Phnom Phen

We were greeting in Phnom Penh by the throng of taxi drivers we had come to expect. One young man caught my eye and motioned to me as if a young boy at a middle school dance hoping to be chosen by a the pretty girl- 'pick me' 'pike me'. Luckily for us, one of the drivers held a sign above his head for the guest house we had chosen that read, "Narin Guesthouse - Free Taxi for Our Guests." After we claimed our luggage, we made a bee-line for the man with the sign and followed him to his Tuk Tuk, which took us to our next hotel room in a long line of rooms blurring in our memories.

Narin Guesthouse was an unassuming three story building on an unpaved gravel road off a main drag. Our room was on the third floor, above the restaurant, the last door at the end of the hall to the right. The first room on the right as you entered the hall was home to an unshaven hermit of a man who spent his days sequestered in his room in the dark, door open, with a constant stream of American pop music the only hint of his existence, unless you peered into his dark doorway to catch a glimpse of him sitting on the bed humming to himself. We weren't overly impressed with Narin Guesthouse, but it had been recommended in the Lonely Planet and they arranged Vietnam VISAs and buses to Saigon, so we decided to stay.

We weren't up for much that afternoon, so we decided to head up to the river front and have a leisurely afternoon. Our first of many Phnom Penh moto taxi drivers dropped us off right in front of Frizz, a cafe that had been recommended to me by some of the new volunteers in Thailand, so we decided to stay and have lunch.

Our experience at Frizz was mixed. The food was great, the availability of Cambodian newspapers to read was great, our waiter (who talked to us about how he used to sell newspapers as a child before he saved up for his first motorbike and then became a taxi driver, before getting his current jobs as a waiter and an employee at an NGO that fights sexual abuse of children) was great, but the whole experience was tainted by the fact that we were consistently confronted with small children carrying new born babies begging for money, mothers with babies begging for money, or young boys arguing with us that our excuse that we had no money didn't hold water because how were we going to pay for our lunch if we had no money?

After lunch, we walked across the street to sit on the wall overlooking the river - which in my estimation was more an eye sore than a scenic water front – the bombardment continued with women insistently trying to get us to buy soft drinks and beer, begging children and a man who wanted to take us on a tour who would not leave us alone even after my repeated pleas that he do so. It seemed that there was nothing we could do to avoid being begged or hassled except to stay holed up in our hotel room and what was the point of being in Cambodia if we saw nothing of it but four dreary walls? And of course the fact that I wanted to run from it weighed on me even more.

Besides a day trip to the Killing Fields and the S21 museum, we spent most of our time in Phnom Pehn wandering around, taking taxi rides to the river front for lunch or dinner and taking in urban Cambodian life. I learned to ride side saddle on the motor bike between Steven and the driver, as the majority of Cambodian women, enjoying the ride as our numerous moto drivers rode unfazed into oncoming traffic, turned in front of buses and sped out into roads filled with motorbikes zooming along in every direction. I didn't take to the food in Cambodia as I had in Thailand, but we managed to have a few good meals. Steven soon had the maze of streets pretty well mapped in his head and we enjoyed the freedom of wandering around knowing we could make it back to where we wanted to go. After a few days in the city, despite our discouraging introduction, Phnom Phen grew on both of us and we enjoyed our stay there.