Thailand -> Cambodia and Angkor

We'll we're in Cambodia now. We left Thailand on the 7th, one day after our Visas expired. We ended up paying for that in time and money at the border. After going through the thai part of the border, we had to wait in line to pay our fines. This involved one very slow border employee stamping forms at a ridiculously slow pace. After waiting half an hour or so we were directed to the Cambodian Immigration part of the border, this went pretty smoothly and soon we were on our way to Siem Reap.

One thing to note is that the roads in Cambodia are atrocious. They seem to be more dirt and potholes then actual cement. The entire trip was extremely bumpy, dusty, and loud. In all directions the land was completely flat. With sparse vegetation, and farms that didn't look like they were doing to well. After a few hours it got dark out, and then, we hit a paved road. And before long, we were in Siem Reap. The city seemed to have appeared from nowhere, one minute we were surrounded by shanty houses, and the next, luxury hotels lined the street. And when I say luxury, I really mean luxury. It's amazing how many extremely expenxive hotels are in Siem Reap. I guess one of the wonders of the world get's a lot of rich people coming to town. Our bus pulled into a guest house and we were informed that we could get off the bus and stay at this guest house, or get off and walk to another one. There were a few other places to stay on the same street, but we decided to stay at the place we were dropped off at. It was very cheap, and the rooms have their own bathrooms. Can't complain.

The next day we got up pretty late and had breakfast. Scrambled eggs with bread turned out to be scrambled eggs with a huge baguette. Not what I expected, but good. Later that day we headed to the war museum. This is not a museum like any we're used to in Canada. It was mostly just a lot of tanks and artillery, but you could go up to any of them, touch them, get on them, whatever you want, no one would complain. And there were also a lot of guns that you could pick up, pose with, whatever. Totally opposite of the hands off approach I'm used to.

That brings us to today. We visited the various temples of Angkor. Coral and I both hired a motorbike driver from our guest house, and were driven to the various temples all day. We did the small tour, which consists of the more popular, and better restored temples, which are also all in proximity of each other, and then we did the grand tour, which is a few spread out temples in ill repair.

There is not much I can say about the temples, I'm not good at describing stuff. But they were pretty damn amazing. I can't fathom how long it would take to build, let alone how it could be built. But it was amazing. We visited the Bayon temple, which was really neat, and had lots of cool giant faces carved on towers. And we visited a temple in the middle of some jungle. And at the end of the day, we visted Ankor Wat, which is insanely huge, and breathtaking, even in comparison in the marvelous temples we'd seen all day. All in all, it was definitly worth seeing, and I'll just put up some pictures instead of trying to describe them.

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