I've been in Cambodia for two full weeks and I have been sweating pretty much the whole time. This place is mental. I am going to just type what I perceive to be facts without any narrative strategy. It will not be interesting.
I came into Siem Reap airport which is beautiful, looks a bit like an amazing modern temple and is very well run. The rest of Cambodia is not like this.
After Siem Reap was Phnom Penh, which is a lot more like a city, but with traffic lights that mean NOTHING!
Phnom Penh begat Kampot, which is a sleepy old-ecole French settlement quite near the coast. The roads here are massive, but have very little on them.
Kep (sur Mer) was next, with a trip to the tropical paradise of Rabbit Island (Koh Tonsay) at the tip of the journey.
The next four days will be spent going back over this route all the way to the LCCT Airport in Malaysia!
The roads
here are mostly dirt tracks. Vehicles overtake at will, with oncoming traffic expecting to cede ground for a faster/larger vehicle. Four people and a large polystyrene cool box can fit comfortably on a moped-sized motorcycle; the comfort being provided by the box upon which the smallest child is perched. Approximately 30 people will fit on the back of a truck, sardine-style (this reduces burning from the sun, excess exposure to the road dust/grit, unnecessary being cool...) Traffic lights (only in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, circa 2008) are almost completely ignored. Turning corners/crossing roads is done by looking straight forward and avoiding anything directly in your path regardless of which side of the road you are on or anything like "right of way", it is everyone 
else's responsibility to avoid you. This I call "accepting the mystery." Petrol is sold everywhere by anyone with access to glass bottles. The road is mostly single lane surround by dirt tracks, houses on stilts, then mines (in that order). It variously contains cavernous pot-holes, dogs, cows, children, fowl, pigs and any number of overladen motor- and self-propelled vehicles travelling on the wrong side/across the road/stopped completely on a roundabout. The speed limit is slow as you like for motorbikes and dangerously fast for anything car sized (mostly 4x4s, pick-ups and massive trucks). Honking your horn means you are overtaking, being overtaken, in a hurry, acknowledging a friend, wishing to purchase something from a food stall, happy, or pressed up against the horn by the weight of passengers/boxes/sugar cane/durians/livestock/all of the above on your bike/truck. Some bikes are trucks (MASSIVE trailers bolted on) but not all trucks are bikes.Happy Pizza is pizza with weed on it. The best mojitos in the world are available at a bar in
Siem Reap for $1. Baguettes are readily available, butter is not (as refrigeration is not, as electricity is not).There are at least two currencies running side by side and you have to calculate the difference for
most transactions (USD$1 = 4100 R, though generally it's 4000, USD$1 = 0.6GBP approx) but most things are cheap anyway. In Siem Reap and Phnom Penh they may try to charge you more anyway çause you're foreign. In many tourist spots you official prices are higher for foreigners.Air con is still the world's best thing, but cost (and general lack of electricity) here makes it far from ubiquitous. People go to a mall in Phnom Penh, for fun, to try out the escalator.
The whole place is pretty poor, and getting around is a chore, and anywhere you can get to probably has loads of French or English or Australian people in it. But it is lovely. The people are lovely, hospitable and friendly, the food is good, the landscape is really tropical. There are dragonflies everywhere (and every other sort of animal/bug). It's good. However the heat, constant noise and (in some places) mosquitoes can make it tiring.
I'm not sure Cambodians, or the Khmer people if you like, actually sleep. I'm assuming everyone is deaf because (except for the middle of the day) noise is everywhere. Street traders squeak toy horns throughout the night. Dogs run and bark and fi
ght throughout the night. In Kep, storms make you fear for your life throughout the night, or any time you get onto your rented Honda Dream. Music is played at uncomfortable and unsatisfying levels for weddings in car parks day and night. One wedding was set up in a big decorative tent over one lane of the busy highway out of Kampot: lovely place for a reception, bit gritty, dangerous and in the middle of a road, but looks good in the official photos.
Anyway, it's Australia via every other place I've already been next, so looking forward to that. No pictures from this internet cafe I'm afraid, but I'll try again at some point. Hope this makes sense, but as usual I'm sweating under an ineffectual fan so have probably forgotten to include anything of interest.
Over and out.
