As the saying goes, the eagle has landed – with a sore arse, but happy never the less!

DAY 0

Flights

The first moments of our trip were filled with blood-shot eyes and plenty of yawns after a healthy 2-3 hours of sleep per idiot. The taxi was waiting us at agreed time and we had arrived at Helsinki-Vantaa airport long before we even realized we had rolled off from Hakaniemi. The airport provided us with plenty of fun and exiting fuzz over nothing when our pre-checked-in tickets seemed to provide us with more trouble than we would have faced by waiting meekly in line to get the check-in done all manually… And a top of that the “0 minutes of queuing” queue for the security checkpoint proved to be “closer to 15 mins of queuing”. And I ended up being send through the metal detector twice and had to endure a pat-down procedure, just because of my boots… But never the less, HKI-Vantaa did not manage to beat us, regardless of it’s numerous attempts to break us both mentally and physically, and we go to our first flight in time. The first flight with Finnair/Flybe was short and uneventful.

Once we landed in Manchester we got rallied trough security check vol. 2 (Seriously, we just came from an international flight for which we had just been checked a couple hours earlier… it is not THAT easy to build a shank or a gun in mid-flight I’d wager…) All in all Manchester Airport did not leave that big impression on me, the people seem rather rude –  or maybe not rude, but kinda bored with their jobs – and the security measures seem rather paranoid. The building of terminal 2reminded me of a narrow, sparsely filled industrial complex. We got out of there in quite good time though, with only couple hours in between the flights.

The second flight was the longest of all three and offered much in comparison to the Finnair one, regardless of us flying only in economy. Cathay Pacific had provided us all with blankets, pillows and headphones from the very beginning, and the seats had plenty of head and leg space. We even got to fiddle with individual touch screen tellies all the flight – the tv offered a wide variety of really new movies, Chinese and western tv shows and most importantly – a outdoor camera alongside the flight map. Though I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the fact that the big Boeing 777-300 plane was as noisy as the  much smaller Embraer ERJ-170, mostly because of the over zealous air conditioning. The flight went  faster than I thought it would, though I did not manage to sleep that long and was feeling really tired during the last couple hours of the 12h flight. The food on the flight was about the best I have ever had in an airplane (maybe besides the ones I have had on Thomas Cook charter flight, but just maybe…) and the flight included free alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, but during the meals and outside mealtimes. The staff was really friendly and most of the time spoke good English, though the tiredness they suffered during the last parts of the flight was somewhat visible in every way.  All in all though, I am not at all surprised why Cathay has been awarded as the best airline in the world.

Hong Kong airport was a heaven for a Northerner like myself: it showed us the first glimpse of what to expect from our journey – warm and humid – and the airport itself, regardless of being huge, it was also well organised, rather logical and extremely spacious. Thought, once again, a darn security checkpoint! And this time we apparently did way more than was necessary and we got weird looks for taking off out hats, scarves and in my case the boots, just like the earlier security checkpoints had taught us to do… I even forgot my belt on, and even though it does sport a buckle large enough to cause an alarm on any of the western airports, the Hong Kong ones did not make a sound.

The last connection sported almost no waiting time besides the inevitable walk (on those horisontal escalator thingies ofc) and we got to our final flight from Hong Kong To Siem Reap, Cambodia, really fast. I honestly can’t remember that much from the flight itself other than that I played most of the time solitaire (we had similar seats on this short flight as we had on the Cathay one) and that there was some sorta meal offered at some point.

Seam Reap sported a small but fancy airport building that has clearly not been there for long. We were clearly directed to the slowest possible  line in the immigration checkpoint. After having our fingerprints recorded with a machine that seemed to be way too complicated for most people to use – including my travel mates – we were finally on Cambodian ground and got united with our belongings – just in time for the local customs. Customs that included a bored looking guy speaking into a cellphone and not giving a flying fuck about anything, so we just walked past it after dropping our customs declarations into some random box.

Hostel

We had arranged for a pickup at the airport and our guy was relatively easy to spot. There was a surprise waiting for us though, there was a Tuk-Tuk –  a local scooter driven rickshaw – waiting for us. It was a bit hard to fit all our stuff in there, but we managed it somehow. Our driver, whom I shall call Jimbo – just because I can’t remember his real name – is a nice smiling fella in prolly his mid 20s. The drive from the airport to our hostel – located in a quite lil back alley barely off the busy national road 6 – was rather short and entertaining.

It would seem that we had booked one room for four persons –  at the least that is what the printout from our hostel booking site says, though I am sure that we had in fact booked two rooms – and the hostel does not offer such ones… This caused some minor disturbance when arriving, but the hostel still provided us with two rooms for no extra charge. Ville and myself ended up in a room in the second floor, while girls stayed in the first floor. The rooms themselves are in quite good condition with big soft beds, are painted in bright green and have a big ceiling fans as well. The mosquito nets in the windows provided us with bug free first night when coupled up with the fan – Whoo!

The city

After settling down and showering we headed out to grab some food and ended up on a street that we thought to have been the famous pub street of Siem Reap – just to be proven really wrong later during our trip. Never the less we found a nice looking place and sat down to eat and to enjoy a couple beers. I chose a familiar western “delicacy”, a cheese burger and fries, which was good enough, though uneventful. The local beers seemed not to be too different from the Finnish ones, just as we expected.

After the meal we decided to go for a short walk in the surrounding city, just to end up in god knows where. Once we got back to the big street we were utterly lost –  or so we thought until hiring a tuk-tuk and finding out that we had been a few blocks away from our hostel… and after paying big bucks for that discovery. And ofc I got so bad allergic reaction to all the dust on the back roads that by the time we got back to the hostel my whole face was super leaky. Never the less, soon after having recovered we headed out again for shop and a short stroll… just to be turned back again after just a couple blocks from the hostel. Clearly not our day, so the only wise decision was to head to sleep and try again the next day… 9something pm and I was fully asleep after eventful and sleepless 20h+

In the morning, new adventures awaited, but more of that later on this very same bat channel (though prolly not at the same bat time)!

Pics coming as soon as I am not too tired to sort through everything on my phone, hopefully tomorrow that is…

HOT HOT! Check out my friends travel blog as well (in Finnish) at http://korpinsiivin.blogspot.fi/