Saturday, July 24th: One Night in Bangkok Makes a Tired Man Humble

As I come to my waking senses, I wonder where I am, yet the heat that fills the room when the rotating ventilator turns away from me gives it away: I'm in Thailand. Bangkok to be more precise. Blandine's happily snoozing away. What's on the plan today? Deliver our netbook to the ASUS repair center, then fly on to Cambodia. One snag though, I still have to locate a post office and it's Saturday.

I figure there must be a post office in the airport and inquire by the front desk. The girl behind the counter smiles cutely, yet it's a smile of polite ignorance. I'm about to leave in frustration when her colleague arrives: "Yes, post office in airport, sir". I can't get her to tell me whether it's open on Saturday or whether it is equipped to send parcels, but we've got no choice: a trip to the delivery address by taxi would take too long and is not really cost-efficient. We take the next shuttle to the airport crossing our fingers that all will work out. Yup, we're good. I send a box containing my netbook to the ASUS office on the other side of Bangkok for 70 baht. Wow, us tourists can't even buy a beer in the airport for that price!

Still jetlagged, we wander around the airport for hours, just long enough not to fall asleep until we gain our seats in the AirAsia plane to Phnom Penh. I fade in and out of conscience until the plane lands, roughly an hour later.

I spend my first half hour in Cambodia watching a nice attempt for a queue disintegrate into an amoebic mass of frustrated and impatient tourists trying to elbow themselves into pole-position for payment of the USD 25 visa tax we tourists are entitled to pay for spending loads more tourist dollars in this country. The next 15 minutes I try to follow the mechanical gestures of a human assembly line made up of 6 identical-looking uniforms all nosing through our passports with equal disinterest. The cherry on the cake is the Cambodian guy who must read and call out the names of the European passport holders. Each and every name gets absolutely butchered in every Cambodian sense of the word.

We walk from the air-conditioned airport into the hot and sticky Phnom Penh air, where Noon and his family are waiting. They've brought fresh flower necklaces to adorn aunty Blandine and her boyfriend with. I'm happy to see Noon, it's been over a year since I met him, and I've been looking forward to this moment. I can see the excitement sparkle in his eyes, he is such an upbeat guy.

Relying on Blandine's extensive knowledge of the city and its value-for-money guesthouses, we jump in a cab and try our luck at the Boddhi Tree Umma, a haven of peace, right across from the sinister Tuol Sleng prison. They've got space, so we throw our backpacks into the room and rush down again for drinks and dinner with Noon's family. Tira and Terry have grown a lot since I met them last year, and their English is pretty good.

We order some food and catch up on our lives over a nice fresh fruit smoothie. Life is good. We've got a few days to ourselves before camp starts, plenty to find our bearings in Cambodia's capital.