If you can't trust the tourist police, who can you trust....

Well! Seeing as it's September now and this update starts in January, and seeing as how I don't particularly want this to turn into some kind of memoir, I'm going to speed things up a little, which is easy, because little of note happened for the rest of my trip. Luckily I've been working in a roadhouse in Northern Territory, Australia for three months now, and literally nothing of note has happened in this time. It's a bit groundhog day, same shit, same day, so that should be coverable in all of one paragraph, bringing me right up to October 9th when I get back on the road - America and Asia, here I come (again).

January 24th - Myself and mike head back to Bangkok to see Joe before he heads home. He's come off his bike a week or so before in Laos and has to go back to recuperate. Lee and Sara, the welsh couple who were with him when he had the accident, are arriving the next day, along with Lisa who we'd travelled with before, and who'd gone to see Joe when he was still in hospital in the north east.

On a side note, I'm not going to go into Joe's accident or his condition in Bangkok because I think it's Joe's business and if he reads this, I'm pretty sure he won't want to be reminded of it or hear how I felt about it. If it seems like I'm skipping over a lot, it's intentional.

Me and mike check into a guesthouse a few streets over from Koh San (aka tourist city) and head off into the night to meet my friend Dawn. She'd arrived to Thailand a month or so after I had, but we hadn't managed to meet up yet. She was doing volunteer work with a program that aimed to get Thai prostitutes off the streets and teach them skills to start making money from less dangerous means. I get her on the phone and she says she's at a cool little bar named Hollywood.

We hop into a taxi and head over to find Hollywood is actually a gigantic club in the "rich kid" area of Bangkok. Hummers and Thai kids with huge gold "bling" necklaces abound. We pay the exorbitant entrance fee, check our jackets, and locate Dawn, who is there with some Americans from her program and some of the women they've got off the streets. Far from being a "cool little bar", Hollywood is a cavernous ballroom rammed with old Thai men paying exorbitant prices for imported whiskey by the bottle. On the huge stage, on ramps, is a band playing a mix of Thai pop and western pop standards. For each song a different singer comes out and either launches into the song, or does some rat pack type banter with the audience before singing something that gets everyone laughing. Every four or five songs, a singer comes on with a troupe of about twenty backing dancers, all female. At the end of the song, the women walk down the ramp that runs the middle of the room, and stand there swaying to the music while men in the audience pick and chose, pay their money, and disappear into a back room with them. Easily the seediest place I've ever been (at this point).

I ask dawn how her job is going and she says she's just quit/been fired because she's met this Thai dude and everything's going great, but his wife keeps coming to her work, with their eight month old kid, shouting about this foreigner who's stolen her husband. Seeing as her job is finished, she's planning on getting an apartment with her new boyfriend for the remaining time she's in Thailand.

It's good seeing dawn and all, but the whole scene is way too depressing in there, so me and mike head back to town, find a bar, and get good and drunk.

The next day we meet up with Lisa and amble around before running into Joe and his dad who's come to see him home safe. We have dinner with them before heading out for more drinks.

The next few days pass pretty similarly. We meet up with Joe, his dad, and lee and Sara for breakfast each day. During the day, Joe, Lisa and mike head off to go meet monks or check out markets, we meet again for dinner, and at night, mike, Lisa and i head out for drinks. I rarely did anything during the day because i was flat out sick of travelling. It wasn't so much homesickness, as being tired of Asia. It's an amazing place, don't get me wrong, but I got tired of living out of a backpack, staying in dingy, anonymous guesthouses, everything being hot, dirty, noisy... And what a place to get sick of it - Bangkok, possibly the most gaudy, loud, dirty, smelly place in the world. I was a pain in the arse to be around too, I’m pretty sure mike and Lisa thought i was annoyed at having to come to Bangkok and deal with the reality of Joe’s situation, but i was just tired of moving and very conscious that the group I’d been travelling in for the previous two months or so was finally fully disbanding - Joe was going home, mike was off to Australia and lisa to India. I couldn't imagine meeting better people than i'd already been with, and the thought weighed heavy on my mind that i was looking at another two months in asia feeling the isolation i did when i was without that gang or the first australian/kiwi/german gang i'd met in the islands. To say i was pessimistic would be an understatement, but i didn't really want to talk to mike or lisa about it because i felt it would be selfish considering we were here for joe and my worries were pretty minor considering what he'd been through. In retrospect, i think if i'd let them know what was going on with me, rather than just spending the days alone and the nights surly and withdrawn, giving the impression i was pissed at being "dragged" back to bangkok, it would have been easier but... C'est la vie....

Eventually, the gang breaks up. Mike leaves for Australia, that night Joe flies out, and the next day Lisa heads for India. My next stop is Cambodia so i buy a daytime train ticket with plans to stay a night on the Thai side of the border and cross early in the morning. I'd read up on it a lot and the crossing (at poi pet) seemed to be about as shady as tourist-scam crossings get. There's far more scams going for this crossing than i have time to go list, but in one way or another, i encounter all of them over the trip.

The train to the border town finds me sitting next to an American who's on some sort of Nicholas Cage Leaving Las Vegas trip, but with ten times the amount of prostitutes. He's spent so long drinking heavily, exclusively in the company of hookers that when i first meet him on the platform, drinking deep from a bottle of Jim Beam, i think he's Mexican, such is his pidgin grasp of English. Turns out he's headed to Siem Reap to meet with a lady who he'd spent a month with but who'd left him when he refused to keep paying her $800 a month for sex. He keeps on about her "beautiful soul" and how he has to meet her again (and pay the money). Sleaze to the max. I manage to ditch him when i get off the train, check into a hotel, and crash out.

The next morning i get a tuc tuc to the border, where i immediately meet my first group of scam artists. "The border no longer issues visas, you must pay for one here with me before crossing". Asking price: $50. Actual (like real) price of a Cambodian visa: $30. Length of line of gullible tourists: Approx 8 people. I keep walking. A few feet later a small man comes and offers to help process my visa quickly for $10. I ignore him. A few feet later, a man offers to take me in his taxi to siem reap for $50. This is actually pretty reasonable, but without seeing the taxi, it's too risky so i ignore him. Unfortunately, he keeps following me.

I get to the end of the Thai side, get my exit stamp, and walk into the kilometre of no man’s land between the Thai side and the Cambodian side. The border opens at 6am and i'd arrived "early" at 7am hoping to get in before the gangs of Thai gamblers hopping the border for the day to spend money in the legalised casinos of Cambodia. Not early enough though. The place is absolutely jammers with gamblers, horse carts, trucks full of scrap metal, women carrying jugs of god knows what, and, every so often, white faces like mine looking highly confused. There are no signposts and people appear to be just walking right through, so I’m not sure where I’m supposed to get my Cambodian visa. "Luckily", my taxi driving friend is still by my side so i ask him where the visa office is, and he leads me to tourist police dude who sits me down at a desk and begins to process my visa. I have my back to an area with closed information-style windows and a bunch of empty plastic chairs, which i presume is the proper visa office. I've heard a lot of stories of notices on these windows saying "visa now $50" and westerners sitting round for hours sulking until the visa officers agree to sell the visa for the correct price ($30), but today it's flat out deserted. I fill out the tourist police guy's forms, and he asks for $35. I remind him that the visa is actually $30, but he says it's gone up. I say i don't believe him, and he replies, with a big friendly smile, "please, i am tourist police, if you cannot trust me, who can you trust?". I have to laugh, slick bastard. I know I’m being took, but i figure it's only $5, so i give him the money, he goes and knocks on the proper window, buys my visa, pockets the $5, smilingly gives me back my passport, and sends me on my way.

I check into Cambodia and cross into the somehow simultaneously dusty and muddy shithole that is poi pet, without a doubt the shadiest town I’ve ever been to. It's said to be incredibly dangerous after dark - the reason i didn't cross after the train the night before. My "handler" (who's still following me since the hour before when i was in Thailand) passes me over to his friend who owns the taxi. He tries to sell me on the taxi but i say I’m getting a song thaw. He says he has these too, and offers to take me on his motorbike to see. I refuse, saying i'd prefer to walk (assuming this will make him finally bugger off), and he decides to join me for a pleasant stroll through the hundreds of scam artists that line this side of the border. To his credit, he keeps them all off me, no mean feat, but he does complain a bit about having to walk, and after about 500 meters, is visibly knackered.

Eventually we get to where the song thaws are, to find they're packing about twenty five people onto the back of a small flatbed truck. There's no bloody way i want to spend the next three hours packed like a sardine that’s sure to fall out on a tight corner, even for $5, so i share my concern with my new friend, who begins to kick a woman out of the cabin to give me her space. I'm not having that either, so i start walking away. The guy follows me and asks what i'm up to. I say i'm going to get a taxi, so he offers me a taxi for $25. I know this is way too cheap for a taxi, but decide to humour him. Long story short, i end up in the back of a sedan with about five more khymer people who look like they'd steal my eyelids if i fell asleep. I pay $20 and my friend asks for something for himself, but i'm out of good will so i tell him to get stuffed.

We drive through the Cambodian countryside for about an hour and a half before we pull over in some random town and i notice the driver pulling my bag out of the boot. I jump out and give him a "what the fuck" look, but he's actually transferring me to another taxi, this time with five people who are much thinner (thus more room for me) but far more pissed off looking. They argue amongst themselves, all the while gesturing to me, as if two of them want to kill me and eat me, two want to kill me and sell me for parts, while the other just wants to kill me. Another hour of this and we arrive into siem reap.

I'm dropped on the roadside in the middle of the nowhere (read: we stop, they dump my bag out of the boot, and while i go see what's up, they drive off) and after some guide book cartography, i meet a friendly tuc tuc driver who offers to bring me around to see as many guesthouses as i like for $1. I've heard about this before, the deal being he's all nice today so tomorrow i pick him to take me to see the Angkor temples for big money, which i have no intention of (I’ll see them, i just won't pick a random tuc tuc driver), so i play along, get a cheapo tour, and get checked into a fairly alright guesthouse.

When singing in, i see the names of two Australian girls i spent time with in vang viang at Christmas, but for some reason they've checked in and out, so i go facebook them and arrange to meet for dinner. It turns out they fell for another scam. They got an early (6am) bus from a nearby Thai island, which somehow managed to spend six hours making the two hour journey to the border, where they paid $50 for visas, before the two/three hour journey to Siem Reap became an eight hour ordeal of lunch stops and engine trouble. When they arrived, the bus brought them right to an (overpriced) guesthouse a few kms out of town, where they were too tired to argue and booked in. The next day they'd booked into my guesthouse, but were quilted out of moving by the guesthouse they were sold to, so they checked out again and were back 5km outside town. We met up the next few days for dinner - they're off seeing the temples each day, while i spend mine reading $2 photocopied books on Thai history in my guesthouse.

I find out two friends, Naj and Eliane are both coming separately to Siem Reap a few days later, so i elect to lay low for a few days until they arrive. The ozzie girls leave on Monday and i spend a few days reading books in my guesthouse. Naj arrives on a Thursday and eliane on Friday. We try out a few different restaurants (one with traditional khymer apsara dancing and some amazing curries) and have a few nights in the "traveller bar" Angkor What. On one such night, eliane and i are walking home (her guesthouse is across the road from mine) when somehow get talking to a young Thai tuc tuc driver outside the 7/11. He tells us he needs to make $5 a day to survive - $3 for three meals, $1 for petrol, and $1 for his living space. He says Cambodia is about as lawless as it gets, he once killed someone in his tuc tuc, a collision that he himself said he should have been jailed for, but he paid the police $15 and they put it down as a traffic accident. Eliane's been running around with some four or five year kids who are hanging out outside the 7/11, and at some point they go to sleep, one on a bench and one under it. The Thai guy tells us the kids are used during the day by their parents to beg money from tourists, but the money goes to the parent's gambling habits and the kids sleep on the streets. It was all about as grim as it gets, and we got the guy's number, telling him we'd like him to take us around the temples ($30 for the three of us) but the next day the number doesn't work and we never see him again.

We get up early the Monday morning and head for the temples for sunrise. I won't go into their history because, frankly, i'd be mostly making it up at this late stage (eight months later). All i remember for sure is they're old as the hills, they Khymer Rouge tried to knock them down some thirty years ago (pack a wankers they were), and a group of Germans are currently rebuilding them. We plan to get in early before they get too packed, but some eight or nine hundred people have the same idea so it's actually pretty packed. While Naj had gone for a three day pass, Eliane and i skimp for one day passes, so we are eager to get in and out, while naj wants to amble about and take in everything, so we split up.

The temples are spread over several sites, with one complex being the main base for seeing the sunrise, so we start there. The temples inside are spread over about two kilometres, with a twenty five foot ornate stone wall bordering the place. The walls themselves are a sight; a huge tunnel runs through with beautiful carvings and middle rooms at random spots. We move into the inside are which is a sort of long stone pathway to face another huge temple. The grounds around the pathway are dotted with other temples, a lake, and an area where hawkers have set up food and clothing stalls. We head into the temple directly in front of us which has several bathhouse type rooms, huge steep stairs to statues of different gods, huge open areas... Just huge anything-you-can-make-out-of-stone!

After an hour or so we head for the next site about 2km down the road which is far more packed than expected. I try to take pictures but there's always fifteen or twenty people in the shot. There's a sort of shanty site setup there with stalls for food, drinks, clothes, art, souvenirs - all the usual. I stop to get a drink and get chatting with an old khymer dude. Turns out he was an officer in the khymer rouge, but left Cambodia when the regime was falling and moved to America. This was his first time back in years. I'm all too aware that as a khymer rouge soldier he'd been complicit in a genocide on his own people. I wanted to ask him about it but lost the nerve.

We zip around to a few more temples, including one used in the tomb raider movie which trees had grown into to the point that it was hard to tell if the trees or stone blocks had come first. After a few hours, me and eliane are pretty templed out. I think we took on too much too quickly, though at the time i never wanted to see another temple again.

We go out for dinner that night and say our goodbyes. Naj is off to Vietnam, eliane to Thailand, and i'm headed to the beach town of Sihanoukville for a few days of doing nothing with the Canadian girls from Don Det.

For the sake of easy reading, i'll leave it there, expect the next update in the next few days!!!