After saying goodbye to the teachers and students at the school where we’d spent the last month volunteering, we made our way to the bus station and prepared to take our leave of Siem Reap, headed to a layover in Phnom Penh en route to our next volunteer position in Vietnam.

Leaving Siem Reap

There was a bit of a wait in the little bus terminal, and we passed the time in part by playing peek-a-boo with a little boy waiting with his parents.

The Road to Phnom Penh

Our vehicle, once again, was a large van, and it would have been quite comfy if they hadn’t tried to make sardines of the passengers. When we booked this ride online, we chose our seats, and tried to get what looked like the most comfortable ones we could; but when it was time to board, we discovered that the actual seating arrangement didn’t conform to the online booking chart. Rather than being in a single seat behind the front passenger seat, Dennis was wedged into the kiddie seat between the front passenger seat and the driver. But later he was able to move back to another seat, where his only problem was that he was next to a gabby lady on her phone.

As in the ride coming the other way (Phnom Penh to Siem Reap), our eyes were bombarded by explosions of local color in all the towns and villages and rural areas we passed through. It never ceases to amaze us how all kinds of vehicles, including motorbikes (“motos”) can absolutely defy gravity with the enormous loads of cargo (and passengers) they transport. It’s as if we’re in a corner of the world where the laws of physics don’t apply.

As before, we made a lunch stop along the way, and although we’d brought our own grub along, it was good to be able to stretch our legs and get some air, and get the blood circulating so we weren’t constantly fighting the urge to doze off and miss all the scenery.

Dennis even ordered a cup of hot tea to give him a caffeine jolt; but he was at first hesitant to actually drink it, because the server, upon retrieving a teabag, had carried it around in her bare hand for some time while searching for a carry-out cup. And you know who is a bit of a germaphobe. But finally the desperate craving for caffeine won out.

Upon arrival in Phnom Penh, we hired a tuk-tuk to carry us to the Airbnb apartment we had booked. He had a difficult time finding it, but at last we managed. It was very close to the famous marketplace known as Russian Market (Psaa Tuol Tampung in Khmer).

Phnom Penh

On this particular trip, the tuk-tuk driver’s difficulty in finding our lodgings turned out to be a presage of the comedy of errors to come.

Having located the apartment, we were unable to open the combination box containing the key. Finally we had to ask for help in the candle shop next door, which was owned by someone connected with the apartment.

So we got inside. But then we were unable to get Internet service. So we had to contact the host and jump through a couple of hoops, and at last we were able to get online.

Then we tried to do a load of laundry in the machines downstairs which we’d been told we could use. But the infernal devices absolutely wouldn’t cooperate. So we once again had to bug the lady in the candle shop.

And the next obstacle was obtaining drinking water. In third world countries, as we’ve mentioned before, you never drink the tap water (at least not without boiling it). Everyone brings in (or has delivered) drinking water in 20-liter (a little more than 5 gallon) jugs. Once the jug is empty, you exchange it for a full one, usually paying about a dollar or so for the water.

Well, we had an empty jug. But finding a place to trade it proved to be difficult. There was a store around the corner that did jug exchanges, but when we took ours down there, we found that it was not the brand they traffic in.

At first, we had to just buy some water in bottles. Then we discovered that about a block away was a laundromat (not at all a common sight in Cambodia), and in that laundromat was a vending machine that sold drinking water — not that common either. So we could take our water packs and what other bottles and containers we could round up, and stock up on water much more cheaply than the bottled rate.

And having our necessities taken care of, we settled in for a rather comfortable stay in Phnom Penh.

We never imagined that in the near future, we’d spend more than a year haunting this very same neighborhood, and living in an apartment only a couple of blocks away.

10/27/2022