Last Updated 22/09/2020
I’ve never experienced internet as bad and as unpredictable as here in Kampot Cambodia, anywhere ( this was before our last trip to India!). OK, it was really bad in our guesthouse in Phnom Penh, but we left after 1 night so it didn’t really have time to get to me, but Kampot, on the river, is a nice place. We wanted to stick around for a bit. The internet in Battambang was superb, so it’s not a Cambodia thing, I’m not dissing their internet. Experiences of staying in Kampot, things to do in Kampot – Cambodia.
In the olden days, we travelled without internet ( I mean, totally without, that long ago) and it was fine, we had a RTW flight ticket booked and we’d done all our research, attained necessary visas and knew what we were doing before we left home. Including when we’d be coming back. We were very happy to wing it with accommodation, as we are now, so same same there. These days the way we travel is different, it’s more on-the-fly .
We plan to cross into Vietnam in the next week or so, maybe, this means finding out:
Please check and double-check all the information we give you locally as times, places, dates, and services do, as we found, change often. Restrictions and closures may apply. Our site is free for you to use but running costs are high and lockdowns have removed our income. You can keep our site alive by donating here
The best way to get visas and what they’ll cost.
Do we need to pay for visas for the kids? (yes, but had we not done this research before entering Cambodia we would have fallen for the scam)
See if it’s possible or cheaper to fly in from Phnom Penh to get a simpler visa-on-arrival. (no)
Decide if we want a 1 month visa at $60 each or a 3 month visa at $95 each. This decision will be based on factors like, cost of accommodation, food and transport. We already know Vietnam and we know we like it, but prices must have changed in the last 15 years.
We need to look at flight prices out of Hanoi, compare them with flight prices out of Saigon and decide a. where we’ll fly out and b. where we’ll go next. We need to at least have some idea of where we’re going. ( then start the visa thing again)
All this has to be done online and it takes hours. I hate it but it’s a fact of life. Dear God I miss the days of just checking in the Lonely Planet!
I also have an online business to run, all be it at a very leisurely sort of intensity. At the moment I can’t even check my email, which is why I’m writing this post, WordPress will open but my email and social media accounts won’t.
The online learning programmes the kids sometimes use, forget about them. The kids favourite games, gone. Their current pet project, making videos for You Tube, extremely limited, the first one took 4 days to upload. The new Kindle books they want me to download, impossible.
My support network of online friends, unreachable.
So forgive me for whinging about bad internet and don’t tell me I should be out enjoying Cambodia, not looking at screens. This is our life, not a holiday, and the internet is a big part of that. We have days we fill with doing Cambodia stuff and days that remain empty for normal life stuff.
It was so much easier in the olden days.
So I’ll just have another Angkor beer and look at the sunset while the kids play with their friends, I guess.
Vietnam will have to wait, we seem to be having a forced holiday.
UPDATE: We decided not to go to Vietnam in the end. We came back overland by taxi and bus to Bangkok and we’re heading to India instead, just to keep things interesting!
