Eastern Cambodia

Ban Lung - Waterfall

We have had a very relaxing week in Eastern Cambodia and are amazed by how different it is to Laos in so many ways.
- Cambodians are much more friendly, and interactive with many speaking some English, in Laos wherever we camped we were left pretty much alone.


Sen Monorom waterfall

- There is much more organised agriculture in Cambodia with large scale plantations, and little untouched forest outside the protected areas whereas Laos has large areas of unspoilt forest and little large scale agriculture.
- Cambodian roads are much better, even the dirt roads are well graded and are better maintained than in Laos.


Logging Road into Forest

National Museum

The Eastern region of Cambodia is more hilly then the west and has rubber, cashew nut, banana and cassava plantations over much of the ground. Being at around 700m it is cooler than the Mekong Valley, feeling positively cold some nights when it was particularly windy. We spent a couple of days in Ban Lung in the north east visiting a nearby volcanic lake and a couple of waterfalls, whilst enjoying a couple of nights of luxury in the Tree Tops Eco Lodge. 165kms south we stayed near Sen Monorom where we had planned to organise a trek to visit the gibbons, but the guide had just married and was on honeymoon, so we will return next week.


Lakeside Campsite

Instead we have dropped down into Phnom Penh , a bustling city boasting a number of new skyscrapers as well as some lovely old French Colonial buildings, and a lovely riverfront where families picnic overlooking the water. We spent the day visiting the national museum which houses some fantastic sculptures from the Ankor Period followed by a very thought provoking and moving visit to the genocide museum S21 where 20,000 people were tortured and sentenced to death during the Pol Pot years. It is extraordinary how a nation can inflict such cruelty on its own people and fall under the spell of a tyrant, but sadly it is not unique, and was not the last genocide of the 20th century.


French Colonial Buildings

Over the next week we head for Ankor Wat, and will hopefully find out whether we can get a permit to cross Thailand as planned, or we will have to make some other arrangement, perhaps shipping to Indonesia instead.



       
 

New Year - New Country

Mekong waterfalls

Mekong Car Ferry

Irawaddy Dolphin

After a fantastic four weeks in the UK over Christmas when we were able to celebrate with all the family and catch up with friends we returned to Vientiane in Laos. Mike's garage had greased all the wheel bearings and we had the air conditioning checked and a small leak repaired. Hopefully we will be able to keep cool from here on. With nothing else to detain us we headed south towards the Cambodian border, stopping for a couple of days at 4000 islands, an area of many small islands in the Mekong River where it cascades down over a rock shelf. The river at this point is several kms wide so there are many waterfalls between the islands. Just south of the lower island there is a pod of the endangered Irawaddy Dolphins so we took a boat to where they live and were privileged to see several surfacing around 50m from the boat. The island of Don Khong is only 8kms long and is serviced by a passenger ferry. Despite being a backpacker destination and a good stopover on the route from Cambodia to Vientiane it is relatively peaceful (apart from the overnight concert) so we hired bikes to travel round visiting another waterfall, and a couple of very sandy beaches. During the French colonial period a short railway was constructed along the island to get two gun boats past the waterfalls, so they could patrol the upper Mekong.
Finally on Sunday we crossed into Cambodia through an almost deserted border post, with one of the fastest border crossings in this part of the world so far. Cambodia feels very different, fewer vehicles on the roads and much flatter, but we will discover more over the next couple of weeks.

Mekong sunset



Water Buffalo