Holiday in Cambodia: Day 6, Battambang to Phnom Penh

For those following at home, this one should be a short entry. I’m now back in Noongar Boodjar, eating overpriced avocado on toast and sipping on an iced coffee with dairy products that have known actual refrigeration, and am playing catch-up.

Went for Khmer noodle soup breakfast this morning, lots of noodles, some greens in a soup of turmeric, galangal, and other yummy flavours. At a couple of dollars, a good way to start the day.

Battambang to Phnom Penh can be done in a number of ways, well, by road, but the vehicle choices are plenty. Cheapest are the big comfort coaches, these are also the slowest taking around 7-8 hours. Only a little more expensive are the VIP minibuses, less than 20-seaters that offer to do the trip in 5 hours. Or for a fair bit more a private car can be hired.

I chose BayonVIP minibus: promising wifi, aircon, bottled water, GPS, trained drivers, and insurance. Sadly, the first 3 were wishful thinking, the GPS was the driver’s phone, and he seemed competent wielding a steering wheel in one hand and the phone in the other. Fortunately, and mild spoiler alert, I didn’t have any need to avail myself of any insurance, so I can’t comment on the validity of that claim.

Cambodia is a developing nation: part of the development involves eventually putting sealed, flat roads between major population centres, but they aren’t there yet. How bumpy are the roads? In the first half hour of the ride, my phone thought I’d walked 2,000 steps (I then paused the counter). We did slow/stop for roadworks repeatedly along the route, so better roads may be coming.

No aircon, and no windows that could be easily opened. And including the presence of children, we had 18 in the 16 seats, plus bags and boxes in the aisle. Over the ride a baby got a nappy change, and two other passengers vomited. I may only know a handful of words in Khmer, but I clearly understood a couple of the other passengers when they said something like, “VIP my arse”.

We had a few stops for food and cool drinks along the way, including a final stop, with 40km of dusty road still to go, where we all got out so that the outside of the van could be hosed down and cleaned.

And it still took 7 hours.

Phnom Penh is big and busy, with all the chaos of any S.E.Asian city of similar size (except Singapore). While the streets have names, they also have numbers: odd numbers run roughly north-south, while evens run east-west. So far so good, but I don’t know if some numbers got missed deliberately, but some certainly jumped, so that the next signposted street after 148 might well be 154, and then 170 very quickly after. Similarly there didn’t seem enough streets between 13 and 51.

After checking in, and taking a long shower to wash off the journey, I hit the streets, doing my aimless wandering in the hope of finding food, and I succeeded. I also succeeded in finding sugarcane juice at the night markets, one of my favourite drinks in these climes, and finally got my hands on a decent street corner banh mi.

The next food fix was from a place called Orphic, which promised air-conditioning, cocktails, and 99c oyster Fridays, so I ordered six. Towards the end of my first cocktail a thunderstorm broke, so I ordered another drink and half dozen oysters to round off the evening.