Cambodia. Anyone been? Any tips?

Wow thanks for that link LITSL, while their FB page is pretty “ancient” but the info and advice on that web site was really helpful, given me some more ideas for the planning stage.

I love these types of “exploring projects” we’ve already set a few “anchor points” for the trip when we knw we want to be at a certain place at a certain time (Christmas Day, Mrs D_P’s Birthday) and stuff like this web site really helps explain where we need to add more time.

2 Likes

Yep I think their website would be the main point of contact…if you want to talk to Dave Perkes to pick his brains this is his FB page… https://www.facebook.com/dave.perkes?hc_ref=ARTAzEAR5TyKuim2tkj23DUs2JE5abIxsK4bVmJlFZYqSy7uw27Bhr7SxlzDElmP2GQ&fref=nf

1 Like

Today’s planning update.

Interesting that I can save 5 quid a night on some web sites but have to pay in advance. So took the decision to use Booking.com and avail their free cancellation policy and still get some bargains (by “western standards”)

Based on your recommendations, we will actually spend 4 more days in country WOOHOO!

We now plan 5 nights in Siem so we don’t kill ourselves or overdose on temples, then go down to Goaties Hippy Heaven at Sioubeach place thingy ville for 4 nights of chillin, and then added an extra night in Phnom Phenh so we can do it justice.

Not easy mixing vacation days with wanna sees with XMas & Birthdays but I reckon we have the outline of a plan that gives a balance between sights and much needed downtime.

One thing we learnt is that we may use our (limited mobile ap developer) skills to create an offline tour guide app so I can even now claim I am doing all the research for work as well. Heck with a good travel agent mate here I may even be able to sell it and cover some costs!

20 quid a night for 4 Star hotel De-Luxe rooms including Breakfast - my sort of budget!

(And that is splashing out! found some hostels for 1.50 a night - probably got soe of Goaty’s left overs in them1)

ONLY 129 days to go!!

4 Likes

Glad I have the story straight now :wink:

2 Likes

I am v. jealous D_P.

1 Like

Update:

Thanks to the delights of Booking.Com and their ability to book now with free cancellation, we are now fully booked up and planned accomodation & internal flights wise.

5 Nights in Siem Reap - allows for a recovery afternoon from an overnight flight, 3 Angkor days and a Tonle Sap day. Nice little “boutique” hotel close to the centre but still quiet and an extortionate $35 per night (inc Breakfast, Airport Transfers and a Complementary Gala Dinner!)

Then hop on Angkor Air down to Sihanouk Ville for 4 days at Otres Beach area - again a small property owned by Italians, 4 Star at a rip off $38 per night inc Breakfast (but tight buggers don’t include transfer!)

Taxi ride up to Phnom Penh (yes there are buses, but they eat too much time out of the trip and train would have been cool but only runs at weekends)

2 Nights in the Centre of Phnom Penh giving us 1.5 days to tour the “Killing Fields” and stuff - not sure how bothered we are by Temples and Palaces having done all that stuff over the years in Thailand & Vietnam - but the Khmer Style hotel there is walking distance to the Palace & Riverfront. This place was a real rip off - we booked the bigger sized room and it’s $43.20 a night (inc Brekkie)

Then have a Thai Air flight back into Bangkok for NYE and shopping before back to the sandpit.

Only thing we won’t book yet are the actual flights to Bangkok & in to Cambodia. Emirates flies direct to Phnom Penh BUT the plane spends hours on the ground in Myanmar (Rangoon) and costs 250 quid pp MORE than flights into Bangkok which actually has 6 flights a day 5 of them on A380 so we have more choice.

IF you ever travel this way, The trick with Emirates when booking is that they have 3 grades of Economy Ticket. Their SUPER Saver is only ever sold as a “Sale” from 1st to 12th of each month and relates only to travel 3 months ahead. So for example the current ticket cost is 700 Quid in economy, but in the “sale” they cost about 380 quid. (I’m actually using airmiles so that simply means I use half the miles for each ticket!)

The AMAZING thing about the research and booking process is how much information there is out there - LITSL’s mates Photo Tours site was a huge starting point, Goatie and the minibus idea set us thinking about more than and ditto Bath’s input.

And the other sweet thing? Each hotel I booked sent a personalised welcome email - not some standard bullshit template but actually looked like someone had typed them! Things to do, email names if we had questions, (obviousl) their Tour Desk contacts.

To be honest, the only issue we now have is that the trip is still 120 days away! BUT while I am normally a book at last minute type, I had seen prices and availability of a lot of hotels changing for the worse (and yes, obviously I was clearing Cache & Cookies when searching! - another trick to keep costs down)

So, will be back to this nearer Christmas and will link some of the pics to here.

Can’t wait!

1 Like

If Bazza tells you the place is a shithole…don’t listen. :lou_wink_2:

3 Likes

@dubai_phil you make a good point re airline tickets. We are heading out Sri Lanka way soon but booked the flights last year. Because the dates were really important, we were looking at the flights as they were released. The tip here (thanks to a travel agent friend) on scheduled flights is NOT to book on release. They are released at RRP to pick up all the panickers. Two weeks later the prices tumble to about 60% of what they originally were put out at. The savings become really significant the further up the plane you travel

Yeah, there are a lot of tricks to Long Haul flying. The Ryanair mentality is that people think when the new schedule is released they often sell the $12.99 tickets.

Lass in the office is heading back to Capetown to get married then back through here to Thailand for honeymoon. It took about 5 minutes extra work to book her flights “back to front” and saved her over 400 quid.

BA, Virgin, Etihad all run sim ilar systems to Emirates and they know someone booking 4 or more months in advance simply HAS to travel on those dates. It’s a patience game, BUT sometimes you can come unstuck.

(For example, IF anyone wanted to fly out of here on 13th-15th December and had NOT booked in February you’ll be paying almost Business Class rates, yet by 19th they are back on sale on KLM!)

Anyway have a great time in Sri Lanka - I do hope you can get up to Nuwara Eliya!

So a brief update.

We had been waiting for the regular Emirates monthly “Saver Fare” offers before we actually booked our long haul section.

I have a bunch of airmiles left so was looking to get Mrs D_P an airmiles ticket with them. FFS they wanted US$424.60 in TAXES alone as well as cleaning out all my miles, plus the cost for my ticket was running at $1018.25 which was actually breaking the budget and the point of going

So I spent the last month watching alerts and Skyscanner, and picked up a special deal on (yuk) Gulf Air via Bahrain for $384.00 - basically saving just short of $700.

Now I like Emirates, they’ve been great over the years and I have used Gulf Air before and while they are a full service airline they are let’s say functoinal rather than pleasurable, but that cash AND saving the airmiles for (insert golf story) means they are saving me close to $1000.

Been a lot of grumbles here lately about changes Emirates are making to their pricing and service offerings and with that cost differential I can see why.

As we agreed when we booked. They can lose our bags, redirect us onto over flights due to missed connections (for which we have insurance) but we’ll plan for that.

Now, at US $1.00 a pint in Cambodia, I’ve just added >1000 pints to our plan.

Although, looking at this image of Sihanoukville beach they serve free beer anyway.

Image result for sihanoukville

Moral of the story.

Plan, and get advice from you guys

1 Like

Use booking.com to book something in advance and then see if anything better comes up beforehand. Usually the different between pay no and pay later is small enough to go with it. I also have had some alleged discounts with expedia and booking.com due to using them quite a bit.

1 Like

Yep did that for a lot of the hotels I could have saved about $50 in Cambodia paying now but this spreads the cash flow so much better.

Having said that, a favourite of ours in Bangkok for the NYE stop over - Amari Boulevard was $120 cheaper paying in advance with Hotels.com

It pays to use booking.com but have the comparison sites as well!

1 Like

When you just know you’e gonna have a great road trip.

Meet Vuthy- Cambodia Saints legend. Wore this to a skates wedding!

3 Likes

You should try the Rembrandt in Bangkok. Better than the Amari in my opinion :lou_wink_2:

1 Like

It’s time to start telling the story. These threads hang around the innerweb for ages so who knows, maybe in a year or so someone else may be planning a trip to SE Asia (eg @intiniki )

I’ll do bite sized chunks I promise! But we learnt some lessons that may help others

Planning

We flew via Bangkok - this is economically important as there are SO many airlines who fly there and so you can get very good deals. Our plan was about the cost (1/3rd of the cost of other airlines via Gulf Air who were actually better than Lufthansa - sure they only had 6 movies and only served Beer, Wine Whisky & Vodka but they had better legroom than Emirates KLM or Lufthansa.

The unexpected benefit was that we chose to stay 2 nights - to give a full day to get some shopping (ie below knees shorts for Mrs D_P) needed for “the jungle” - the BENEFIT was that we got the 3 hours jet lag out of our system. Coming from Europe Jet Lag could utterly screw up a trip to Siem Reap (see below)

There is a huge choice of airlines flying from Bangkok (BKK and Don Muang) - full service and low cost. We chose Bangkok Airways from BKK simply because we could take 30kg each and the cost was only about $10 each extra. They actually served a 3 course “meal” and beer on a 55 minute flight - A320 standard legroom, clean and on time.

Siem is a mass of hotels from huge 5 star resort machines processing tour groups down to Boutique Hotels. We stayed in a 12 room 4 Star Boutique for $38 per night inc breakfast. It was a 7 minute Tuk Tuk ($2) from the centre of town

http://www.laroseblancheboutique.com/

Because Vuthy was busy on our first full day the hotel gys arranged the Tuk Tuk Driver for us - they are tied to the hotel so WAY safer than going all back packer and finding a guy from the street to save $2.50

Visas

Most countries do NOT need a Visa for Thailand - you need PATIENCE - Bangkok Immigration is a SLOW process (make sure you fill in your landing card!) Transit (to KOH or Phuket) means you clear immigration & customs at the arrival point so make sure you DON’T lose your sticker!

Cambodia NEEDS a Visa for all of us. Yes they do Visa on arrival. yes it is cheaper than online. BUT when we landed at Siem Reap airport, there were 3 people ahead of us in the passport queue. There were about 200 in the queue for Visa on Arrival. So, don’t arse about get your Visa online - takes 24 hours to get it and we saved at least an hour at the airport!

Siem Reap

So we planned to see Angkor. It is a National Park, it is huge. There are two “routes” Grand Loop or Big Circle (tour) and Inner Loop or small tour. You need 2 days to do these. Your FIRST task is to decide when to buy your ticket. IF you buy up to 4:30pm you can enter the park that day (1 day 3 day or more passes $72 for 3 days which you can use over a week or so).

You can pre-book Vuthy via his web ste or via Facebook messenger - he is a gem. Huge Saints Fan but SUCH a nice guy. He charged us LESS than the going rate for the 3 days he drove us round so for someone who never tips he was over the moon when I gave him a 30% tip - to be honest? Our time with him was priceless

Book your Tuk Tuk in Siem Reap

Grand circle covers all the “not in the middle Temples” - to be honest we loved these as much as Angkor itself, I was climbing all over them. We did this on day 1 with a 7am hotel pick up by Tuk Tuk. Hotels start breakfast at 6:30 you need it but their service is SO SLOW!

The Tuk Tuk Driver takes you to the temples in the right order, you can buy a guide book for about $20 or download the online guide to word documents for your phone (much easier) The driver CANNOT take you around the Temple - you either rent a tour guide or read the stuff yourself or do what we did - take thousands of photos and drool. First trick is the early start gets you ahead of the millions of Chinese tour groups who are a pain in the butt and swarm over everything you want to take a picture of. Equally you REALLY need to have some basic photography skills - the lighting is harsh and getting good shots meant I had to bracket almost every scene I took with my Canon EOS. We also used a Powershot, Galaxy A7 Galaxy Camera Phone and a Note 4 - 60% of the pictures were useless after about 9am hence it needs planning!

The rainy season is the European Summer - try and avoid that. The Dry season is normally 28C plus - it was 14C when we left the hotel so we needed thermals! (14C 60kph Tuk tuk wind chill - do the maths!. You DO need to be “healthy” to cope and climb everywhere, but I managed so you one level above couch potato will be fine.

There are a ton of restaurants for lunch your driver gets a free lunch for taking you there.

BECAUSE it was cooler we actually got round the Grand Loop without wilting and so after lunch we carried on and visited the “other” “not in the middle” temples. We were done by about 3pm and had covered about 15kms walking.

Back to the hotel for a snooze and then dinner and a much needed massage.

The Town

It is a boom town, it is also clean and (reasonably) safe - but do heed the warnings about bag snatching on the streets and from tuk tuks. All the guides focus on Pub Street being the centre and so we went there. It was kind of shit. Not nasty, it was just that we went, had a beer had a meal but actually away from there (and the tourist market) we found other streets - Might Market Street and Sak Son Road that had restaurants and bars where the food was better and about 20% cheaper (although Pub Street IS cheap) - We didn’t like it because it was trying to be Koh Samui or Phuket without the go-go bars. Also there are a number of Happy Pizza places great pizza and free herbal toppings once you get off that street.

Shopping was VERY limited - 7/11’s for basic needs but clothing wise - fantastic if you want T Shirts Fake Under Armour gear or Elephant Pants & Back Packs. There are a smattering of Duty Free Shops selling local made original gear Columbia, North Face, Jack Wolfskin, and lots of souvenir type stuff.

TBH you should be too knackered to want to go clubbing. Just a nice dinner and a cocktail or two. Mallis is a great fine dining restaurant. You should also catch up with Travel Mush.

Food choice is perfect. We usually had Spring Rolls ($1 away from Pub Street) you can have Vietnamese style (cold) or chinese style deep fried. Almost every Cambodian dish has a kind of sweetness to it. On the whhole it is NOT spicy having said that I did come a cropper on a red chilli by accident twice! I had (local) Pepper Steak and chips a couple of times ($7.50) Most Curries are actually very sweet - not a big fan of Amok or their Curry but I did eat it. And yes plenty of burgers grilled stuff - in fact 70% of their stuff seemed to be cooked on charcoal grills

OK that was our day one

Yes my wonky knees got up and down this stuff!

Yes that is me being all Laura Croft. Wearing a Hoodie.

I’m slowly building the albums on FB in lower res.

Having had a huge walking day one we planned “Further Afield” and “The Lake” for our next two days. Will lump them into one post for you.

Could you do Angkor in a day? Yes IF you are really fit. BUT you need to see Angkow Wat at sunrise - that means a 5am departure from your hotel. Then you need to see a sunset - which is around 17:45 - not sure 12 hours in the Temples is the right thing to do. We visited enough on day 1 to save half a day later in the week. We REALLY needed that down time. Anyway - Further Afield is an adventure that you really should not miss out on! And as for the sundowners …

2 Likes

I really want to go back now :lou_sad:

1 Like

I’m telling a story

Don’t jump to the last page too soon GB

:sunglasses:

1 Like

Hurry up and get to the bit where you find yourself in a sleazy bar snuggling up to a wrong 'un with a long 'un then. :lou_wink_2:

It wasn’t in a bar Goatie

OK The Alien connection (PMSL, yawn. So many errors - externals of Angkor yet statues from Banteay, c’mon)

Oof.

Obviously I’m still downloading stuff but this (Canon EOS 300mm f5.6 1/1000th Exposure +0.7 step).

Tonle Sap Lake Sundowners