So is everyone humming the Dead Kennedys now?
I’m on a school volunteer trip this time, to Cambodia, as the title says. We’re (that’s a bunch of kids from my school and another boys’ school) helping out for 10 days at the Cambodian Children’s Fund Community Centres. Then I’ve got two days of R&R booked in Bangkok on the way back, to do a bit of Christmas shopping.
We arrived in Phnom Penh last night on Thai Airways via Bangkok. The PER-BKK flight was good, a bit bumpy at times, but the new A330 had quite wide comfy seats in economy, and even right down the back I managed a half hour doze after watching Modern Family and Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. The Gluten Free meal was as unappetising as ever: as my neighbours were chowing down on a gorgeous-smelling curry, I had a chunk of unidentifiable white fish with some steamed potatoes. Tasty. Interesting breakfast, in any case!
Bangkok Airport is huge and snaking, and after one of the staff had his duty free confiscated at customs since the PER staff hadn’t sealed the bag, a few of us got separated from the group and traversed most of the snaking hugeness of D concourse looking for the rest! We eventually caught up with the rest of the group and sat down with some Pad Thai and unreadable Coke for lunch.
The short flight from BKK – PNH was short, in a much smaller 737 with much smaller seats! The cabin crew managed to throw a snack at us before we came down in PNH with a jarring thump – as the students said, it was as if the pilots thought we were already on the ground and just dropped the plane a couple of metres. Nice bounce!
PNH airport is pretty small, and we went through customs and passport control with no problems before loading our thousands of bags onto the buses and heading to the hotel which will be our home for the next 12 days.
The streets are very busy, with hundreds of scooters vying for space amongst cars, tuk-tuks, buses and trucks. As I’ve seen elsewhere, traffic signals are a guide rather than a rule, and we were amazed to be weaving our way through intersections where scooters especially were creeping forward and creeping forward until there was only a very narrow channel for the “right of way” traffic to get through!
The Goldiana Hotel is quite comfortable – airconditioning and a pool which is all I’m after really! There’s a supermarket around the corner which stocks such things as tim tams and polony! Pretty civilised!
Two Weeks Away 