8/3/04
Sau S’dei all you funky monkeys and secret squirrels…
Well, we are currently sitting in an internet cafe on the Tonle Sap river in Phnom Pehn in Cambodia, and we are well and truly shagged!!!!!! Well at least I am… Avril is sitting next to me and is being chatted up by some monks who have been surfing the net!!!!
We have just gotten in from a 6 hour very painful horror boat ride from Siem Reap in the North of Cambodia which SUCKED the big one and was about as much fun as plucking out anal hairs!!!… which by the way isn’t really any fun unless you pluck them to use as dental floss to impress your mates…!!!
…anyways… HOLY COW… this was one of the MOST DANGEROUS and suckful rides we have ever been on!!!
Basically, we were on a bullet boat, which is really just a cigar shaped boat with a very big jet engine. It’s normally supposed to only seat 90 people but somehow they managed to squeeze over 130 people on it which really sucked since most people had to sit on the roof and the boat almost rolled over twice…!!!
We were pretty shit scared since we were crammed into the middle of the boat almost below the waterline and the seats were so tight that we had to sit in them in fetal position… and not only that, but there was only one exit out of the boat which was rusted shut and the boat was leaking, so if we capsized we would have been more dead than a very dead thing… which is actually quite dead!!!
In a way it was kind of our own fault since we had heard how bad the boat was, but we were assured that it hadn’t sunk since 2002 and even then no tourists were killed!!!!… However, we realized we had made a lamearrse decision when we saw the driver wearing a motorcycle helmet and that the boat was called the Rambo Express… doh…
…But other than that Cambodia has been absolutely awesome!!! We crossed the border from Thailand last Wednesday into Siem Reap in the North of Cambodia, and we were pretty proud of the effort since all the people who took organized tours told us it took over 17 hours and we managed to do it in 8 hours from Bangkok by ourselves… and we even managed to dodge the Cambodian Mafia at the border which we were a bit worried about…
Still it took us 2 hours just to clear the checkpoints, which makes it one of the worst border crossings we have done…
The main reason for coming to Siem Reap is to see Angkor Wat a huge temple city hidden in the thick jungle, which was featured in the movie Tombraider… And now that we’ve seen it, we can say that it seriously ROCKS!!! The temple complex is soooo huge that it takes 3 days just to get around it all by motorbike…
People who have been to Angkor wat, the Egyptian pyramids, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Tikal in Guatemala, all rank Angkor as the most impressive ruins in the world, and now that we have seen all four as well, we would totally agree with them…
The sheer scale of the ruins and the elaborate Hindi and Buddhist scripts that are carved into the walls are amazing, and the fact that the jungle has just over grown the ruins gives it a serious lost world atmosphere… All it needed was a few dinosaurs hanging around and it would have been perfect!!!
…In fact the only thing that sucked was the hordes of Chinese, Japanese and French middle aged tour group tourists. Man… we have never seen so many loud rude arsed tossers in one place… In fact one group of Chinese tourists pissed us off so much that we spent one morning following them around just to deliberately get in the way of their photo taking… and of course whenever we got into trouble, we just pretended that we were from New Zealand. That’ll teach them to fuck with us!!!
The Cambodians by contrast are the nicest people we have ever met. They are absolutely beautiful people with beautiful attitudes despite the atrocities they have suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. In fact it is really weird being here and seeing all this after growing up hearing all the stories of Kampuchean refugees from back in the 80s when Cambodia was called Kampuchea.
Still since the war only ended in 1997, the poverty here is some of the worst we have seen, and since Cambodia has the largest number of unexploded landmines in the world second only to Afghanistan, there is a huge number of limbless and blind people and that is really sad!!! Although, we did get a really cool massage at the Massage School of the Blind… They really let their fingers do the walking…
But despite not being able to pee in the bush because of landmines, and despite SARs, Dengue Fever, Malaria, Bird Flu, and border mafia… we are having a great time and feeling perfectly safe…
In fact the only danger we have had so far is from the monkeys, which really freaked us out since we were warned that for some reason they don’t like the colour red and will attack you if you are wearing red… How FREAKY is that…?????!!!!!!
Tomorrow we are off to see the Killing Fields, which will be depressing, and then we are off to an orphanage for landmine victims where I intend to hold a small clinic with medicines donated from drug companies back home… so that should be WAY cool…
And then we’ll head to Sihanoukville on the coast to chill out for a few days before boating across to Thailand.
Feel free to write and keep us up to date with news from home…
Lots of love and mooshy gooshy stuff…
Ced the Leper King
Avril the Tomb Raider
Greco the Gay Lord
PS By the way, we have been eating a lot of chicken since we arrived which has been really cheap since no-one wants to eat it… so if we don’t make it back then can someone tell the World Health Organisation that yes you can get bird flu from eating chickens
Click Here for a look at our Cambodia Pics from Angkor Wat taken with our funky new 5.1 megapixel Olympus…
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