The alarm goes off at 4.30am. My new girlfriend, Aum (more on her later), calls from the beer garden on Thong Lo where she’s just finished her shift. I think she’s offering to go to the airport with me (she speaks no English, my Thai is barely functional), but I tell her there won’t be room in the taxi with 3 farangs and the baggage, to get to bed and I’ll see her on Monday.
And so we begin. Sonny, Nick and I emerge from the tower block, blinking in the dawn light on New Petchburi Road, and hail a taxi to Suvarnabhumi Airport – Thailand’s new pride and joy has only opened one day previously, so we will be amongst the first people to use it.
The taxi ride to the airport was surprisingly smooth. No traffic at this early hour, no need to take the “highway” (toll road), and we were there far more quickly than we would have manged to get to Don Muang International – the airport that this grand place is replacing.
Structurally it’s all very impressive; apparently it boasts the tallest air-traffic control tower in the world. Such phallic obsession in the land where the sex industry officially “does not exist”…
We make it through to the departure lounge easily enough – there are no tannoy announcements, but the signs are (just about) clear enough. There’s a nice decently-sized plasma screen in the departure lounge, which you’d be forgiven for expecting to display boarding/flight information. This being Thailand, it is showing video commercials instead.
Eventually a queue forms silently, and we eventually find a member of staff who tells us that yes, this is the queue for the Phnom Penh flight. We go through the gate, onto a bus which has had all of its seats removed, and we stand like cattle as we’re slowly driven to the plane, only half an hour behind schedule.
The flight itself is straightforward enough, of course. We get to Phnom Penh by about 9am, and it’s very much a case of “start as you mean to continue” by the Cambodian officials. A passport photo is required for your visa application form, or you can pay ฿50 if you don’t have one. I hand over ฿60 in notes, which the official happily takes. I wait. I am given a withering glance, as the official beckons the next person in line, willing me to get out of the way. Instead, I hold out my hand for my ฿10 change. The official laughs: “We don’t do that here”.
Sure, it’s ฿10. If I’d dropped it, I might not have bothered to pick it up. But I object to being openly ripped off, no matter how trivial the amount. It’s the bare-faced-ness of it that I object to, I think…
That done, we are allowed to proceed to the visa cashier, where we pay $20 (US dollars) each for our tourist visas. Then passport control. Nobody has smiled at me yet. Has Thailand spoiled me? If Thailand is the “Land of Smiles”, this is the “Land of Contemptous Glares”.
We find an ATM and get some dollars – bizarre to be using “greenbacks” in South East Asia, but the Cambodian currency (riel) is so meagre in value that it is currently pinned at 4,000 to the dollar. Change of less than a dollar is given in riel. There are 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 riel notes, as far as I can tell. There seem to be no coins whatsoever in use in Cambodia. Not a bad idea, to be honest.
At least things have moved on from the Khmer Rouge – under that regime, rightly more infamous for mass genocide, currency literally didn’t exist. Money was declared illegal, and the authorities blew up the central bank for good measure.
We get a taxi to our hotel for $7, and are met by friendly staff who offer us two options. We can have a room on the first or second floor for $15 a night, or the third, fourth or fifth floors for just $10 a night. There is no elevator. Lazy mollycoddled westerners to a man, we go for the $15 rooms to save the effort of climbing more than one flight of stairs.
The rooms are decent enough for $15 – air con, fan, cable TV, en-suite bathroom. A bit run-down, but it all works. We wolf down burgers and fries outside the hotel, then hit our rooms for well-earned naps.
At around 4pm, I emerge into the late afternoon sunshine on Street 148 (catchy, eh?), sit at one of the hotel’s outdoor bar tables, and order an Angkor Beer. A pint or so of this very pleasant local brew sets me back $1. And I am so transfixed by its yellow fizzy goodness, that I don’t notice the seedy taxi driver until he sits down next to me.
And within moments he has offered me firearms, drugs and underage prostitutes. I firmly inform him I’m not interested in any of the above. He backpedals a little – tells me that the girls are fifteen, so only just underage, but that they do cost more than regular girls because they “have small hole”. Nick and Sonny appear from upstairs, and he slinks away. Cambodia is apparently known as the Wild West of South-East Asia – I’m beginning to believe it.
We wander up to the riverside, which is dotted with some superb restaurants. The Rendezvous Cafe does terrific pizzas, and amidst a sea of motorbike touts, pushy salesmen and child/amputee/both beggars, we eat.