TheSiemReaper

Banteay Chhmar is awesome, not sure that a homestay is perfect for a young couple with a kid either though.

Unfortunately government hospitals in Cambodia are not very good. Nor are they at all inexpensive. Not at all comparable with Thailand.

There are some competent doctors to be found in Cambodia but one has to ferret them out, and not in all specialties. For anything at all serious or complex, best to go to Thailand or Viet Nam.

This... I use GP services in Cambodia for anything more than that, I'd be in Thailand in a heartbeat.

Sorry, sheryl and TSR - its back to Oz for me. From the roads to the cops to the non-existent road rules (or complete lack of enforcement of rules that might save liives), I'm blown away by the contrast between the generosity and good nature of individual Khmers vs what PP is becoming - a gridlocked nightmare. There is definitely anti-Viet and anti-Chinese sentiment here, but my paranoia aside, common sense tells me they cant keep jamming more poor people from the provinces into PP without total gridlock. Put people in that dogfight everyday, continue to ratchet up the cost of living and I think most here know where that will lead.

I'm glad I had this experience - Thaiiland sheltered me from a lot of realities of life in this region but this has opened my eyes. Most Khmers seem to be great people overall, but I have grave fears for their future. Even Jakarta seems to have more in the way of future planning and development - that doesnt happen by building more 5-star hotels and convention centres, sadly. Whatever money is being pumped into this city seems to be swallowed up by a select few - happy to hear otherwise.

Bon voyage and good luck.

Good luck to you too. Though I don't live in PP because I don't like it that much either. Siem Reap's been home for a few years but I think I shall be moving on to Thailand soon now.

Does Surat Thani airport even have immigration, i dont think it does, why would they be fined there anyway, they were departing Thailand BKK, either badly reported or some BS being written

And 7 × 500 doesnt equal THB10500 BTW if it was genuine fine they overstayed 21 days

1 If 7 days = THB 3500

2 overstayed 21 days

3 scammed by someone

4 someone is writing BS

A few factual things wrong with this story

Umm... there were three of them. 7 days @3,500 Baht x 3 people = 10,500 Baht. No rocket science there.

So, I live in Cambodia and am finding it next to impossible to get money transferred into the country. I can't use PayPal here. All the banks require the use of an intermediary bank (which my clients' banks don't like using).

So it would be ideal to come to Thailand and open a bank account and marry it to a PayPal account... so where do I go and what do I need to do? I will put 150K Baht down as an initial deposit and expect about 200-300K Baht coming in an ordinary month...

All advice welcome. Apart from "it can't be done" because I know it can...

My Wife and I visited Sihanoukville three times over 2013/14 and not a hint of violence or trouble. Good clean Beaches. Cheap happy hour beers and wonderful Evening seafood barbecues. Great days to off shore islands. Really good Western Restaurants and coffee shops. Wiith LCC Carriers waiting to fly into Sihanoukville airport it's going to become even better. I can see so many people from Pattaya wanting to move here.

The Cambodian Police here seem fair and are visible.

Good clean beaches? Sihanoukville? You have to be joking. Yes, we can also see the scum of Pattaya and Phuket coming to join the Cambodian community when they can't get a visa any more too. As for the police being fair and visible; the corruption of that particular force is world famous.

1155 the number for farangs to report problems like this to the "boss"

Manned 24/7 , multilingual, complaints logged into a computer data base.

There are no farangs in Cambodia. There is no such phone number here either.

Don't waste your time. Cambodia has absolutely no standards for teachers at all. There's a famous lady in Siem Reap who has been abusing students at SmartKids school for the best part of a decade. She's even been caught on camera doing it. Action taken, despite being reported to government and school and large amounts of public attention? None whatsoever.

Here is another negative blog in Sihanoukville. There are hundreds of comments about dodgy things that have happened to travellers all over Cambodia. Is it changing for the worse???

http://www.adventurouskate.com/cambodia-has-changed-and-not-for-the-better/

Adventurous Kate is a self-obsessed gobshite who dangles her possessions in front of poverty stricken people and is amazed when things go wrong for her. Me, I've been here 3 years and never had so much as a sniff of trouble anywhere in Cambodia... and yes, I travel with more expensive kit than most too.

There's no dramatic increase in crime. Just a dramatic increase in people whining about petty crime... which occurs absolutely everywhere and not just in Cambodia.

There is excellent and great value food in Phnom Penh, as with all of Cambodia, if you didn't leave the riverside to find it - more fool you. I'm not a huge fan of the city but when I did live there; no-one tried (or succeeded) to rip me off, never got a counterfeit bill (something that happened a lot in China), etc.

Really? So all it takes to be innocent is to say you are? That will be of serious comfort to the large volumes of foreign kiddy-fiddlers in Cambodian jails. When they arrive home after deportation they can skip their second trials completely; "I SAID IT WASN'T ME." and the courts will immediately presume innocence?

It's amazing how many of the idiots screaming this guy is innocent have already decided that so many held in pre-trial conditions are guilty.

Is it the the same entertaining Thailand immigration? Same questions? Thanks

No, because Thailand does not fingerprint arriving visitors.

If you have a new pp with biometrics with fingerprint. If scan by immigration. Should it showed your overstayed finger print even you pay in court even your not block listed?

Thanks

It depends. If you have a new passport and did not have your prints taken on an old passport - the chances are very good that the overstay record is not joined up. Cambodia's IT infrastructure could be, kindly, seen as next to non-existent.

However, if you left on a passport for which you were fingerprinted and then return on the same passport or if you were fingerprinted on one passport and intend to return on another... it's 100% likely that they will have the record of overstay. As Sheryl said; this probably isn't a problem if you paid up and weren't blacklisted.

All Cambodian banks are junk rated or below. Why do you think they pay out such incredibly good interest rates on savings? It's because they are risky investments. They are doubly risky in a country with no formal investor protection laws (assumed government insurance is worth the same as assuming I've insured your deposits - which for the record I haven't). It is considered highly likely that only 4 Cambodian banks are actually viable in the long-term this includes both Acleda and Canadia. Many of the others will either go broke or be bought in M&A activity which provides very little additional value to account holders.

As for only 900,000 accounts out of 15 million people... you'll find that approximately 12 million of those 15 million (or possibly more) hold no accounts at any banks whatsoever. Most Khmer are not paid into their bank accounts, they're paid in cash. Most of them will spend 100% of that cash in the same month as it is earned. They don't have any spare to save and next to no-one has a credit card that needs paying off either...

Hi,

It doesn't always follow at all that they give good interest rates because they are risky banks nor were these viewed, until the banking crisis, as incredibly good interest rates. The Bank of Canada in Singapore until the crash of 2008 was paying 5% as the norm with no tax on interest.

There are many reasons for wanting deposits and paying decent interest such as expansion, updating their facilities, new branches etc etc.I also think Acleda charge in the region of 12% interest on loans if not mistaken and are very conservative in their valuations and have a cap on borrowing?

I was told they much prefer lending in the low and medium SME market as opposed to the big money construction projects and super malls etc

All the rest of your post I find very informative and useful. I wasn't aware how few actually had bank accounts in comparison to the population. I never thought about it like you put it, I was probably swallowed up in the merry go round of looking at all the development and spending taking place around Phnom Penn and Siem Reap.

You are most certainly right however, I believe, that Cambodia represents a " higher risk " than say Thailand does, with its far larger and more diverse economy.

Cheered by the fact you say that Acleda and Canadia are marked as two that will probably survive as being viable. I too, after plenty of reading and online studying came to the same conclusion. Thanks again for your input. Very much appreciated. I love to get the spin side of the coin from people on the ground or with the flow.

The guys working in the banks in Cambodia are not really managers as much as salespeople to be honest and as in every country, just tell us what we want to hear.

While it's true that before the banking crisis good interest rates were attainable in safe havens - since that crisis the average rate of interest in safe havens has been hovering around 0%. Thus any return of 7-9% is going to be an indicator of the risk that you assume.

I come from a banking family... and got the hell out of banking before I started but the contamination is still there; interest rates are a measure of the risk you assume on pretty much every investment. I haven't got historical interest rates for Cambodia but I would bet they were higher pre-crisis than they are now.

Lending is one of the big problems for Cambodian banks, they don't know how to do it... so they have become obsessed with small stakes deals which show reasonable returns rather than gunning for the high-end business that a credible bank expects to win. Of course, the problem with many Cambodia-based firms is that they too lack credibility (and audited accounts). This may change in the mid-term as more companies clean up their act for local exchange listing, though I wouldn't put a shiny penny on clean acts, I'd expect to see something like China where banks are bribed to lie about cash flow and balances to auditors...

All Cambodian banks are junk rated or below. Why do you think they pay out such incredibly good interest rates on savings? It's because they are risky investments. They are doubly risky in a country with no formal investor protection laws (assumed government insurance is worth the same as assuming I've insured your deposits - which for the record I haven't). It is considered highly likely that only 4 Cambodian banks are actually viable in the long-term this includes both Acleda and Canadia. Many of the others will either go broke or be bought in M&A activity which provides very little additional value to account holders.

As for only 900,000 accounts out of 15 million people... you'll find that approximately 12 million of those 15 million (or possibly more) hold no accounts at any banks whatsoever. Most Khmer are not paid into their bank accounts, they're paid in cash. Most of them will spend 100% of that cash in the same month as it is earned. They don't have any spare to save and next to no-one has a credit card that needs paying off either...

Modern Khmer music is mainly derivative of K-Pop or Mando-Pop but not quite as good (and I can't believe that I've found something worse than Mando-Pop). Most of the live music venues in Phnom Penh have closed over the last year too. I am yet to encounter a single band in Cambodia of any nationality that I'd want to encounter again.

The point of the $100 from an ATM is a practical one. ATMs which dispensed nothing but $1 or $5 bills would be empty approximately after the first customer had made a withdrawal. An ATM, on the other hand, stocked wtih $100, $50, $20 and $10 bills has some hope of staying full all day long, as long as it dispenses enough $100 bills. Given that nearly every single business apart from a tuk-tuk or a moto can break a $100 bill in Phnom Penh, I have no idea why you would rant about it.

You don't have to get a long way from the river on the same side to be in a hassle free zone of PP. I lived within a 5 minute walk of the river for nearly 6 months and the only time you get harrassed by tuk-tuk/moto drivers is on the river itself.

And... I do know people who have been asked for bribes at the airport if an extra $1-$2 is worth getting upset about...

And yet in the rich, developed USA all you can get out of an ATM is a $20 bill? Kind of weird that...I think Khmer ATMs should only dispense $10 and $20 notes. They certainly wouldn't be dispensing $1 or $5 bills, come on, very few places in the world dispense such low value bills you wouldn't even be able to withdraw $100 if that was the case not to mention you wouldn't be able to fit those bills into your wallet.

I agree with the previous poster that it is a bit weird for such a poor country to dispense such large notes. $100 is what many Cambodians make in a month - as ATMs only appeared in Cambodia in 2006, I hardly think most locals would be withdrawing such large amounts of money at a time. Also, don't forget the many rural ATMs now - try getting change for a $100 bill in Pailin or Battambang not as easy as you think.

I don't know about Pailin but I just spent a week in Battambang and managed to get change for each and every one of the $100 notes I took with me without any hassles whatsoever. Cambodia's changing. The days of shock at large bills in cities is long done. If they don't have change, they just dispense a runner to fetch some... I remember when I first arrived in Siem Reap there was always a fuss when you paid with $100. It hasn't happened to me in 2 years now.

It's the low salaries that suggest that it would be sensible to stock your ATMs with low denomination bills but the problem is the rapid emptying of machines. $100 bills suit me fine. I tend to withdraw cash in multiple units of $100 at a time... and I hate having a wallet so full that it starts to deform quickly (which is what small change always does to my wallets).

This is a good Cambodia Travel Guide: http://www.canbypublications.com/

Phnom Penh: http://www.canbypublications.com/phnompenh/ppintro.htm

Phnom Penh Hotels: http://www.canbypublications.com/phnompenh/pphotels.htm

One of the things I like about Canby Publications is it gives you the direct contact details for many of the hotels, so you can avoid the "middle man" fee.

Agoda have just messed up my booking with one hotel so I am having to rebook elsewhere....

From what I've been told Agoda doesn't do Cambodia well. Agoda does most other place well...but not Cambodia.

Going direct is generally pretty foolish when booking a hotel. Most hotels in Cambodia will not match their Agoda or Booking.com rates - so you pay more not less.

Booking.com is probably best for Cambodia though I've never had any issues with Agoda either...

If I go to Arun to do a visa run, meaning cross the border, leave Thailand, go into Cambodia and then turn around and come back into Thailand with a 30-day tourist stamp what should I know.?How much is the visa for Cambodia and do I need a photo and should I pay in US dollars. Can I do everything on foot? If I do the visa run from Arun I will more likely than not drive. Any suggestions for parking while i cross the border. What time do the Immigration paces open and close or are they open 24/7? Thanks.

There is a high chance of refusal if you walk out, get a Khmer visa and try to walk back in again. Back to back visa waivers are now very much frowned upon. However, if you want to take the chance - a Cambodia tourist visa is $30, you need a photo (or say 100 Baht to smooth things over) and yes, you pay in USD unless you want to be given the world's worst Baht to USD exchange rate. The main borders are open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. the smaller borders are open less... assume 9 to 5 and you won't be far wrong.

Anyone know or have experience of getting a tourist visa to France for a 26 yr old Cambodian woman. She would be traveling there with an older

Uk male. Return tickets, plenty money for the trip etc. We,ve been together 6yrs and are unmarried. We live in Thailand most of the time.

As long as she has money in the bank, a job to which she will return, owns some property wherever she's living now... no problem. Otherwise, you have more chance of getting a winning Euromillions ticket for her.

In all honesty, who would want one? You can qualify for citizenship officially by marrying local, staying for 7 years and learning to read and write the language. Then you pony up about $5k in bribes to get it done. Alternatively you can buy citizenship, current price is about $75,000 - it's gone up a lot in the last 2 years from $25,000 before.

Hey thanks for the quick replies, do you know if this place is still open or was that closed too? http://www.casinocity.com/cambodia/siem-reap/lucky-diamond-casino/map/nearest/

Once more for the cheap seats. There are NO casinos in Siem Reap now. They have ALL been closed.

Siem Reap's last casino closed two years ago... Poipet is the closest, Phnom Penh's Naga World is probably more fun though...

"Is there enough to see in Siem Reap?"

You have read up about it I presume (Sheryl has covered the bases as I assume you haven't).

Angkor Wat 2 days

Four days on PUB Street drinking Angkor Beer for 20 baht a bottel.

Dream on - the exchange rate isn't getting near 40 !!

17 Baht a beer.........................

33.70 at the moment and yours is 51.69 and dropping like a stone.

If it hits 40... I'm going to move to Thailand... That would be 33% more bang per buck than I got last time I lived in Thailand...

Guest houses are basic facilities only. There are a couple of guest houses in Siem Reap with cooking facilties but they only take long-term lets... otherwise as Sheryl says; it's serviced apartments for kitchens (more expensive and not commonly available in Siem Reap for short-term lets).