A Totally Awesome Change of Itinerary and our Last Day at Angkor!

Hola again from Cambodia!

By the way, Happy Belated Anniversary to my parents!

Cambodia has been recently called The Wild East, and it really feels like that. If you replace horses with Honda Scooters, the pace and style of life of suburban and rural Cambodia is similar to the Wild West. There are cows and chickens everywhere. People drive cars with Oxen down the street and they sell gasoline by the bottle out of 1 liter recycled Pepsi bottles in roadside stands.

We've been in Siem Reap for like 8 days now and have spent 6 days exploring Angkor. Even though Cambodia proved really challenging when we first arrived, we're both totally in love with the place now. Alicen is particular is doing really well, very happy about the whole experience, finally relaxing and forgetting about work stress (finally!), and really being amazed by everything around us.

It's almost a shame we're seeing the temples of Angkor this early in The Trip, because there is no way that anything will top this place. I highly recommend visiting Cambodia and Angkor to almost all of you (some of you I'm sure would really, really hate it...), as soon as possible before the crowds get too overwhelming (ironic to call for tourism before too much tourism changes the place, I know).

Speaking of The Trip, we've made some changes. Our original plan was to visit China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, (Laos was inserted into the itinerary about 2 weeks ago), Malaysia, and Singapore before heading to India. However, after being on the road for over a month now we've reevaluated our priorities and redefined what The Trip could and should be for us.

So, we've traded in Vietnam, Laos, and Singapore for...Australia!

Stoked!

Our new plans put us back in Phnom Penh tomorrow, Bangkok on Friday, then we'll work our way over land for the next 2 1/2 weeks down the coasts of Thailand and Malaysia to Kuala Lumpor, then we'll catch a flight to Perth (surprisingly cheap from Malaysia!)!
We're going to try to make it to Ayers Rock as well but probably won't be able to make it to Sydney or Melbourne (unfortunately) until the next trip down under.

So our trip changes, but it gets way more exciting!

In the meantime, I'm really looking forward to getting some pictures up; it's gonna be a big update I think, because a lot of really amazing things have been surrounding us.

We revisited our 2 favorite temples today, Ta Phrohm and Bayon, then headed back to the hotel around sunset. On the way, we passed what looked like a large, shallow pond with lily pads and behind it the sun was about to set and fully red. There was just some grass along the water and some kids playing, so I asked Vee Kahn our driver to pull over. Alicen and I walked over to the water to watch the sunset and all these kids came running over. There was about 7 or 8 3 to 6 year olds all waving and saying hello and just being really, really cute and sweet.
This was new to us here. Sadly, most of our interaction with kids has been around the temples where there are tons of kids trying to sell you everything from cold drinks to guide books to violins (I bought one of those), to everything else. But the kids have been doing it too long and are often quite bitter and are kinda mean to us when we don't buy. It's really quite disturbing and continues the trend of feeling upset by children's roles in the society here.

Tonight we're going to watch Obama's inauguration on CNBC at 12am local time then, most likely, fall asleep.

Might be a few days before I can post again but hopefully that means we can add pictures then!

Happy Inauguration Day!

---

---