PHNOM PENH

The capital city. Quite a nice place it turns out, a different feel to it than Siem Reap.

While I was sleeping (well if they will put the european championships on at a ridiculous hour then of course I'm going to sleep in), some of the others found a better guest house, it was okay. The Okay Guest House. said it all really. we left the shit one at about 12 and checked into the ok one. Did some washing and thought about what we should do for the next few days. The only things that I wanted to do here was see the S-21 Genocide museum, then go to the Killing Fields, then go and fire a bazooka at a cow, which you can do for about $200 here. Now that's a bit pricey, so we were all going to chip in and draw straws to see who gets to do it. It would be a topic of conversation at parties for the rest of my life!

We had some lunch and sent emails, I thought this would be a great time to back up all my photos from my phone and matt's camera on to my removable hard drive, which was in my bag................oh, wait maybe it was in my other bag..................did i give it to some one else to hold? No. Shit. I'd lost it. I was the most annoyed that I'd ever been. Mona said that she saw it on the top of the wardrobe in Earthwalkers, back in Siem Reap, I was livid. I stormed around the room for 5 minutes emptying my bag in case i had packed it. I went to the internet to send the guest house an email. I realised there was nothing much more i could do so decided to forget about it and try and have a good night.

I got changed and went out to see the town. We decided that we needed something to celebrate so we pretended it was Kai's birthday. Kai is a really nice quiet lad, never says a bad thing to anyone, never really says anything much, but that was because he couldn't really understand us half the time, although he fell asleep in the back of the taxi the other day and said he had a dream in English!

The thing about phnom penh is that there isn't really a main centre for bars, in Siem reap you had Pub street, here you had nothing really, so everything was so far spread out, we had to keep getting tuk tuks everywhere, which gave Matt more and more opportunity to haggle them down. Also the drivers are useless. They don't know where anything is, and can't read a map! of their own city! Most of the bars are filled with women, which is no bad thing, but quantity doesn't always mean quality.

We went to a sports bar, the Gym bar, which was run by an aussie guy. I stood at the bar and chatted about football for about 2 hours with him, while everyone else played pool and had shots. The bar could pick up sky Sports news for an hour a night, brilliant, I'd not realised how much I'd missed Georgie Thompson.

We left there and headed down the road, I was behind everyone else as I stayed behind to say goodbye to the landlord, I saw everyone turn into a bar so I followed. as I walked in I was accosted by a slight, effeminate Peter Pan type character, shreiking with laughter every 2 seconds. we had walked into a gay bar. If i hadn't of been so drunk then it might have been annoying, bu t it turned out to be great fun. Peter (real name was Dee Dee), took an instant liking to Kai and kept trying to get him to go out the back with me. I think Kai was more scared than he'd ever been at this point. Dee Dee changed costumes every 10 minutes into various dresses, and was quite a good laugh actually. We did our best to protect Kai from the evil 4 foot 8 gay man/woman, and left for some more drinks, it was Kai's birthday after all, and we'd never find him a woman in here.

The night ended in a bar called Walkabout (nothing like the Aussie chain) in a drunken mess, we'd failed kai on the woman front, but we had got him incredibly drunk, so that was all that mattered.