It was hard getting off the Wat Phou, the cruise boat on the Mekong, this safe haven with its varnished wood, the drinks awaiting every sunny outing, the happy meals, my nice little bed and the smile of the barwoman... The serenity of nights when everybody was asleep and life felt easy and  beautiful, so beautiful that it anguished me…
But all that’s good comes to an end and one nice day I had to pack again, wear my shoes (forbidden on board) and get off on a sandy bank of the Mekong under blazing skies and suffocating heat, plus mixed feelings if I could face again the self-repeating guide that would drive me to the land frontier of Cambodia, or try and make my way alone to it and die dehydrated but not pissed off.
But there he was, full of smiles.
I pretended sleeping on the way, wondering what was to follow: I had never crossed a land frontier in these latitudes…
Can you post this postcard for me? I asked my guide when we got to the frontier,  it is already stamped.
The one I had found the day before as I was cycling, with a German destinee and Laotian stamps already on it. But I had not found anywhere a post-box to post it myself.
You can post it in Cambodia, he said.
But the stamps are from Laos!, I said, unable to believe what I heard.
You can post it in Cambodia, he repeated, as the moron he was. And he added, It will go faster this way!*
It is hard to imagine when you are reading this, but the heat was so unbearable at that moment that I decided I cannot get angry. Moreover this happened as I had already started showing my passport to the Cambodian officer hidden behind his window, that kept on stamping unperturbed Chinese passports by the hundreds while I was melting away, so I had to keep my calm and get over with the frontier procedure. In the end and as I was ready to pass out he assigned my passport to somebody else who stamped it in like half a second and I thought, this is it, I am done with Laos and the silly guide. At the end of the road I could distinguish Vanna, my Cambodian guide waiting.

But there were these three frightening guys under an umbrella that I had to go through too, looking extremely bored in the nature.
Two were frightening because they looked as crooked as it gets, while the third one, the one with the uniform, because he was heavily crippled, which made the scene something in between a mock arrest about to happen and a Monty Python movie scene. The uniformed guy was sitting straight in his chair because he had no choice, and the other two were so laid back in theirs that they were at the brink of falling back.
The crippled guy smiled and passed to me a paper containing a thousand horrible, unspeakable  diseases that actually had no No as an answer to tick.
This is it, I said to myself. They’ll lock me up now and later make a film, like the Midnight express…
Me no disease, I said.
You Sierra Leone? The crooked-looking guy asked.
Wow, I thought, what are the odds that someone would have been to Sierra Leone and then come cross this middle-of-nowhere land frontier post?
No, I smiled, trying to warm up the situation a bit, yet sweating like crazy, while at the time thinking if there was anything in my suitcase that could possibly incriminate me…
Me no disease, I said again, thinking now I sound like a moron too, haha.
After some moments of disquieting silence the crooked guy showed to me reluctantly a separate box writing No (!), meaning no disease and I am good to pass, which I ticked asap. Then the crippled guy in his blue uniform and stripes slowly opened his drawer and took out what resembled a small toy gun, which he pointed at me. Oh my God I thought, why is no one around when you need them?
He pushed the trigger, nothing happened, then smiled his big smile full of rotten teeth and waved me on.
OK, he said. Welcome Cambodia!
Must have been a thermometer, which makes one think, what if it really worked, and I really had fever? Would that be a proof that I lied, has straight come from Sierra Leone and I was an Ebola carrier that had to be thrown to the Mekong?
I stood up, took my one-too-many bags and set off to the end of the road where my new Cambodian guide was waiting for me, got thankful in the car and its air-conditioning, and had about 3 bottles of water…

Cambodia reminded me of the song, So close yet so far away. The language is different, the people too. The architecture is different and the mentality. In Laos you can wait for ages to be attended, in Cambodia they will take your plate before you’re done with it.

My handful of tips would be the same as for Laos, with small changes

Night scene
Better than Laos. In touristic places like Siem Reap there’s actually too much of it. In Phnom Penh you need Valium: the city is hectic as it gets, especially when you walk the side of the tuk-tuk waiting drivers, that will invariably sing the words “tuk-tuk, massage, nice lady’ to everyone that just passes by. They all know ladies, and apparently we all have a “looking for tuk tuk and nice young lady” sign sticking on our front. And since you are going to use tuk tuk about a thousand times during your trip to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, and they have no seat belts: Good Luck! (they drive like crazy sometimes, to the point I got to film an accident happening with my tuk tuk while I was filming the night life of Siem Seap)

Time
Counts. Some waiters are so much in a hurry that they will confuse everything and will make you go crazy, because hardly anyone speaks a word of English, which is definitely also part of the problem.

Money
The currency is called riel. But the real money here is green, very green and you need bring nothing else but US dollars. But here’s the downside. Cambodians pay local and get change back, while Gringos pay green rounded-up prices and never get change back. You’ll find everything costs one dollar, be it a big or a small water bottle from the same vendor (!!!), as absurd as it may sound. The good thing being, a dollar can still buy you things here… It would seem that Cambodians are trying to catch up the modern economy, after the Khmer rouge simply abolished money and bombed their own National Bank! As much as everything is cheap, the price difference from one street vendor to the other for the same thing made me sometimes furious (four times up, for what else? A bottle of water)

* I sent the post card in an envelope with European stamps as soon as I got back. European out-of-time solidarity I guess…