People and Streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Just Back to Bangkok From the Trip
I disappeared from Hive's radar a few days ago. This was because I went to Cambodia. Six absolutely intense days...
Seven boxers and seven T-shirts to never deal with laundries.
A hoody and jeans to be safe in potential freezing AC buses and dormitories
Plus, 5 kg of devices... 😁
A train trip from Bangkok to the Cambodian border; five hours in a crowded sitting car with old buzzing fans on the ceiling. Only $1.4 (49 baht) for the whole trip from Bangkok right to the border checkpoint!
Crossing the corrupt Cambodian border...
The Cambodian border officers tried to drag some extra money from me but I fought back well and paid only an official 30$ for a tourist visa. 🤠
A walk along a dark broken street in Poi Pet, Cambodia in search of a bus to Phnom Penh... Book in advance, guys!
Ended up taking an 18$ night bus with a double bed only for me, coincidentally. Heaven! And then hell: arriving in Phnom Penh at 4 am... Dozing on a plastic chair for three hours...
A tuk-tuk trip to the booked hotel. Check-in at 2 pm... 😫 "Can I leave my backpack here?" - "Sure" - "Can I use the bathroom as well?"
8 am, with the brushed teeth and the empty bladder, I was ready for a walking photography adventure in the capital of Cambodia! 😎
The first thing that caught my eye - monks having these wonderful umbrellas.
Flocks of them were cruising the area, asking for alms and giving blessings:
The woman is bowing to monks while the security guard is bowing to the mobile. 😃
It was impossible to resist following those monks. However, I tried to remember their faces to be sure that I didn't chase anybody certain for too long. 😁
This is a Wat Langka (វត្តលង្កាព្រះកុសុមារាម), not a top tourist destination but I didn't want any sightseeing this time.
I lived in Phnom Penh in 2019 for a month and even at that time didn't want to engage in any tourist checkboxing. Too old for this shit.
I just want to go anywhere I want. Not to Phnom Penh's genocide museum for sure.
These guys exclaimed something towards me, not sure what:
But I understood them the way I wanted: “Take a picture of us, we are not less orange than those monks you are secretly following.” 😁 Not the most interesting picture but it conveys well how a walk with a camera is full of emotions.
Another character, what a sweet hold:
I reached the Independence Monument and a question arose where to head next.
I chose the Riverside.
Passed the Royal Palace and National Museum of Cambodia, having polite no-thank-you talks to tuk-tuk drivers.
That's the place.
The Riverside is supposed to be a leisure promenade and it works this way partly... but, at the same time, it looks like an untidy embankment of a provincial town and hosts dubious characters. The best place to feed pigeons in the whole Phnom Penh though. 😁
By the way,
Do you know the rule of 10 seconds?
It says, if you dropped food onto the ground, you can quickly collect it within 10 seconds and keep safely eating it. 😁
| Surprised to learn that there are people on the Internet who believe this rule isn't a joke. 😁 |
There is another one in Asia, a less strict, saying:
If you dropped food onto the ground, you can keep eating or selling this food if you are quick enough to collect it before motorbikes will crush it into mash. 😄 And that's the proof:
All the traffic got frozen patiently waiting for the pickles would be saved. 😃
(It would be fair to note that the saleswomen decided not to save the first layer of the pickles lying straight onto the road surface.)
Keep walking!
The central Phnom Penh is a kind of spectacle. There is no polish there, except for individual buildings, the rest is chaos with a large number of dilapidated houses.
That's one of the oldest, obviously, from the French times:
The banner on the window says that the building is for sale or rent.
But most buildings in the center looks rather this way.
Many signs of the previous times.
That creates peculiar vibes of "adventure in Asia", which you can't find in nowadays Thailand or Malaysia, and that's what many foreign visitors like about Phnom Penh.
But Phnom Penh has a modern face too.
This is the young generation of the small but growing Cambodian middle class who has never known the terrors of totalitarianism and lives in the age of the Web although physically located (caged) in the backward corrupt authoritarian country.
And this is a new architecture of Phnom Penh. No matter if this is wild oligarchic capitalism... at least, they don't execute people for wearing glasses in Cambodia nowadays.
I'll end the post on this minor note (simply because the caffeine has worn off from me and that's why I've run out of smiling emojis).
Another story from the capital of Cambodia is coming as well as a reportage from Battambang, a Cambodian city, I visited for the first time.
More images and stories from Southeast Asia are ahead! Check out the previous ones on my personal Pinmapple map.
I took these images with a Nikkor 50mm on a Nikon D750 on February 13-14, 2024, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
What bright clothes the monks have!
Bight and yummy like fresh oranges - I couldn't help taking pictures of them. 🙂
Fantastic!!!!
!discovery shots
!VSC
😎 Thank you, Jesus! 😊
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Great shots, I haven't been to Cambodia for almost ten years. I imagine it's changed a lot! Even from the first time I was there about 14 years ago it had changed, can't imagine what it's like now. Even back then Thailand was becoming the west of the east, basically infested with tourists (like me 😅) and Cambodia was a welcome change of gears to a bit more real travelling. There was an island off the coast of Sihanoukville called bamboo island I think, you could hop on a boat and make your way out to stay in the huts there, it was amazing, but I've heard they've since closed down the little "resort" and it's not open to tourists anymore.
Thank you!
I have a feeling that the whole genre, real traveling I mean, is dying. It's not only because they've set up a ticket booth at every beautiful place. It's not only because traveling reminds online shopping nowadays. It's not only because the number of international visitors grow and the number of backpackers declines in SEA (I have this feeling). It's first of all because of the constant decrease in the value of traveling. Reading a book by Gerald Darrel's wife and seeing that you even didn't need to have cool photographs from travels - telling stories was enough to collect a crowd around you in the 20th century. In the 1990s, people saved beautiful travel pictures in folders on their computers. In the 2000s, you could go traveling to see what real streets in Asian cities look like and now you only need Google.maps for that.
Since then, traveling has been losing its value as a bad crypto token - an endless downtrend.
Nowadays, traveling on only a sightseeing mission is a way to disappointment if you want something meaningful.
To me, street photography (and generally photography) is a way to escape tourism. Exploring the life of cities. Since I sell images on photo stock and my pix appear here and there, including books, it gives my travels a flavor of a mission that has a meaning.
"My travels" isn't a precise term though. I live on the outskirts of Bangkok with my Thai partner. Although with tourist visas and stamps only.
I agree with you 100% Things have been changing so much and now many people don't even need to leave their couch to have the feeling of being somewhere else. I think that's what we are all chasing, is that feeling.
That's really cool you sell stock photos, what sites do you use? How did you get into that? I've often considered it but never really had the time or motivation to look into it too much.
My wife and I have also been considering spending part of our year in SE Asia, do you mind if I ask what it's like for you doing the visa run thing? Do you have go leave every month? Do you ever get hassled by border security or are you at risk of not being allowed entry? I'm really curious about it since we might consider doing something like that ourselves at some point.
Low payments even for the East (Eastern Europe, most Asia). For the West, you can say they pay nothing. I sell on Adobe, Alamy, Shutterstock, iStock, and smaller ones. Adobe sales grow (surprisingly), the average sale is like 0.4$. If a new image is beautiful, it can be discovered on Adobe and start bringing some money.
Alamy sells rarely but you can have 10-20-50$ for a sale. You can earn money with not only general-use photos but ones with narrow use - like, a picture of, for example, a museum in some no-name provincial city in Romania or Mongolia. You need many pix like that and better not just random bad shots and clones but good ones.
Shutterstock, if not rare big sales, pays very low, a usual subscription sale is 0.1$.
There is an annoying thing: you can just copy and paste - every stock has its own web interface so you have to lose time with all this.
I sometimes think about uploading most editorial images to Alamy, and potentially profitable non-editorial selected photos to Adobe.
Most nations come to Thailand visa free for 30 days. After that, you can go abroad (Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc) to get a tourist (60+30-day) visa for 30$. 60+30 days means you can spend 60 days in Thailand and then pay 50$ to get an extra 30, in almost any city (no refusals). Then, you can get the second visa for 60+30 days. That's 190 days - 100% no problem.
There is no rule about how many days you can spend in Thailand. If someone says, there is a 180-day rule - don't believe it. I was in Thailand for around 240 days in 2023. No rule means an official that works with you makes a subjective decision, and Thais want more tourists nowadays...
Their main question is "are you a real traveler or you secretly work in Thailand?" So, when I leave Thailand, I try to spend a longer time outside. For example, in autumn I was in Vietnam for 1.5 months. In summer, 1.5 months in Laos.
Different Thai embassies and consulates are differently strict. Vientiane and Savannakhet ones are easy. You should read about each of them. Some of them can ask this or that. Some paranoid ones can ask you to show tickets away from Thailand, as people say.
If you have enough money for traveling, you shouldn't spend so much time in Thailand - so many nice cheap countries to go to in Asia.
Once before the pandemic - they were strict with me, sent me from the passport control to an immigration officer and she was asking "why, why, why" trying to get proof from me that I didn't work in Thailand. They stamped me 30 days - this was what I wanted (I was entering without visa - it was my second time with visa extemption rule which wasn't allowed at that time + many months in Thailand). But that stamp had a sign that I was not a good traveler anymore, a sort of.
Before the pandemic, there was a sentiment in Thailand, that there were too many foreigners and they stole jobs, etc. Now it is the opposite - the pandemic impressed everyone here.
Dang man thanks so much for all the super useful info. I'm gonna check out adobe stock and the others. As for the thailand visas that sounds pretty awesome to be honest. I don't think it would be hard for us to prove that we are not working in Thailand but you never know. My wife and I are professional wedding photographers so maybe we would get hassled, though we honestly don't really have a desire to photograph weddings in Thailand or Asia in general, we really just want to spend half our year working in Europe and then half living cheaply in somewhere nice. Thank you again so much for the info, I'll check into those consulates you mentioned when we do decide to make the move :)
Half a year is just 2 tourist visas, nobody would ever have a slight question about you.
Good luck with your research. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me!
great captures, tell me did you find the people of the city a bit unwelcoming? I did a few years ago, I loved the country but in contrast to other indo-china peoples they just seemed a bit "off".
Thank you!
Honestly, I've found people welcoming.
Cambodian border guards are scammers, the whole border of Cambodia is a scam to milk foreigners... and locals too - almost everything is imported in Cambodia and prices are 2x compared to Bangkok or Saigon.
There are some people in Cambodia who "don't care" or/and have some mental deviations making them extremely irresponsible and unpredictable.
All sorts of scams and bigger crimes are still present there.
So, if I buy a bus ticket, of course, I ask myself if I am buying a real ticket or a fake, etc. I am cautious there much more than in Thailand or Vietnam.
I know what you mean, the tour bus we were on got "randomly" pulled over and the driver was told he had to pay $100 or so, (forget the exact amount) to be allowed to proceed, we had to have a collective whip round! Now whether the driver was in cahoots with the cops.... who knows!
:( And were those guys real cops or just cousins, who knows... Now large Cambodian bus companies work well inside the country but adventures start when you cross the border. One of the things: bus employees sometimes collect passengers' passports and ask for $40 to arrange all things with the visa while a Cambodian tourist visa costs $30. If you refuse, you might have a problem with continuing the trip after crossing the border - your bus might "lose" you.
That's why I decided to travel on a train ($1.5 only) from Bangkok to the border and to cross the border on my own. Fair to say, on Cambodia passport control (Poipet Crossing), there was a large sign saying "Cambodia tourist visa 30$" and that allows people to avoid a common $5 bribe for not waiting Cambodia visa on arrival for a couple of hours. So... things slowly become better. They asked to pay me extra $3 however. I said "but why, look it's $30 on the sign above"... they told me "because you have no photos for visa" (another trick). I had prepared photos (old) and avoided this... Happy.
oh the joys of travelling lol
😁😁
👍
Nice contrast between the different man in orange!
Glad you liked it, thanks. 🙂