On Transportation...

Hello everyone! My heart is pounding and I can not type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts....translation....a little dehydrated and over-caffeinated. We have had an interesting last 24 hours to say the least. At about 4:30 pm yesterday we decided that we had had enough of Cambodia and were ready to move onto Vietnam. Within the course of about five minutes we had a very cheap and easy plan to get out and it became apparent to me that perhaps Cambodia was through with us as well.

The beach has been wonderful and disappointing at the same time. There is actually no beach, just a rocky coastline and no place to lay in the sand. There is a small beach that is sandy but more like a sandbox kind of sand...we were able to walk into the water which was so incredibly warm and that was about it. Given that the beach was not quite what we were looking for and the fact that we are starting to get a little weary of the Cambodians and their love of the mighty US dollar it was all too easy to say goodbye to it all. We are so happy that we came all the way down to Kep. It is am amazing, sleepy, quiet town. Hardly any tourists. Before we left Phnom Pen I had mentioned to Will that the beach would be awesome if we arrived and it was raining buckets and was a little chilly. The extreme hot weather has been wearing us out. Well, my wish was granted and it was raining as we arrived and the air was crisp and cool. There were not many options for accommodations and we finally ended up staying dorm style at a place owned by a crazy French guy named Fabrize called Kukuluku. We arrived after 5pm and got settled and then got some food and then Will split to the internet cafe for his facebook date with M. I went back to the guest house and had a lovely time with other guests from Italy, Australia, Canada and Austria. It is truly a party of strangers out here in the world and the communication flowed easy and everyone enjoyed the company. Staying dorm style means there is one huge room that is filled with beds and you pay for the bed and the bathroom is shared. The beds were huge....almost king size and had Will and I shared a bed like many other travelers sharing the room with us it would have been $5 total. Before we even left Myanmar I had already announced that I wanted my own bed from here on out...so we each paid $5 for a bed and were quite happy.

We pretty much hung out yesterday reading and catching up on journal writing. I did lay out in my bikini in a hammock that was strung between two palm trees...not such a bad thing really, sun was able to get to me, a slight breeze coming off the water, I have no complaints. We walked into town and got a burrito...yup a burrito that had cheese and tomatoes inside of it, and a coke! Such Americans! The name of the place was called Led Zep and they cranked out nothing but classic 80's hits. It was here that we decided to move on. So we are now in Sihanoukville where the Vietnamese Consulate is. We arrived here at 930 by car (which will be another blog altogether...) and caught a moto to the Consulate. It took exactly five minutes to get our visas. Certainly makes you wonder what the hell takes so long at other Consulates but I will try to be grateful about it as they still did not require me to have a photo...

We are now booked on a bus back to Phnom Pen and will leave tomorrow morning for the former Saigon/ Ho Chi Min City!

In the end we are glad we went all the way down to Kep. Seeing the coastline and then the rain was well worth it. Last night we went to a restaurant and ended up being joined by four other guests from the Kukuluku that we were staying with that I had been talking with the night before. We ate and drank and then went back to the guest house and drank more...it was a huge party with very loud music, Cambodian men playing pool and lots of wine and beer drinking. I had five beers (three of them stouts and very potent) and this morning as we were waking at 545 to get our taxi to this town the thought occurred to me that I have not had a hangover in years..,but today I did!

Which is why, when the taxi showed up I was a little pissy. I have often been quoted on this trip as saying "nothing is ever as it seems..." take for instance the burrito from yesterday. I said to Will the minute we saw the sign that the word conjures for me the ultimate burrito which is from Pancho Villa's on Valencia in the Mission in San Francisco. The next burrito that comes to mind is the no carne burrito from Felipe's in Santa Fe... Will has his own mental image of his favorite burrito as well...don't we all? That is why we had to know what the Cambodian Burrito looked like...plus it was 75 cents...

Ok back to this morning....when we booked the car yesterday we were aware that there were two other passengers. So, in my head I imagined a car with four foreigners and one local driver. Three in the back, one in the front seat with the driver. I also imagined that I would be able to lean on a window and sleep for the three hour drive. Given that nothing is ever as it seems I should not have been surprised to see that in the toyota camry already were not just two other foreigners, but four adult Cambodians and a young girl approximate age of five. Will and I just looked at each other...the couple from France looked at each other and then us. We all looked at the Cambodians...surely some of these people were now getting out of the car and walking somewhere....weren't they? Well actually No. they were all coming to Sihanoukville as well. I mean if the car was taking some foreigners might as well not waste the trip and take half of the village with you. Remember the hangover....ugh. So, a huge tall French guy and his tall girlfriend and Will and I all squeezed into the back seat and the Four Cambodians adults and one child squeezed into the front seat. Eventually we would pick up two more Cambodians and make our way. One person sat on the back of the car and the other extra guy sat next to the driver beside the driver-side door. It is a little known fact after today that the drivers seat is actually meant for two. The driver drove the car, shifted gears and loaded up DVD's in the dashboard mounted DVD player and Talked on his phone all at once and while seated in the middle of the car. Three people shared the passenger side front seat. And as always...no travel in Cambodia or really anywhere in SE Asia is ever complete without a few huge bags of dried fish. The smell was great. We drove very fast and only four people appeared to be awake in the car when the driver drove over a dog in the middle of the street. I was one of those people. To his credit, the driver did slam his breaks and tried to stop but there was nothing that could be done. We did not stop to see how the dog was either. There was no way he could have been alive though....or at least I surely hope not.

It was just another assurance to me that we had made the right decision to get out of Cambodia.

I will have to blog more when we get to Phnom Pen and let you know about the killing fields.

Off to catch a bus...

willandCody