On Saturday morning, we pack up and catch a bus to Siem Reap, about 5 or 6 hours drive to the north. Our first 40 minutes in Siem Reap don't bode well - they're Bangkok-esque.
We have a booking at Siem Reap's Red Lodge hostel, which we arrange on Day 82. The place sounds amazing - cheap but well-kept rooms, free breakfast, free bikes, free tea and coffee.... we mark the hostel with both a star and a heart in our guidebook and are very grateful they have a free room when we call. While booking, the clerk asks for our time of arrival and says he'll send a tuk tuk to pick us up. If we take a different driver from the bus station, they might demand a commission from him for bringing us there (even though we had booked in advance).
None of this sounds unusual to us since in some cities tuk tuk drivers do charge commissions for delivering guests. On cue, when the bus pulls in we see a 8.5 x 11 "Red Lodge - Dianna" sign held up above the crowd of touts that huddle around bus doors whenever you pull into the bus station in a new town. The man holding the sign is our tuk tuk driver, Nam, a young man who's very nice and speaks English. Newly married, has a young daughter - he speaks well, but not so well that we understand at first what he's trying to tell us about the Red Lodge.
"Red Lodge maybe full," he says.
"It's ok, we have a booking," Pierre says. Nam turns around and drives a moment then turns back and the same conversation is repeated several more times with a few variations. ("We have a booking, that's why you've picked us up at the bus station.") It's not until we arrive at the Red Lodge and we speak to the owner that we discover that we don't actually have a reservation and that Nam was trying to explain the following:
- the number listed in the guidebook for the Red Lodge is a cell number
- the man who originally owned that cell number used to work at Red Lodge, but no longer does
- the ex-Red Lodge man sold the cell number to someone else. The new owner of the cell number now accepts calls as the Red Lodge, while not actually making any reservation of any sort.*
* As a result of this situation, the real Red Lodge no longer takes reservations over the phone and only accepts walk-in guests, as is helpfully noted on their website, though written in what I consider "the small print".
At this point, this is where the whole story loses the plot and I have a hard time pinning down any facts. For example:
- Our driver, Nam, is aware of this situation yet still accepts assignments from Fake Reservations Guy? (Nam says he's hoping to make contacts with tourists in the hope that they might hire him for a day or so as a driver. He complains to us that he gives his number to the tourists that he drives from the bus stations but that they never follow up with him. Does he really not understand he's gotten off on the wrong foot with potential customers by taking commissions from FRG?)
- How does Fake Reservations Guy benefit from this in any way? Does he get a cut of the tuk tuk fares? Does he get a commission from the guesthouses?
Normally, if there's a scam going on you get dumped at an overpriced, under-maintained, inconveniently-located guesthouse. But after Red Lodge, the first place Nam takes us to is just around the corner - the Mitri House which is well-priced, family-run, newly-renovated guesthouse and is located just a few minutes away from the two best markets in the city. Over the next 10 days we discover that the six or so family members who run the place (ranging in age from about 12 to 70) are helpful and sweet and wonderful hosts.
So what's up with Fake Reservations Guy? Why doesn't it add up?
We never find out - though more politely posed than I wrote out above, I think I'm a bit too direct in my questions to Nam because by the time Pierre gets back from vetting the room (I wait with the bags in the tuk tuk), Nam seems glad to be rid of us (me). Over the next week and a half we pick away at the mystery a bit between ourselves, but mostly let it drop. The latest Lonely Planet for Cambodia (published late 2008), which we pick up a few days later to replace our out-of-date one, still lists Fake Reservations Guy's number for the Red Lodge. We've added that to our growing list of updates to send to Lonely Planet.
The Red-Lodge-mixup aside, Siem Reap is not at all what we expect after our week in Phnom Penh, even though there were a few clues that it would be a nicer, mellower place. Around day 80, for example, we met a couple of tourists, newly arrived from Siem Reap, railing at Phnom Penh's incessant touting and crazy traffic. From this, we reckoned the math was as follows:
Siem Reap = Phnom Penh + Less Touting + Less Traffic
The guidebook we still rely on during Days 83 and 84 is a few years out of date. The restaurant that we hunt down on Sunday, the Khmer Kitchen Restaurant, is described as "tucked away down the up-and-coming alley situated between Bar St and Psar Cha (Old Market)." We consult the map a few times during the short walk to confirm that we're in the right place. Everywhere we walk there are restaurants and boutiques that have multiplied several times over since the the guide map for the alley was last updated.
"Looks like it up and came," Pierre says.
The Khmer Kitchen restaurant is cozy, clean, bright and still reasonably priced, though it's now wedged into an area of town that has cleaned up and spread out to take over nearby streets, and really wouldn't look out of place in the fancier tourist areas of Quebec city. We spend the first full day in the city wandering around to orient ourselves and idly planning how to best spend our 7 day tour of the local temples, which we start on Day 85.
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