Apologies for the delay in an update, things have been a
little unpleasant, as both myself and Giss have been struck down with a couple
of bugs. Myself with my tonsils doing their
usual trick, of inflating to imitate small golf balls, and Giss with the
travellers tummy flu. None the less, the
blog must go on!
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| Inside the Central Market |
So yesterday we decided to take it fairly easy, it was our
first free day and I was pretty under the weather, so we had a bit of a sleep
in and headed down for breaky fairly late. Unfortunately this meant we missed
most of breaky, as obviously they stop topping up well before breakfast is officially
over. All good though, we had food in
our bellies and were ready to face the day.
Not wanting to waste our holiday away in a hotel room, we decided to
venture out despite not feeling overly flash.
We hopped in a Tuk-Tuk and headed to the central market, a
giant building of colonial design housing a huge variety of market stalls, from
jewellery to watches, scarves and carvings, as well as food and the usual mish
mash of fake handbags, belts and wallets.
The market was fairly unproductive for us, obviously our desire for
imitation goods had worn out on previous trips, so we just did a bit of aimless
wandering, much to the dismay of the helpful shopkeeps, who were always on hand
to offer us a “special price for you sir”.
The shopping here is certainly much cheaper than that in KL, this is
especially true for booze, but more on that later.
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| Outside the central market |
Our wandering of the market led us to the food section, a
particularly interesting place to be, with an amazing selection of meat, fruits
and vegetables. Hygiene standards are,
well, non-existent, in fact they seem to be going the opposite way. The fruits and vegetables all look lovely and
fresh, with beautiful colour, but once it comes to meat, well that’s another
story. For a start, cross contamination
seems to be the only way they can prepare food, with fish, half cooked
chickens, raw chickens, and everything else sharing the chopping block. Flies eat for free here, and I think our full
realisation came when we found a guy washing freshly plucked chickens in a tub,
with one foot in the tub as well.
I finally got to test out my formidable (I tell myself)
haggling skills when we found a lovely wooden carving in a stall. “How much?” I ask. “$35” he says. “So much?
Never mind.” I say as we walk away
“Ok ok I do good price for you sir, $30.” “Pfft” I say,” never mind, we’ll have a look
at the next stall. “Ok ok how much you pay?”. “$15.” In the end we settled on $20, which while
still probably high is a fraction of what we would pay back home, and while
initially I did feel guilty about screwing them down, they seem to enjoy it as
much as we do.
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| Our new carving, not bad for $20 |
So now it was down to the riverfront for lunch, with my
appetite still lacking we settled for something fairly tame, a club sandwich
for me, and a Khmer Sour Soup which has taken Giss’s fancy, and will obviously
be something I’ll need to add to the bag of tricks back home. After lunch we wandered back to the hotel for
a rest, as I was still feeling pretty rough.
Once we had some A/C recuperation, it was down to the
riverfront again, to find a nice spot to watch the world go by, but first we
checked out the night markets, which were pretty much the same as the central
market, just hotter and with Khmer traditional music being blasted around 12
times louder than was tolerable. So we
exited fairly quickly, and found a great spot with a 2nd floor
balcony bar, and happy hour(s) from 7am to 12am. Cambodia must be the only
country in the
world, where beer is actually cheaper than water ($.75 for beer, $1 for
water). However seeing that I was still
not feeling the best, I decided to splash out the $2 for a cocktail, as by my logic
that would be much better for me than the beer.
I had a White Russian, in ode to the Dude, an Giss went for a Pina
Colada. It was a great place to just sit
and watch the traffic, the people wandering the riverside, and the river as
well, and we both decided if we were feeling better it would be a great place
for a few quiets later on in the trip.
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| Bargain beers, and the cocktails were actually only $2 |
One of the less pleasant sights was the easily 60+ western
man wandering along hand in hand with the maybe 18+ Cambodian girl. One of the main attractions of Cambodia to
many is its sex trade, and there is no shortage of westerners ready to take
advantage of the desperation of these women (and girls and boys) to get
themselves out of the poverty they live in.
While the Cambodian government is making a show of stamping down on this
activity, you have to wonder how seriously it is being taken.
Another much more positive experience was the young boy who
took up position opposite us, and put on an impromptu dance show. He was a brilliant dancer, and everything
from MJ to popping was in his repertoire.
He was dancing away for ages, with no music, and stopping only so often
to wave to us. I would kill to be able
to dance half as good as him, let alone to no music, but when we finally
wandered down to give him a tip on our way home, it turned out he was deaf as
well! A talent like that would no doubt
be a brilliant sob story on some reality tv show, but this kid was ecstatic
just to get a couple of dollars off us, how the hell he learned to dance like
that while not being able to hear beats me.
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| Cocktails on the Mekong River front |
So from there we wandered back to the hotel to try and get
an early night, knowing that tomorrow we had to relocate hotels. We started fairly early and hit the hotel
breakfast again, while I was feeling a bit better now Giss was battling a
dreaded case of the tummy flu! So while
she retreated to the bedroom to relax in the A/C I wandered down to hit an ATM
for some money. Unfortunately the only one
nearby was an ANZ which charged $5 per withdrawal, about the only thing I’ve
found here which isn’t cheaper, what a surprise!
From there we just relaxed at the hotel until it was time to
head to our new digs, which are an incredible improvement! For an extra $5 a night, it feels like we
have moved from a backpackers into a resort!
The room is huge, and beautifully decorated, we have a balcony looking
out onto the street, all the doors are beautiful hand carved timber, and most importantly
it has
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| The new hotel, a big improvement! |
a pool! The area seems much nicer as well, while it is a bit further from the action there are plenty of lovely looking restaurants around, and the streets are bit quieter and cleaner here. All in all a good move, especially for a sick Giss! So tonight I’m heading out solo for my night market food tour, a bit hesitant as to what that might involve given what I saw at the central market, but it’s run by an Aussie ex-pat who gets great reviews on trip advisor, so I guess it can’t be too bad.
Tomorrow is another free day, so the blog may be a little
slow again, but on Monday we are off for a behind the scenes tour at the local
zoo, which hopefully will be amazing.
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