Lady Gaga....

I thought i'd break the the journey to the south coast by stopping at Phnom Penh. This way the journey would be 5 hours to Phnom Penh and 7 to the coast.

I caught a local bus which cost 2.80 GBP for the 5 hour journey :) from Battambang bus station...









I reached Phnom Penh in the evening and went to the 'Foreign Correspondents' Club' (FCC) which was one of the most famous bar/clubs during the war...




It's got a brilliant aspect on the river where you can watch the sunset...but I only had one beer as it was expensive and pretty empty...




I then walked further down the road to meet Toby at the Riverside Bisto....here he is changing the music videos..



Usually, i'd wait around for him to close the bar at 01.00 ish and then we'd go out to other bars around town...the Riverside had a mixture of rich old Khmers, tourists and expats. Usually when he was closing up, the expats and tourists would clear out, but he'd always have a problem getting the old Khmers to leave...

One day he found the answer... he'd noticed that although the old khmers had no quarms about coming to the bar with their mistresses who were often 20 years younger, they seemed to dislike and were unused to seeing badly behaved and scantily clad women on the TV screens in the bar (Cambodian TV is quite conservative) ..... so Toby went out and bought a few Lady Gaga videos and he'd play them at the end of the night...and it worked !!! The mistresses appeared to enjoy watching the videos, but the old Khmers would show their distaste by getting up and leaving every time.. :)

He found that Telephone and Paparazzi worked the best......

I could only find the clean version of Telephone...

That night, Toby, myself and a French ex-boxer called Richie (who gave us a lift in his car even though he'd had 4 whiskeys...) ended up in Heart of Darkness again.

When it got to 5am, i was tempted to stay one more day in Phnom Penh, but Toby persuaded me to go and explore the coast, so I continued on my way to the South the next day...

Richie gave me loads of ideas about places to go when i got there including a white sand beach called 'Otres'....this is where he went to escape the city....