Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We arrived in Cambodia’s capital on Friday 12^th March. The immigration process was bizarre to say the least. Having completed 4 forms on the flight, we were handed another to complete as we exited the plane. We then joined the queue for visas, handed in our forms and two passport photos each and then joined another queue to pay for the visa. Only it wasn’t a queue. It was just a mass of people waiting for their name to be called out, whilst the immigration officer held up the passport. If you recognise your photo, you go up, hand over your $20 note and come away with your passport and Cambodian visa. The whole thing took only about ten minutes and not something you’d see at Heathrow! There was a bit of confusion when we were going through the passport control, we were bieng called up individually and Liam went up with Cliff’s passport. All sorted though and our bags were waiting on the carousel for us, as was our taxi driver arranged through the hotel.

The airport is only about 14km away from the city, but the traffic is unbelievable; motorbikes everywhere, weaving across the road, usually with three or four people on them, Liam saw one with five – two adults, a kid, a toddler and a baby. Our driver kept taking different turns to avoid the snarl-ups, he said sometimes if there is an accident, nothing gets cleared until the police arrive and that can take a few hours. Our hotel, Villa Langka was a little oasis. We’d had to book a deluxe room for the first night as they didn’t have anything cheaper and we were then moving into a smaller room for the next two nights. The deluxe room was massive, about twice the size of our old lounge and the bathroom (again huge) had our first bath in Southeast Asia. Only Liam actually had a bath.


At dinner we met the cute hotel cat, he didn't have a name - other than 'Chma' the Kymer word for 'cat' - but he enjoyed sitting on your lap and getting a cuddle.

The hotel had a lovely saltwater pool, in one corner there was a mango tree that at regular intervals dropped fruit into the pool, which Liam dived down for and handed over to the hotel staff to make the drinks. The staff were really friendly here and so helpful. Pretty much like every Cambodian we’ve met has been the same. There is a genuine feeling that they are welcoming you to their country and keen for you to see everything.

On the food front, we’ve not yet had a bad meal in Cambodia. We found a little deli place at the end of our road, that did the most amazing veggie and salad wraps. The restaurant at the hotel was good too; lovely breakfasts and on the first night after dinner we tried their deep fried chocolate and ice cream. This was literally dark chocolate deep fried (not in batter or anything) and it was scrumptious. Cliff also found a really good vegan place near the Independence Monument, where we ordered far too much food, but again it was delicious. On our last night in Phnom Penh we went to an Italian place down on the quay. There were no tables left inside so when we helped them bring one in from outside, there was much hilarity amongst the waitresses.

On the first day we took a tuk-tuk over to Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21 or Security Prison 21. During the rule of the Kymer Rouge (1975-1979) it was transformed from a high school to a prison where around 17,000 Cambodians were imprisoned, tortured and taken out to the Killing Fields at Cheong Ek, where they were murdered and buried in mass graves. Often they were beaten to death to save precious bullets and the victims included children and babies (who were beaten to death against a tree out at the Killing Fields). One of the four buildings at S-21 still has the barbed wire up at the balconies, which was installed to stop prisoners committing suicide.

Four things really hit me here; the first are the hundreds of photographs of the victims (the Kymer Rouge were meticulous record keepers), the rooms that still house metal beds on which the people were tortured (some still with blood on the ceilings), thirdly, the fact that the Kymer Rouge was doing this to their own people, and finally that this was all happening in my lifetime. It’s still hard to fathom what it was they were trying to achieve. Conservative estimates put the total death toll at 1.7 million. If you want to learn more about the genocide, please go here.

On day two we went out to Cheong Ek – the Killing Fields. There is a Buddhist stupa built as a memorial that houses the remains of the victims found there. The mass graves that were found are on full view here and human remains are constantly coming to the surface. Despite this, the area feels a lot more peaceful than at S-21, where I felt there was still so much negative energy.

Back to Bangkok

On Friday 5th March, we flew back to Bangkok for a little regrouping, visa sorting, travel booking. and hopefully a little relaxation. We went back to Imm Fusion hotel; inexpensive, good breakfasts, helpful staff and a pool. You won't be surprised to read that I didn't have a Thai massage this time around.

We ended up staying a week; securing our China visas (which turned out very easy in the end, just a one day turnaround) and applying for our Vietnam visas online which allows us to apply for them on arrival in the country.

Cliff went out for a long training run (21 miles!) one morning, but when he came back he wasn't even sweating (unusual in this 35 degree heat) but his skin was incredibly hot (not sunburned). We feared he'd managed to get heat exhaustion, but his temperature was normal. It was a bit of a puzzle and he had to spend a couple of days in the room with the AC turned up to maximum and drinking loads of water, just to get back to normal.


Liam and I left him to rest and went to see the new Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. On the same floor as the cinema, they had a millionaire's car exhibition which mainly consisted of smart cars with two beautiful Thai models draped over them. And lots of amateur photographers. Liam's developed a bit of a liking to Top Gear in recent months and had his photo taken with a Ferrari (minus the Thai beauty).

One evening we returned to the hotel and were told that there was a problem on our floor (we'd noticed someone doing some electrical work outside our room) and they were going to have to upgrade us (for free) to a deluxe room. This really wasn't a problem! We got twice the amount of space for our last two nights. And a dvd player. Excellent.

We were glad to get on the road to Cambodia by the end of the week, we had enjoyed Bangkok but were starting to get a little bored by the end of our stay. Also we'd planned to leave before the Red Shirt demonstrations were due to start at the weekend, so it was all good timing.

Singapore

A short flight over to Singapore from Kutching on Malaysia Airlines. Excellent customer service on display. I hadn't ordered any veggie food because I thought the flight was too short for a meal. So the air hostess gave us some food intended for the crew :) which was very good of her.

We arrived at our hotel mid afternoon and it was a good 10 minute walk there from the closest BTS/metro, with the backpacks not getting any lighter. This was after a pretty direct trip from the airport. Our hotel was excellent, a huge window with window seat and a lovely bathroom with the best shower yet (these things are becoming increasingly important somehow). And a brilliant swimming pool and gym on the 7th floor which luckily happened to be our floor.

We ventured out to a technology mall (yes, just technology stores) to replace Cliff's heart rate monitor. We think it got left behind in Sandakan. But the specific store that carries Garmin stuff was closed so we had to go back the next day. Apart from that we tried to avoid the malls (there are loads) although it's hard to miss the cutting edge architecture used to bring in the punters.

We went along one day to the Singapore Discovery Centre, mistakenly thinking that it was the Science centre. Not sure how we managed that. It was a well thought out place, billed as an 'edutainment' centre. The kids could do some town planning (actually more fun than it sounds), news reporting, quizzes, dancing and there was an IMAX theatre too. And Cliff and Liam did some target shooting with modified rifles (Liam just edged it with the score). But the constant 'Singapore is great' message started to wear thin towards the end. Good pizza though.

Kutching, Malaysia

We arrived in Kutching on 27th March. We were staying in our last Tune hotel of the trip in a really good location, just off the Waterfront - Kutching is situated on the Sarawak river. We were directly opposite the Hilton. Our hotel leaflet actually urged us to go and hang about in the Hilton's reception to boast to their guests about how little we were paying in comparison :)

This hotel, like many other places we've stayed at do not allow guests to bring in two kinds of fruit to the rooms, namely Durian and Mangosteens. And you can understand why. The juice of the Mangosteens is an inky purple colour and stains everything it touches. The Durian's consistancy has been compared to custard, the smell like old socks and over ripe cheese and the taste like vomit. But they are for sale all over South East Asia so someone must like them.

There are many statues of cats in Kutching. The unlikely story goes that when Rajah James Brooke arrived in Kuching along the river, he asked his local guide what the settlement's name was. The guide, thinking that the English adventurer was pointing towards a cat, said 'Kuching' - Malay for 'cat'. And the name stuck. Or something like that. But Sarawakian Malay for cat is "pusak" so this explanation does not hold much water. It might be a variation on the Indian name for 'port' - 'Cochin' - as the area was first settled by Indian traders.

We had three nights here and planned to do a lot of chilling out; the last couple of weeks had been incredibly hectic and we were all a bit exhausted. We'd all come down with a cold in Sandakan which we were struggling to shake. We had toyed with the idea of making a day trip to the Bako National Park to see the proboscis monkeys, but we were just too tired and also didn't really want to rush the park, which really needs more than just a day to do it justice.

So we did lots of walking (Cliff did a couple more early morning training runs - 6 and 10 miles) and eating. We found a really good place in Chinatown serving good Indian and Malay food. The day before we'd walked through Chinatown, and found it closed for the end of Chinese New Year. And we found a veggie place just up the road from the hotel. No meat allowed!

We went to the Natural History Museum because I'd read that Alfred Russel Wallace had been heavily involved in the setting up of the displays. Wallace was a British naturalist who is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution (that pushed Charles Darwin to publish his own theory). I'd been interested in Wallace since I'd done an essay on him for my OU course. But unfortunately it was closed for refurbishment, so we went to the art gallery and the aquarium instead.

Miri, Malaysia - down memory lane

On Wednesday 24th March, we left Turtle Island at 7am to head back to Sandakan, to catch our flight to Kotakinabalu, we only had a short stopover there (time for an excellent Italian meal) before catching another flight to Miri in Sarawak, still in Borneo.

We lived in Miri for a period when I was fifteen and my dad was working there for Shell, so it was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. Miri has changed beyond all recognition, well, it has been 27 years, ha ha.

We stayed at a really lovely guesthouse (the first without an ensuite bathroom - wow we are really slumming it now!) called the Dillenia. But we did have a huge shower room just down the hall and we had the place pretty much to ourselves, only two other guests on another floor. We hired a car the following morning so that we could drive up to the Niah national park to visit the caves. On the way out of town, we took a detour passed where I used to live, I'm pretty sure we found the main road, but too much development had taken place to be sure of where our actual road was, let alone the house.

The national park is about a ninety minute drive away and the caves are reached by a quick river crossing, followed by 45 minute boardwalk through the jungle. The main cave is massive (about 1 km long by half a km wide) and is home to both bats and swiftlets and therefore full of their guana (droppings). The guana when collected provides an income to the local people. The swiftlets also make birds nest from their own spittle and these are are collected for the famous bird's nest soup.


When I visited before, twenty seven years ago, we only went this far. The cave is an important prehistorical site where human remains dating to 40,000 years have been found. This time however we ventured further to the Painted Cave that (surprise) has some cave paintings (at least a 1000 years old) and the remains of some wooden 'death boats'. The caves were used for burial purposes.

To get there we had to go through part of the cave which was pitch black. When the book said 'bring a torch and good walking shoes' they meant it. We walked for about 15 minutes in absolute darkness up and down some very slippery boards and steps with the BIG spiders and the bats for company. Out in the light there was another board walk to the Painted Cave. I can't honestly say that all this effort was worth it for the paintings themselves, as they were fairly faded and behind a fence. After a short break here, where we lamented our decision to only bring three bottles of water, which were now empty, we made our slow way back to the main cave. It was a hard slog in that heat but definitely worth the trip.

The following day, I dragged Cliff and Liam around all the old places in Miri that I remembered and that were still standing. We managed to find the old meat, veg and fish market and the place we used to pay the rent for our house, although the office is now a cafe. So we stopped for a drink.

On the morning of our departure, three nights later, we had a really good lunch at a cafe around the corner from our guest house and Cliff was trying to get us not to watch the tv, calling us zombies (well, it was showing the last ten minutes of Mrs Doubtfire!).

Turtle Island

'This is not an island paradise' said one of the guides as we came up onto the beach on Selingan island. Well, it actually does look like one. We'd come 40 miles north of Sandakan in the Sulu Sea, on a speed boat, so we were a little windswept, although Cliff can nap anywhere and managed a little snooze on the way.

We checked in and were directed to our room, one of six in a villa on the other side of the island - a whole three minutes walk away. We had a bit of a lie down until lunch and then headed for the beach because the real action doesn't take place until after dinner. The water was super clear and we did some snorkling, managing to see lots of colourful fish (one nipped my leg) and Liam and Cliff spotted a ray.

Later in the afternoon, just as I was about to head up for a shower, one of the rangers on the beach handed me his binoculars and said there was a turtle coming in. It turns out that she was right behind Cliff who was still snorkling and he hadn't realised. So I'm on the beach waving and saying 'it's behind you - turn around' and he thinks I'm saying 'get out'. After getting the okay from the rangers to get out a bit closer to her, we managed to swim out within about a metre. There were actually two and they were mating. They tolerated us for about ten minutes before they swam off. Incredible.

After dinner we played cheat, one of our favourite card games, with two lovely Australian girls Natalie and Kathy and learned that it's called BS where they come from. The deal is that after dinner everyone stays in the restaurant until we get the 'turtle time' call from the ranger. The call came about 10pm that a couple had made their way up the beach to lay their eggs. In the end there were fourteen Green Turtles laying that night. We were lucky as sometimes the call doesn't come until the early hours of the morning. When the time was right, we were led out onto the sand to witness the laying. Before that, the turtle is left alone to prepare her nest. 'Our' turtle ended up laying 119 eggs. These were then taken by the ranger and placed carefully in a hole he's prepared earlier, up in the conservation centre which is protected from predators; rats and lizards.

We were told that only about 10 percent of eggs hatch sucessfully in the wild without this intervention, whilst they improve the rate to about 60 percent here. Although I've since read that the success rate of 'natural' hatchings is much higher than 10 percent, so maybe we were told a bit of a fairy story to support the whole hatching programme. They can also influence the sex of the hatchling; shaded and therefore colder nests produce males and unshaded warmer nests produce females.

We then went down to the shoreline with the ranger to release about 50 hatchlings that had hatched that day. Even so, only 1 in a 1000 to 10,000 that do hatch and are released into the sea reach maturity, ie make it to 20 years old. It's tough being a turtle.

Sandakan and Sepilok

A really early start (4am) on 21st February, taxi to the KL Sentral bus station, a bus to the airport and flight to Sandakan on the island of Borneo. We were staying at the Mayfair Hotel which is run by the stern but lovely Mr Lum. It was pretty cheap (£10 a night), almost clinically clean, free wi-fi, right in the centre of town and Mr Lum has a collection of about 1000 dvds which he lets guests borrow five at a time to watch on the enormous tv provided in each room.

We went for lunch at the (very expensive) English Tea Rooms, which was at the top of a very steep hill. The cold towels on arrival were just what we needed though. And the cream tea.

After lunch, we took the bus out to Sepilok to visit the orang-utan centre. I was expecting to be enclosed on quite a small deck to observe the orang-utan's afternoon feeding, so was pleasantly surprised at the large size of it, although it was quite busy. Apparently the morning session is the busiest, so that must be a nightmare. We got to see two orang-utans but one woman turned to me and said loudly 'Only two monkeys? Huh!' - I should have answered that if people keep quiet, some more might feel like coming along. I wish people would heed the 'silence' signs and shut up.

We stayed behind after the crowd moved on, chatting to a British woman who volunteers out there every year for four months. It was worth the wait because we saw the smaller one building her nest up high in the trees.

The following day we headed out to the Sandakan memorial park which is sited on the original POW (Prisoners of War) camp, which was set up during the WWII Japanese Occupation in 1942-1945. By 1943, there were around 750 British and more than 1650 Australian soldiers and civilians. Many were transferred from Singapore to be used as labour to build the military airfield in Sandakan.

In 1945, the Japanese army realising that they were losing the war and the allies were closing in, marched the prisoners from the camp at Sandakan to Ranau, 250kms away. There were three separate Death Marches, the first one began in January 1945. The last Death March took the remaining 537 prisoners at camp in Sandakan. The sick who couldn't leave, were shot. There was no account of what happened at camp after the last march. There simply were no survivors to tell the tale. Those who were sent on the Death March trekked through thick jungle, treacherous routes, suffering from disease and some prisoners had no boots. Those who could walk no further were killed. The march took almost a year to complete. Of the 2700 prisoners, only 6 survived of which two had escaped during the second march and four escaped during their stint at Ranau. No British prisoners survived.

The war memorial has a pavilion dedicated to the prisoners of war and houses a very moving exhibition. We've been to a few memorials now and the message, quite rightly, is always the same; the sufferings of war and genocide should never be forgotten or allowed to happen again. But it seems to be on a repeating cycle. And on that depressing note...

Sandakan itself is a lively little place - during the day. It closes pretty early and adopts a bit of sense of danger after dark. It was pretty much bombed to extinction by the Allies during WWII (in order to liberate it from the Japanese you understand). Only the church and part of a barn were left standing.

We left it in rather better condition as we headed out to Turtle Island the next morning.