Finding a house

With great naivety we came to Siem Reap expecting to find a comfortable house with a western kitchen and decent bathroom. We expected this to all be a short walk from the central Siem Reap area.

What a shock we had when we started house hunting. We were taken by motorbike and tuk tuk all over the city down small dirty trash filled dirt lanes full of potholes and mud. We were taken to places which were full of mice and cockroaches and then told a monthly rental amount that was well out of our budget.

The bathrooms in Cambodia leave a lot to be desired. Usually they are a tiny room with your shower hanging over the toilet. Perhaps a good setup if you are in a hurry to get up and go to work and want to do several things at once, but certainly not the most comfortable to use every day especially if the floor stays wet for hours after you use the shower. The decorations also leave a lot to be desired. Here is an example of a quite spacious bathroom at a house we looked at renting.

After weeks of looking around we were starting to give up. Reality very quickly took over from our preconceptions. We would be happy to find anywhere with two bedrooms a bathroom and a living room and kitchen.

Eventually we heard of a place via a facebook group and went to look. It is the middle flat in a group of nine and is a skinny place going up three floors. It had everything our much lower expectations needed. It even had a shower which was NOT over the toilet. Amazing!

The only catch was that the place would come totally empty and in a huge mess. There was months of grime and dust all over the place.

We took the place and spent days mopping, scrubbing and cleaning the place. Thank goodness we got our tetanus injections before leaving Australia!

Anyway, after a lot of effort and days scouring Siem Reap for furniture we started transforming the apartment. Our bedroom went from this:

to this:

to this:

Finding a soft mattress proved to be nearly impossible. Everything in Cambodia can be fixed or made with concrete. Their mattresses are no exception. There are pages on facebook of ex-pats discussing where they could get a soft mattress. We followed every lead down and eventually found a place with a memory foam mattress. They wanted about $1600 Australian dollars for one. Way out of our price range. We hunted some more and eventually found an affordable place which had a mattress we could test and it was ok. They arranged for a mattress to come from Thailand to Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. After 3 days the mattress arrived and we tested it out on our new bed. HARD AS A ROCK! We found that they'd ordered a different one from what we had tested and were hoping we'd be ok with the cheaper harder mattress. No we were not. After another inter country mattress run we had a softer one but they were not happy about taking the first one back and wanted us to buy two. Eventually we sorted it out and can finally get a full night's sleep.

Our living room and dining room went from this:

to this:

Our kitchen still leaves a lot to be desired:

But in the mean time we have set this up inside as an alternate kitchen:

So as you can see, after a lot of work we have made our selves reasonably comfortable. Stan even has an office where he can write these blogs.

Well past time for an update

Over the next few day we will  be making some updates to the blog. Apologies to everyone who has been waiting for an update. Here is just a very brief summary of what we have been up to since arriving in Cambodia a little over one month ago.

We flew from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur and spent a night at the Tune airport hotel waking up at 4 am to fly to Siem Reap. We flew into Siem Reap arriving at about 7 am. Our first impressions as we took a tuk tuk from the airport to town was "wow, this place is getting prosperous". This is of course only in comparison to our last visit here. New hotels lined the road from the airport. Roads which were mud tracks before were now paved. Streets that we never had ventured down were now teaming with tourists and restaurants. What a change! It is good to see the country flourishing. But it is sad to see the change to the character of the place that this wealth brings. By no means is Cambodia a wealthy country. It still suffers from poverty and lack of infrastructure, but it is certainly moving forwards.

We went to visit the kids at the orphanage right away and as we traveled down along  the river we noticed them doing some fishing in the river to supplement their food.

After catching up with the kids our first priority was to get out of a hotel room and into somewhere a little cheaper while we looked for a long term rental. We found a studio apartment in a good location where we could walk into town.

We then caught up with Bill and Henny (Stan's parents) who stopped in to visit after doing some work in Myanmar (Burma). Together we visited some of the further out temples around Siem Reap.

We then went by night bus to Sihanoukville at the coast. Nicole slept all the way there. Stan, however, felt every bump on the road and maybe got a couple hours of sleep. At the coast we celebrated Stan's 39th birthday by heading out to the islands and doing some swimming and snorkeling and lazing on the beach. We also met some children at an amazing orphanage run by a Filipino pastor and his wife. But we'll do another post on that.

From the coast we traveled back to Phnom Penh where we said good bye to Bill and Henny. The night before they left we took a nice dinner cruise along the Mekong.

We got back to Siem Reap and immediately started looking for a "moto" (scooter) which is a necessity here. After many hours we found one. Probably overpaid. It actually cost more to buy this than what Stan sold his old Hyundai for in Australia. (How I miss that car).

We then helped a volunteer take out the kids for a meal at a restaurant in Siem Reap. This was fun, but a little embarrassing when the kids all crowded around the buffet ice cream with their own spoons and started digging in and eating it in a big group meaning no one else could get any. Eventually we got them to sit down and served them all ice cream.

After this we then looked very hard for a place to rent. This proved very hard to find and very exhausting as "agents" repeatedly took us to places that were waaaaaaaaaay out of our budget.

During this exercise we commenced our Khmer language classes. These are quite fun, but challenging and take up a lot of our free time.

Eventually we found a place within our budget, but it was totally empty and filled with dust and grime. We snapped it up and then spent a week and a half cleaning it up and buying furniture. The exercise was an adventure in itself and I will do another post on it. We are a few doors down from CDO which is great. In this photo you can see the sun setting over CDO. Our flat is just to the left of the palm tree behind the sign.

We'll keep this update brief and hopefully be better in the future with keeping people abreast of our life and adventures in Cambodia.

Stan and Nicole!