We are back in Phnom Penh for 48 hours because we have to collect our visas from the Indian Consulate. Our Indian friends have learnt the craft of bureaucracy from the British but have turned it into an art form. I won’t bore everyone with the process but it involves a lot of queuing, a […]
Archive | Southeast Asia RSS feed for this section
Back to the seaside
Having had enough of the city and the Khmer Rouge, we went off to the south for a few days while we waited for the Indian Government to decide if we were the worthy sort of people to whom they would grant a tourist visa. We took a bus for the 130Km, four hour journey, […]
Phnom Penh: enclave of the rich
According to a couple of old books I read, Phnom Penh used to be the ‘Pearl of Asia‘ in the days when it was occupied by the French. Since then, it has gone backwards. First, thanks to a series of incompetent Cambodian governments, second, thanks to the Khmer Rouge who drove the inhabitants from the […]
Bamboo train and bats
“Why do you want to go to Battambang?” we were asked by an inquisitive guest at our lodgings in Siem Reap. It was a good question and one that we could not convincingly answer. It seemed the obvious place to go after Siem Reap, mostly because, next to a dot on the map, the town’s […]
Stunning Siem Reap
Cambodia seems to embody all that is wrong with a developing world country. The politicians are institutionally corrupt, the gap between rich and poor is enormous, the rainforest jungle has all but disappeared, the waters have been fished out and the country is dependent on (and purposely makes itself dependent on) foreign aid. Even all […]
Storms, sea and sand: Phu Quoc Island
We arrived at our beachside hotel on Phu Quoc Island where we had booked a bungalow with a sea view for the princely sum of US$20 per night. To get here involved turning off the dirt track that served as the island’s main north-south highway and down a 30-degree incline that scraped the underside of […]
Saigon sojourn and the mighty Mekong
‘Fasten your seatbelts, Ho Chi Minh City is a metropolis on the move’. So says the tourist information. If it is talking of the motorbikes then they are correct. We had thought that Hanoi was awash with bikes but Hanoi’s traffic is chickenfeed compared to Ho Chi Minh. There must be at least ten times […]