EDIT: it seems I might still be in holiday mode, cos I forgot to actually post the link to the pictures. Ha ha. It’s been added.

Continuing my process of catch up, I’ve finally gotten round to sorting some more pics. This time it’s the pictures of my week in Cambodia, including Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and the in-between trips.

Looking at the pictures it reminds me just how much of a shock to the system the country was but also how warm and friendly its people were. If you haven’t yet you can read in more details about the shock of Cambodia in my recent post.

Next are the pics from Borneo, Malaysia and Hong Kong and then we move on to the North American continent.

Cambodia Flickr set

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written by Laurent \\ tags: beach, Cambodia, food, people, Phnom Penh, pictures, sea, Sihanoukville, South East Asia, temples, travelling

So I left Saigon for Cambodia about three weeks ago. I was on a definite food high by then, having found more local stalls and treats around Saigon and also making my first and only restaurant stop in Vietnam. The restaurant was pretty damn good, and not expensive at all. I had some amazing tuna steak cooked with lemongrass and prawns in satay sauce that were unbelievably tasty. More than that though what really struck me was the freshness of the ingredients and how simply they were cooked, with no pretention or attempt at disguising anything - just simple recipes cooked well and with fairly copious portions considering.

As I said before I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in Cambodia, of all the spots I was hitting it was the one place which cuisine I didn’t know much about. As it turned out it wasn’t the most amazing, though I did find some interesting things. Cambodian cuisine seems to be primarily Khmer in origin, which would make sense. But it’s quite different to its Thai neighbour, also Khmer in origin. Thing is there wasn’t that many Khmer spots around.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: Borneo, Cambodia, cuisine, curry, Dim Sum, eating, fish, food, Hong Kong, Indian, Khmer, Malay, Malaysia, noodles, spring rolls, travelling, Vietnam

I left Vietnam for Cambodia in early July, taking a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh. The last of my land based trips for a while, it wasn’t the most comfortable, or eventless considering I managed to get on the wrong bus for half the journey, but definitely one of the most interesting. While Vietnam offered an insight into a country recovering from war and moving fast, or trying to anyways, into the ‘modern’ capitalist world that defines us today, Cambodia offered an even more vivid and raw example of that.

As soon as the bus crossed the border the landscape changed radically. Gone were the few apparent elements of modernity I saw in vietnam, replaced by a single tarmac road surrounded by a lot of nothing but rundown buildings, shacks, huts, temples, fields and animals. Even though the journey from the border to Phnom Penh, the capital, was just a few hours it was enough to already give me a feeling that Cambodia is struggling with a lot more than some of its neighbours.

That feeling was repeated once I’d got to Phnom Penh, slightly less chaotic than the Vietnamese cities, but just as noisy, polluted and visibly more grimey. And then it all continued as I connected directly on a bus headed to the south coast of Cambodia and a town called Sihanoukville, a tourist resort of sorts, all beaches, sea and relaxing.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: beaches, Cambodia, friendly, infrastructure, people, Phnom Penh, pollution, poverty, Sihanoukville, South East Asia, temples, travelling, warm