After leaving 4000 islands, Blu and I traveled by bus to Phnom Penh, we didn't want to stay in the city center, instead we opted for a hotel called "Lucky Star 2", a local area south east of the center. The hotel is very modern, staff are extremely friendly and the rooms large and comfortable.


This was my second time to Phnom Penh, 4 years had passed since my last visit, a lot had changed in that time. The streets of PP are dirty and crowded, pollution is thick in the air, the traffic is now more coordinated than when I was last here. What i really mean by this is, only 4 people can ride a scooter at the same time, and I no longer saw people riding cows.

The first thing Blu and I noticed was the increase in prices. If you walk along the river-front you will find restaurants catering to tourists, a standard meal will set you back between $7 - $12, the irony of this is that just a few hundred feet away, you can see homeless families lying on the streets, their babies asleep on the hard filthy pavements.





While the tourists stuff their faces with high calorie foods, cakes, beers, all the luxuries of western society, within sight families struggle to provide meager meals for their children.

Phnom Penh, sadly, is a city firmly in the grip of commercialization, land grabs by corrupt officials are common place to be sold to foreign investors for lucrative profits. Many of these developments are incentives from Chinese and Korean investments. There are multistory commercial retail mega-stores being thrown up all over the place.

Seeing this can only make me question where the money is really coming from, I would suggest this may well be where millions of Chinese Yuan are being filtered, driving the vast corruption that proliferates the Chinese economic expansion. The financial bubble growing in Asia, dwarfing anything that ever happened in Europe.

While in PP we only visited the S21 prison, this place has a dark history of genocide. Its scary to think this is still happening today in prison camps sponsored by western governments.




We spent a lot of time simply walking around the city, we spent rainy days in our hotel room, with the occasional bottle of wine or happy pizza.




We also visited a couple of old friends. SP is a young local Khmer man who works as a rickshaw driver. He knows the city extremely well, speaks good English and is always willing to lean new skills to enable him to support his family.


He works very hard to support his young family, they rent a humble home, one room that all the family share. We visited SP and took a tour of the Birds Nest slum, I visited the Birds Nest some 4 years ago. It was nice to see improvement of the lives of the people, made possible only by non-government organizations, still these conditions would be considered UN-livable by western standards.




We also spend some time with Paddy, a young Irish friend of mine who has been living in PP for sometime with his young son. Paddy always in excellent humor, providing a good laugh and time for me to reflect on life.

Our plan for PP was to allow Blu to get some dental work completed. We decided to visit a clinic named Roomchang, a very impressive clinic indeed, a ten story surgery kitted out with all of the latest technology. If you are looking to get work done avoid this place at all cost. It is a business pure and simple, with the sole aim of making as much money as possible. The dentist had quoted Blu $1500, stating that the price was so high due to the work being extremely complicated, yet in the same sentence he also stated he could complete every-thing within one sitting and only a couple of hours. It made us wonder how complicated things really where, especially as Blu had been quoted only $400 for the same work while in Europe. It became evident we no longer needed to stay in PP.

It was time to leave and make our way to Bangkok. It was time to stop traveling and have a home for a while.