very informative and shared stories from the victims at certain points in the tour, this made it all that bit real. It was horrendous what happened to the country back then, and for some reason, so many people are unaware it happened.
When finished at the killing fields, we then went to the prison, which was a converted high school and used to interrogate and torture the citizens of Cambodia and also one British traveller! Although shocking, I found the prison was less interesting in terms of the tour. It involved a huge amount of reading and obviously once you visited one area of the prison, the rest were extremely similar, as each room was used for the same reasons.
After a short visit in Phnom Pehn, we got the night bus to Siem Reap, I can't say this was the best journey of my life. The bus was really nice, it had double beds, blankets and pillows, lights, plugs and wifi, however the roads were just horrific, and being on the upper bunk meant we bounced and shook on every single bump.
We eventually arrived in Siem Reap, the capital of Cambodia, and somewhere we were more excited to be. After waiting 7 hours to check in, yes 7 HOURS!! We showered, eat and were straight out to the famous Siem Real bar crawl. If you're heading to Siem Reap, this is something you HAVE to do! It's not just about getting drunk, well the majority is... But you meet so many people and as weird as it is, the first person we spoke to worked in the town where we went to school; the tiny little town of Evesham! Small world.
The following day turned out to be a chill day, after probably getting 5 hours sleep the past two nights, we decided to have an extra long lie in, maybe till 2pm.... Woops! Oh well, it was worth it. We used this day to explore the area where we were staying, which surrounded Pub Street, I'd recommend staying here as this is usually where everything happens. There are a few night markets around this area aswell which are worth visiting particularly one of them which is set up near Island Bar, a much nicer, less trashier market filled with handmade goods that you can usually see being made. This day was also dedicated to chilling because we had to be up at 430am the following day to start our temple tour at sunrise.
Our alarms went off at 430am and we headed to Angkor Wat for sunrise. I think sunrise was the best option for us as, bedsides the view it was much cooler and also you were done by 12pm so had the rest of the day. We didn't do the Grand circuit, so I can't recommend it or not, but the temples included on that tour, I didn't recognise. I wanted to see Angkor Wat and Ta Phrom (tomb raider temple) which were both included in the small circuit, along with a few others.
Since we arrived, it felt like we had just been none stop. Our next stop was Chiang Mai, but the best way we found to get there from Siem Reap was to go to Bangkok first via bus then fly up to Chiang mai. A nice easy journey we thought, so we booked both the bus and the flight.
We got the over night bus, which when booking it, neither of us even considered the boarder or the fact that we'd have to wake up mid journey and allow for the time there. We arrived at the boarder around 6am, when it opened, so as you can imagine it was absolutely packed. By this time we'd done 3 out of the 7 hours on the bus. We managed to get through departures in 30 minutes ish. It totally slipped my mind that the departures and arrivals are totally different things, so we then had to queue for arrivals, which is what slowed us down. We knew that we wouldn't, well everyone from our bus, wouldn't get through in time for our flight as we had another 4 hours to Khao San Road and then another 2 hours to the airport...
