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Cambodia! (Sabai Sabai!!)

12 September 2008 at 15:10


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Photo by Axay Patel



"Sabai Sabai!!" This means "HAPPY HAPPY" in Cambodia and that's exactly how the Cambodians are. Such a great bunch of people and i'd say 99% don't have a bad bone in their body....it's amazing! They have great manners, extremely polite and they're incredibly helpful if you get lost or you need a good place to eat or get wasted!!

I've seen some great scenery here too (could easily challenge the other SE ASIA places) and it's just a place full of lots of green, and blue filled sky with quite a lot of rocky/mountainous areas. I saw this all straight away as I came into Phnom Penh from the crazy but brilliant Ho-Chi-Minh City!! Phnom Penh was a great place to be straight away and it pretty much set the tone for the rest of the trip.

The Wats and Pagodas look amazing, with bright reds and yellows that decorate the outsides and amazing gold statues with lots of religious symbols shown all around the walls! I did a lot of the sight-seeing on my own and found it to be pretty rewarding as it's so much easier to appreciate these sorts of things on your own!

I also went to the killing fields (Choung Ek) which was very saddening and well it's overwhelming considering how nice the people are with such a sad history from Pol Pot's evil regime. I spoke to a lot of Cambodians and they all said a pretty similar sentence each time when I asked them. "Why would someone do this to their own people?" (I noticed flags of all the nations around the world by the riverside and realised that this is the reason why they're so welcoming and nice to others and between themselves).

Phnom Penh has got a pretty good nightlife there, where I ended up taking 2 different motorcycle drivers out on the lash, both named lucky, and it proved to be pretty rewarding as they were both complete party animals!!!! The first lucky was a complete ladies man (the guy had about 4 girls around him all night, with 1 claiming she's loved him for a long time!!) and the other Lucky I went karaoke with and I ended up having a great time singing Vietnamese songs and generally making a tit out of myself...GOOD TIMES!!

I ended up chilling out at the Beaches in Sihanoukville next and it was pretty kewl getting wasted most nights and enjoying the amazing sea food on offer down there! Although, I have to admit Beach time was limited during the day due to the lack of sleep we were getting at night-time! (We stayed up so late one night we woke up 5pm, and wondering where the hell the day went!!). Also my friend decided to scare a dog and it bit him (HAHA!) and I was scaring the shit out of him saying he had rabies (he probably does and he has no health insurance either tut tut!)

Next onto Kampot, which we only stayed a day, but saw the Pepper Plantations and generally didn't do much else as it started to piss down the rest of the day at which point we just decided to just bum around...what's new!?!?

And saving the best till last....SIEM REAP...TEMPLES OF ANGKOR...sheer genius!! This place is amazing and the vast amount of ruins/temples this place has to offer is incredible!! I think this is best summed up by Angkor Wat....Rain or shine (I had rain :s) this is one of the most best structures seen by any man or woman....it just got really cool stautes and stone carved pictures on the walls and it's just a really immense thing to see.

Although, word of warning and the best advice I could give you is to have a dump if you go early in the morning to see it at sunrise as Angkor Wat is stupidly BIG in it's entirety and well there's no near surrounding toilets (you probably have to run for a good 20-25 minutes and keeping it in as well whilst running is a bloody hard thing.....I deserve a medal). Luckily I made it....JUST!!!

Also the nightlife is really chilled out here and I went to a cool bar called the Banana Leaf and made good mates with a bar tender there called Dino. He made me drink some of the most tastiest cocktails (and not so awesome cocktails....I asked him to knock me out for six with a potent drink...and he did!)

I've really enjoyed the beauty of Cambodia and it's people and find it hard to believe that such a bad thing happened to a country that's great. It's been really hard not being able to give/do enough to the kids on the streets and as well as the various amputees I came across duing this trip but I tried because of knowing they never asked for such a bad thing to occur. I feel like it's a place to reflect on life...and especially how good we all have it back home.

P.S. - Did I mention that I fired a whole 30 round magazine from an AK-47???!...How was it? AWESOME! :D



Written by

Axay Patel

on 7 May 2009.

Axay Patel's Image


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