"Kingdom of Cambodia's Capit ..." a Phnom Penh Travel Page by Etoile2B

Marc had been talking about Vietnam and Cambodia ever since we canceled Venezuela but as we looked into last minute flights it just didn’t seem financially possible. So we concentrated our efforts elsewhere. I had been dreaming about Latin America, last minute flights to Central America were cheap and we didn’t need visas so we started looking hard at Nicaragua. Our window of opportunity was growing slim, so we needed to book and leave quickly. My show was wrapping on Friday and I had a little over a month free until my next job started. Yet Marc was still fantasizing about Vietnam so on a whim we made a phone call to United Airlines and by some stroke of luck they had two seats available through frequent flier miles leaving on Wednesday to Bangkok. We didn’t have Vietnamese visas secured, nor did we have the time at this point to procure them at home so we booked flights into Bangkok and out of Ho Chi Mien City and crossed our fingers that we could easily obtain the proper visas in Cambodia.

I raced home from work that evening, my heart pumping adrenaline through my system. It wouldn’t be real until I had the tickets in my hands. Marc and I went directly to the United ticket counter at LAX – the final step in securing our tickets. I could barely contain my excitement as the agent handed them over to us. It was finally becoming a reality. We stopped by a local bookstore on the way home from the airport and camped out in an alcove, surrounded by every travel guide we could find relating to our trip. When we settled on the texts we thought fit us best we also searched for some relating novels. Much to my dismay, much of the related literature focused on war and violence. I was hoping for something a little more literary and the one book relating to conflict that I was interested in reading, “Surviving The Killing Fields”, was out of print. Instead we picked up “The Lover” by Marguerite Duras and “Catfish And Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam” by Andrew X. Pham for our journey.

Our flight was only five days away and we had much to do to prepare, like hit REI for supplies and get vaccinated. Thankfully that hardly left any time to dwell on the fact that this was our first trip together and after all, we had only known each other for about 7 months so a month in Southeast Asia could be quite a test. Would our travel styles really mesh? How would we deal with the lack of planning? We only had our tickets to and from The States booked thus far. Could we stand each other 24/7 for an entire month? Would we still like each other when we returned home? None of that mattered at that moment, because we were going and in all honesty if we discovered that we weren’t compatible on the flight to Bangkok we could just split up and meet again on the return flight, right?

Our Travelogue starts here and continues on our Phnom Penh travalogue pages...