Valentine's Love for Sale

We arrived at the share taxi station at about 8:30 looking for a ride to Kompong Cham. A share taxi is a shared car that will go pretty much wherever you want to go. If you want to leave immediately you can pay for the 5 seats yourself and leave. If you only want to pay for a seat you wait until the taxi is full and then leave. The problem is that you can end up waiting for days I guess until someone wants to go where you want to go. Kompong Thom to Kompong Cham is fairly well travelled and we didn't have to wait long. Our moto driver told us it was only 3 dollars per person but the driver wanted us to buy out the full car so we could go, but we were quite happy to wait. Another person arrived and us being the rich westerners were offered to buy out the remaining seats to leave but we still waited. In the end a young guy was buying a ticket for his Mum and asked us to pay for the remaining seat (not that it was a seat just a position between the driver and the front passenger) but we didn't think this was fair and in the end we only paid $1 extra. The share taxi was a Toyota Camry, just like ours back home. The driver thought he was Mario Andretti (or Brocky for the Aussies) but the trip was a comfortable air-conditioned 2 hours.

We were dropped off somewhere in Kompong Cham and needed the bank so we set out in a direction. We did find the bank and went looking for the boat to Kratie (Krah-Che). It seems in the last 2 years since the Lonely Planet was published the roads and bus service in Cambodia have greatly improved doing away with the need for boats. We were looking for the 1pm boat to Kratie but this service had been reduced to 1 trip per day, at 7:30 a.m. (Kel found this out after a 1 hour trek while being hounded by a moto driver constantly). This meant a night in 'gorgeous' Kompong Cham. Cambodia's third largest city after 'gorgeous' Battambang. So we found a room in the Mekong hotel overlooking you guessed it the Mekong River. The river is huge and as long as you are on the bank looking out, Kompong Cham looks great.

We set out to find some lunch and went to the Hao An restaurant. We ordered beef and green peppers, which has proven to be pretty safe previously. The meat arrived a bit bloody (still mooing) so we sent it back. Once all of the kitchen staff started leaving we thought they may have forgotten about us. As she was leaving the waitress that served us saw us and then ran back into the kitchen probably to find out what happened to our food. She came out and we asked for our bill. We did eat some steamed rice. After doing nothing for a few hours we sat at a street stall and had a beer and toasted to a wonderful Valentine's Day. Our lunch disaster was all but forgotten after we had some fantastic cheeseburgers for dinner.

At the hotel reception we asked if there was a good place to get a massage in town, and the clerk said that we could get one in our room in 5 minutes for $5/hour. We went upstairs, tidied a bit and waited. The clerk knocked on the door and I opened it to 2 girls with heavy make-up and wearing acid washed denim. They came in and sat down. Kel and I laughed and made it very clear we only wanted a massage. We lay down and we all laughed some more and got our massage. One girl was 18 and the other was older and looked a bit more experienced at massage that is. The young girl didn't look that happy or enthusiastic, maybe because she really was only getting 5 dollars for a massage. The older girl looked quite relieved to be giving only a massage. In the end the massage was OK and they left. Looking back we would have thought a married couple asking for a massage in the most expensive hotel in town would not have hookers delivered to their room but we weren't surprised. I guess anything goes on Valentine's Day in Kompong Cham.