After spending 2 months in South Vietnam, the harsh reality of visa expirations set in. #justbackpackerproblem
My Vietnamese visa was going to expire on Christmas eve and I didn’t want to spend Christmas in a bus. I left in the middle of December to Cambodia. The bus ride from
Ho Chi Minh City
to
Phnom Penh
was less than 6 hours.
At the border, apparently the officials wanted to see proof of funds🙄. Just Indian Passport problems.
They wanted to see 400$ in cash, yeah cash😐What? Are you kidding me? Who carries around cash with them?
I usually enter countries and cross borders with barely 5$ and then go to the atm to get the local money.
I obviously couldn’t go back to Vietnam as I got stamped out of the country and they didn’t have visa on arrival at the border. The old me would have been panicking at the border, but after traveling for nearly a year,
I smiled and thought to myself that this story is going to be a good blog post!
The one thing about South East Asia is that a little coffee money can get you through almost anything😉.
For once my googly eyes and persuasion didn’t work so while the official kept my passport, I was sent to an atm in the border town to get a balance statement. Once I was back the official was finally satisfied and gave me the visa, which just like Vietnam turned out to be one of those full page visa stickers
(like I don’t have enough of those)
.
After that as I was going through immigration, the officer had my passport over and held the stamp in the air and said “one dollar”. Normally ‘self-righteous’ me would have argued and got the stamp without paying. But after all the atm facade and being super tired as this was in the hot sun, I’m was just like, “Aw man screw this” and gave the man a dollar. He must be gaining a pretty decent retirement fund.
Already a couple of minutes in Cambodia and I realized that my month long visa run in Cambodia is going to create a lot of funny stories.
Once I was in Phnom Penh I checked into the city on Facebook, only to receive a notification a few minutes later that a friend of mine who I met trekking in Nepal in May was in Cambodia. He was in the beach town of Otres and after spending a couple of weeks in the hilly town of
Dalat
, I could use some waves.
After spending a few days in Phnom Penh I made my way to Sihanoukville and then to Otres and met up with my friend. I stayed at a place called Otres village which was an amazing community of people from all over the world. It was relaxing, to say the least.
I spent a couple days there relaxing on the beach and getting some work done. Then we made our way to Kampot.
As we reached Kampot we were walking to one of the popular hostel, when we saw a sign for a dorm for 2.5$/night, we thought it would be shit but on actually giving it a look it was pretty decent. It isn’t listed on any booking site and is called Jack’s Place. It’s opposite Monkey Republic and I would definitely recommend it.
In Kampot I met Paul again, he is a super nice german guy I met in Sri Lanka. He took most of my surfing pictures which are on my Instagram. We met some incredible people in our dorm and on Christmas day, we went to a place a little away from the city center called Arcadia. Arcadia is an interesting place to say the least. It’s a backpacker hostel with…. wait for it…. water sports!
A video posted by Jeremy Noronha (@thinktravelliftgrow)
on
Dec 27, 2016 at 1:56am PST
Seriously it’s so epic. It has a massive slide, kayaks, a blob and a pontoon! The staff, service & food were also excellent. Christmas was pretty sick and we had a great day.
The next day was a ‘lazy do nothing’ day. The next few days we rented bikes and explored the waterfalls and the national parks. When we were at Bokor National Park one of our bikes stopped working and we had to leave it up in the park as it was pretty late in night and 2 of our group had to hitch a ride back to the city.
In Kampot we also met a french guy named Anthony who was hitchhiking across South East Asia. I used to hitchhike a lot in Nepal, Bhutan and India but then stopped. After listening to Anthony, 3 of us from our hostel, Maura, Paul and me hitchhiked to the beautiful beach town Kep and back. It was a short trip but it sparked the dormant hitchhiking fire in me which cause me later to hitchhike 600kms across Cambodia, but that’s a tale for another day.
As 2016 was coming to a close, I didn’t care much for the new year as it’s just another day. Didn’t do anything super special, we got a room in the hostel with the watersports and had a relaxing time amazing people and vibes.
2016 was amazing, but 2017 is going to be more incredible and amazing and full of adventures! Especially thanks to each and everyone of you for all of the support❤️ I won’t be able to do this without each one of you!
