Today, we woke up pretty early and hoped back on the bus to Siem Reap. It was such a great place, I was a bit sad to leave. From what we saw of PP when we landed, it was just another large city in Asia.
So to fully understand the torture of this bus ride, when we got back to Singapore (where I am typing now), we looked up the weather. The WHOLE entire week it was 35C (95F). It was SOOO hot. The bus ride was the worst thing in the world. We transferred from our hotel to a bus which took us about 10 minutes to another station. It was nice, there was no whiny Cambodian music videos at full blast and the AC was nice. Then we got onto a new bus. It was completely full, and the front/side doors didn't close. There was no AC. For 6 hours in the middle of the afternoon. Literally, we sat in a pile of sweat trying not to touch one another, it was so miserable. We stopped mid ride for food, and it was much cooler (by this, I mean like 95 instead of 100) outside, so that was nice. Once we got within an our of PP, the main highway was still under construction. SO the non packed roads brought loads of dust circulating inside the bus. Everyone had their shirts over their mouths, coughing and everything in sight had a thick layer of red dust over it. IT was terrible.
There really is very limited transportation in Cambodia. The main transportation is by these buses, which are not government run but randomly ran by companies. There is no train system or no government bus system. Another very common was is to pay to ride in the back of someones truck.
Our new hostel was pretty nice. IT was only 5 months old so everything was clean. IT was what I would consider a party hostel. Lots of drinking, loud music, weed, but they served good food and there was limited AC, so we had SOME comfort. The city itself smelled. It was very gross. It looked like all the other big cities in Asia, except there wasn't the "nice and clean" part within the city limits. It smelled either like weed, gas, or trash. There were tons of people, but despite everything w read online, I didn't feel like I was going to get mugged at any minute, even though we were warned by locals all the time to "mind your things" when inside the markets. We met these two Canadian girls who were backpacking for 7 weeks in SE Asia and decided to join up with them the following day for the tour.
We got into an interesting conversation about skin. One thing that has happened to me at almost every trip is that my face breaks out. I always brushed it off, maybe its because I use my travel stuff which is different, or I"m busy and sweat alot. But one of the girls said that's not relay why, its because of the pollution. It made so much sense. The pollution in the cities (minus Singapore, of course, because eco green is their life even though they don't always practice what they preach) is terrible here. It's quite ironic, in the US, we are led to believe by the media and some other countries that we are the worst polluters because we drive big trucks and hummers. They obviously have never visited the streets of Bangkok or Cambodia. The motorcycles here jet out large plumed of black smoke and there is not one inch of street that isn't covered in something gross. In the morning the smell is worse, as it rains sometimes at night and the smell gets to sit in the water and become grosser. I actually saw and trash dump IN The city in PP while we were riding around.
Two things I forgot to mention that day before that Lucy told me. In their stable, there was a world map. They had the idea to have guests tack their home countries to see how many people visited the stables. IT was just an ordinary map, but obviously not an American printed map, since the US was on the right side instead of the left side like we see it at home. She told us that her workers, which are locals and orphans they hire, had no idea what it was. They had never seen "the sea" or a map, never the less a WORLD map. She had to explain to them what the other colors meant. Could you imagine seeing a world map for the first time? Another thing we talked about, was the Cambodian music videos. The women would stand and sway on their feet and twist their lands at their hips. It was like Hawaiian dance, with the hand motions, but no hip movements and their hands were stuck to their sides. Lucy said that they bound their hands to make them very flexible (think bound feet of the ancient Chinese) because very flexible hands was considered a beauty thing in Cambodia. Many of the women could bend their fingers back to their arms, it was a common thing. Who knew?
It was a nice easy day :)
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