First thing in the morning I needed to do was to pick up some money from my Travel Cash VISA card. Phillippe sent me to a bank where they do credit card cash advances with no surcharge. There are no ATMs in the whole of Cambodia, you see. However, they could not accept my special travel VISA card that requires a pin to be entered in an ATM. That left me with only one option – to do a real cash advance from my proper VISA credit card – so I did. It actually works out even cheaper that way anyway. The bank is called Union Commercial Bank Plc. and you’ll find them on street 130 behind that starts behind the Central Market. I didn’t get the coordinates - sorry, but it is easy to find if you get the tourist brochure containing a map (which should be easy too).

Next step was to apply for visa to Laos. Steve – the Irish teacher – introduced me to a motorbike company that does seemingly borderless array of other things like getting you a visa, processing a credit card cash advance for you, arranging trips and probably even getting you a girl for the night… These guys are apparently the cheapest (USD36 for two month visa to Laos), which I confirmed by asking at two other places. These guys are very close to the guesthouse area and are called Lucky! Lucky! Motorcycles.

Anyway, before I got to the Lucky! Motorcycles I did a bit of sightseeing on my way back from the bank. All the interesting buildings, including the National Museum, Royal Palace and  Silver Pagoda can be easily found just by walking along the Tonle Sap River on Sisowath Quay. Phnom Penh is so compact that you can easily walk almost everywhere. I like the city quite a lot for that. After Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) it was quite a change for a country’s capital. No photos this time...

In the evening we went for a nice dinner of hand made fried noodles with Phillippe and his girlfriend, after which they showed me around a few bars and discos in town. This made the city to feel even more like “home”. I even got to meet quite a lot of the local white community (English, Australian etc.) doing business here. One of them was a guy named David who is a computer systems engineer / programmer and who started a company here about a year ago. There can be surprisingly quite a lot of programming work here. If I wanted to settle at least for a while I could have a job. Amazing!

We hit the bed quite early as they had some program for tomorrow and I was planning to go south for the weekend while I was waiting for my Laos visa.