Baby onboard?!?

February 20, 2011 
Yesterday we had a 6 hour bus ride from Siem Reap to Phonom Phen. The upside of the trip was that we had the back row, 3 seats, all to ourselves. The down side was that the back seat is right on top of the engine ...HOT!
Arriving at the bus station is always the same routine. Tuk tuk drivers are practically blocking the exit of the bus just waiting to ambush the tourists. It's almost claustrophobic so we usually just walk a block or two before flagging down a ride.
The rules of the road here never cease to amaze me. In a city of million people there are only a handful of traffic lights. Instead it's free flowing traffic, merging into the smallest of openings and if you are too close there is a friendly honk from the oncoming vehicle, but road rage seems nonexistent. There may only be two lanes painted on the road, but there are always an invisible third and sometimes even fourth lane. The rules to obey are as follows: buses and police yield to no one, cars/trucks yield to buses, tuk tuks yield to cars, scooters yield to tuk tuks, essentially little yields to big. The crappy thing about the system is no one yields to pedestrians. Crossing the street has been a learning experience for us and part of the normal process is just stepping out and weaving your way across the moving lanes of traffic.

Today was a heavy day as we toured the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, a prison where people were starved, tortured and later taken to be executed  during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.
Before researching this trip I was oblivious to the genocide that took place in Cambodia such a short time ago (1975-79). Even after becoming aware of this tragedy, the magnitude of the situation is still hard to fathom. Of a population of 7 million at that time, over 2 million people died. 
A brief summary of events at that time is a communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, overthrew the government in 1975. Their goal was to create pure and equal agrarian society in which money, social class, religion and education would all be abolished. People were forced from cities into villages and made to work. Many families were separated, many people died of starvation and inhumane treatment and anyone who was foreign, religious, worked for a previous government, was educated or wore glasses, thus appearing educated, were executed along with their kin to prevent any future revenge. Guns and ammunition are quite expensive so most people were not killed with a bullet, but were bludgeoned or stabbed etc, I will spare the gory details. In a couple of days we are heading to an offshore island that is well off the main trail off the south coast of Cambodia for a few days of relaxing on the beach....a welcome change in scenery and atmosphere.

February 22, 2011
We just can't win with bus rides. Yesterday we had a 4 hour bus ride to Sihanoukville and no word of a lie, the driver honked the horn at least once a minute. I think it's the courteous thing to do when passing another vehicle, usually scooters, to prevent any sudden lane changes, but it made for a long and deafening journey. 
Q has read some bad reviews about this town so we are strictly here to pick up our Vietnamese visas and are hopefully heading to Koh Rong, an island off the coast of Sihanoukville. I say hopefully because this morning our ride didn't pick us up and we missed our boat. They said there was no more boats today we would have to wait until tomorrow, but when we said we would probably cancel there was all of a sudden another boat going at 1pm. Funny how that works. 

The boat over to Koh Rong was nothing more than an oversized, two story longtail boat but they did have lifejackets which was a huge surprise. It really is another world over here and we got a lesson in how different it is the second we stepped on the boat. Lying on the middle on the deck of the boat in the middle of people loading rice and ice and bags was a lady wrapped up in blankets hooked up to an IV. Beside her was a newborn baby, and when I say newborn I mean newborn. We started chatting with another couple from London who informed us that we had just missed the miracle of life. 10 seconds before we had sat down they had witness the ladies friend cutting the umbilical cord!!!!!what? This baby was just born on the deck of a longtail boat....no doctors, no drugs,  crazy! 
The boat took about 2 hrs and when we got to the island we were greeted with pristine white sandy beaches (the kind of sand that squeaks under foot). We didn't have a reservation at any of the 3 bungalow places because there weren't any phone numbers and were a little worried when the first two places were full. The third place had two story treehouses that were right on the beach and only 20 feet from the water. We were lucky enough to get one of these for the first night and spent a fantastic night listening to the water crash upon the beach. The only down fall of the night was when we woke up in the morning to find that a rat had chewed through a side pocket of my pack to get at a granola bar.

We moved to another bungalow place the next night as the treehouse was unfortunately all booked up. We spent the next three days laying on the beach, reading to eachother, and all around relaxing......it was perfect. We couldn't decide whether to stay an extra night or move on to our next destination and just hope we find another place that made us feel the way this place did.

The boat to the mainland was a little rougher this time around and I apparently didn't take my gravol early enough before boarding. 45 mins into a 2 hr boat ride guess who got sick?.....this guy....10 times, haha. As you have read there have been several times that I have been nauseous but haven't thrown-up so I figured I was due. Lucky enough the boat was open on all sides and I just went to the back and paid my respects to the south china sea. 

When we got the mainland we shared a taxi with a German couple to a town called Kampot were we spent a day hiking up to the Bokor Palace. Bokor Palace is a hotel that was built in the early 1900's by the French and is situated on a plateau high above the jungle. The hotel has been abandon for the last 40yrs and has been left to mother nature.... it is pretty eerie walking through it and especially eerie when the fog rolled in. After the hike we took a boat down the river to watch the sunset from a sandbar on the edge of the south china sea....another great send off!

Tomorrow we head east in to Vietnam where we plan to spend the next three weeks making our way from Saigon in the south right up to Hanoi in the north.