So where does this story start? Perhaps the night before in Saigon for NYE when 'going pear shaped' would have been a rather nice way of stating how everything just happened to fall apart. So, here we go. Jase and I had just made our way back to the hotel after a day on the Mekong, which I must say, was outstanding, fascinating, eye opening and in the end, just a really great experience. Anyway, we're back at our hotel and we decide to kick off NYE with a few drinks, aha you say, always a good way to start, but this is where the trouble actually originated. So we're cruising along the streets of the town in the early evening and divert into the very authentic Saigon G'N'R bar, a place that religiously place 3 Guns'N'Roses songs and then perhaps follows up with a Metallica song before hitting the old faithful for another 3. Anyway we're drinking away and I see Jase getting progressively agitated, or perhaps, more to the point, emotionally distressed, and you know, I know the deal, he's missing his girl, he's spent 10 days with me and it's thrown him off balance, especially considering it's NYE. I might have though he was a bit of a 'soft cock' but in the same situation I would more than likely have felt the same way. Anyway in his wisdom and with the aim of settling his nerves he decides to head back up to the hotel room in order to call his girl whilst at the same time leaving me with the job of holding the for down at the G'N'R bar.
Jase returns a little later, contact not made and obviously he's looking just like he must be feeling, distressed. Never the less we get up and move on, into the NYE night, heading for another bar with alternate drinks and perhaps something else to offer. The thing is, Jase has his wiring all askew, he's pissed that he hasn't been able to get in contact with his girl and he lets me know. Somewhere along the line he also loses his smokes and he lets me know about that also with a kind of a bit of an outburst. All these elements ends up culminating into one emotionally detached and pissed person, which right at this moment I don't want to deal with because hey, I'm in Saigon on NYE and I'm really wanting to have a great night! An argument ensues (yes, I've used that word twice now) and then I come out with a golden line,
'Hey, are you going to act like a dick all night', or words to that affect. I may have said it twice.
In any case, Jase throws down his newly purchased smokes and walks into the night, I assume, never wanting to be seen again - so, there I'm left, contemplating taking on NYE solo this year, 'coolio'.
Without going into where my head space was at for the next two hours I did manage to walk back to the hotel room to find our emotionally damaged and decrepit hero in his 'party' uniform. So at about 10:30 we 'kicked' it Aussie style and went back out into the Saigon cauldron to live up the next 90 mins as best we could. This new perspective lasted about 45 mins until yours truly, a dumb ass for the ages, managed to leave his mobile phone in a bar/restaurant and himself acquired the standard 'pissed', 'flipout' status that one usually acquires when they lose an item of relative importance.
Anyway, the question is, how the hell does this relate to Phnom Penh? Well here's where it begins. New Year's Day was spent on a bus out of Saigon, to the border and thence beyond. Dreaming, drowsing away and glimpsing my way on the road to the border was comfortable. The border crossing however was a lesson in 'agitation', highlighted albeit with a modicum of amusement. So, there we are at the Vietnamese / Cambodian border crossing, our bus driver having horded our passports and $25USD for Cambodian visa requirements. We walk into the Vietnamese 'checkpoint' along within 100+ other border crossers, having no idea with regards to the rules, procedures or entry requirements. There we wait, crammed together, waiting for what we didn't exactly know. We see 'official' type people seated in booths stamping random passports and assumed from those actions that perhaps somewhere along the line our passports would acquire the same necessary stamps that would allow us to proceed further also. We waited, and waited, and waited some more, making jokes with fellow travellers and desperado's surrounding the clarity of the situation. We gained snippets of information, mostly from our bus driver who stood for 30 mins near a 'border official', I assume waiting for confirmation of visa acceptance or something along those lines, who knows, we certainly didn't. I'm guessing that about 45mins-60mins later we were ushered through, one by one, our bus driver chuffed at his ability to negate the system as efficiently as humanly possible, and truthfully, in the end, it was a lot better than the 'worse case' scenario that existed in the back of my mind. Fifteen minutes later we were in Cambodia and settling into a totally different odyssey.
About 4 hrs from the border we hit the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. A place that for some reason I had always wanted to see and experience since I was about 8 yrs old. It's funny, sometimes places, names, features and alike just stick in your mind. For example, for me such places as Papeete, Paris, the Canary Islands, Neuschwanstein & Machu Picchu have always had pride of place and have always been place that I had intended on seeing. Now, I have actually been to some of the places that I've just mentioned and the others still remain on my agenda but in regards to Phom Penh, with me now at the ripe old age of 32, was getting checked out and crossed off my mental 'must see/must do' list. I admit, a lot of that had to do with my perception of Cambodia, the mystery that surrounded the country formerly know as Kampuchea, the land that Pol Pot had destroyed, the land of the 'Killing Fields', the land of untold brutality and torture. All of these images and concoctions had remained with me for years and now I was in a place that had occupied a tidy space in the corner of my mind for decades and I've got to say, the feeling was very cool.
I'd like to continue on here but I've had a couple and probably wouldn't do the place justice, so with that, I'll 'park' my Cambodian experience and revisit it when I'm a little more lucid.
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