Lydia Laube - Temples and Tuk Tuks: Travels in Cambodia

Wakefield Press

Temples and Tuk Tuks

Born into the farming community of Caltowie in the mid north of South Australia, Lydia Laube gained her nursing qualifications at the Royal Adelaide and Calvary Hospitals in Adelaide and then set off to see the world. She worked in Darwin, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, London, Italy, Indonesia and, finally, Saudi Arabia, the experience which led her to write her first best-seller, Behind the Veil. Her story of her travels in Cambodia, Temples and Tuk Tuks, is her sixth book.

Temples
and Tuk Tuks

Travels in Cambodia

LYDIA LAUBE

Wakefield Press
1 The Parade West
Kent Town
South Australia 5067
Australia
www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2003
Reprinted 2009
This edition published 2010

Copyright Lydia Laube, 2003

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover designed by Lahn Stafford Design

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-publication entry

Laube, Lydia, 1948 .
Temples and tuk tuks: travels in Cambodia.

ISBN 9781862549036.

1. Laube, Lydia, 1948 Travel. 2. Cambodia Description and travel. 3. Vietnam Description and travel. I. Title.

915.04

Contents

By the same author

Behind the Veil

Bound for Vietnam

Is This the Way to Madagascar?

Llama for Lunch

Slow Boat to Mongolia

The Long Way Home

Singapore Airlines unsportingly took my knitting needles from me at Adelaide airport. Perhaps they thought that I might stick up the pilot and purl and plain him into submission.

How was I now supposed to tranquillise my white knuckles? Knitting is my antidote to fear of flying. I cant read, especially at take off or landing, in case I miss something sinister.

I survived the take-off sans knitting, and even the food was good and came early because Id ordered a diabetic meal (Im not a diabetic, but saying so gets you better food). The flight was as smooth as silk and the skies were clear all the way.

At half past five in the evening I arrived in Singapore. I was on my way to Vietnam, destination Cambodia. I had waited a long time for this. The barbaric Khmer Rouge regime and the bloody civil war that followed it had turned Cambodia into a tragic place of horror and danger that prevented travellers going there for over twenty years. Finally, relative tranquillity has returned and although land mines, bandits and the odd guerrilla still exist, parts of Cambodia are no longer restricted and are reasonably safe. Small numbers of visitors are now venturing into the country. Now at last I could make the journey Id had to cancel when I had been in Vietnam and so close to Cambodia five years before.

The next flight out to Ho Chi Minh City was not until half past nine the next morning, so the airline was obliged to provide me with a cost-free stopover at a city hotel. Waiting ages for my bag to appear joy-riding on the rondel, I presumed that this was the last bag off syndrome, which is routine for me. But this time it was no bag off! The horrible idea finally dawned on me that my luggage may have been booked through all the way to Vietnam.

Sure enough it had. The staff in lost property said that the plane was still on the tarmac, but it would take an hour to retrieve my bag. I waited. No bag appeared. After ninety minutes they sent me off to one of the airports many restaurants with a twenty-five dollar voucher for dinner. What a great barn of a place Changi Airport is. It took me half an hour to find the restaurant, directed hither and thither and finally taken to it by a kind soul. By the time I did locate it, I was thoroughly cheesed off. The food was not very good, but it made me feel better.

I gave up on the bag at nine oclock and took the airport bus to my hotel. Riding through the warm tropical night I saw that Singapore still looked much the same as the last time I had been here: the lush green parks and gardens, stacks of high-rise buildings, blaze of downtown neon and stupendous hotels that looked impossibly high. And everything was squeaky clean.

I was given a suite on the fourteenth floor (what if a fire broke out!) that was super swish. Id almost had a fit when I had seen the list of prices at the desk. My room cost six hundred and fifty Singapore dollars thats even more in Australian dollars. I consider it utterly decadent to spend so much on a nights rest. I could pay for the total care of two Cambodian orphans for a year for that.

I didnt have much time to enjoy the kitchen, dining room and king-size bed and I pondered the usefulness of putting my ten-dollar fake pearls in the safe. Lying in the bathtub, restoring my equilibrium, I cast a critical eye over the grouting of the tiles and decided that it was a worse job than I could have done. Im a grouting connoisseur since I did all the tiles in my own bathroom. I was almost asleep when my bag finally caught up with me around midnight.

An automatic wake-up call from a machine forced me out of bed at six and I fell onto the bus to return to the airport at half past. I was surly about this as the plane for Vietnam didnt leave for three hours and, what was worse, I had not touched the money I had exchanged on arrival to use in Singapore. Fat lot of use that was going to be now.

It was a very bumpy flight through a cloudy sky to Ho Chi Minh City, but the sight of the female airport staff floating gracefully about in their sky-blue and white ao dais lifted my spirits. The airport, however, was a far cry from my previous entry to Vietnam, when I had walked alone over a bridge across the beautiful river that forms the border with China in the north. Here it was a nightmare. You stand in an un-airconditioned hall in incredibly long rows for an interminable time. The rows are long and slow moving due to the communist fervour, or suspicion, that makes the officials take forever to process each person. It was more than an hour before I reached the immigration desk. Then it was on to the customs line.

After two hours I tottered outside and the steamy tropical heat hit me, a sensation about as pleasant as a slap in the face with a wet fish. Considering that the temperature had been five degrees when I had left Australia only a short while before, it was quite a shock. Hijacked by a waiting taxi driver, I allowed him to take me to the small family-run Hotel Van Tran in the travellers part of town that he recommended.

This hotel was a narrow, high-rise building that possessed no lift. Naturally I was billeted as near to the sky as possible at the top of cardiac-arrest inducing stairs. I arrived panting and fell on the bed to sleep until dinner time.

My room had a dinky balcony that I could only reach by stepping halfway behind the wardrobe. Not a metre wide, the balcony was just big enough to harbour a fold-up chair and a weeny bit of wrought iron that someone had thoughtfully put across the front to stop you pitching nose first into the street but it gave me a great eagle-eye view of the small, busy street below. The room was neat, but freezing, and the airconditioner had been hot-wired with duct tape to a power cord up near the ceiling.