tarkers

The bus ride up to Kratie is apparently meant to take around 6 hours, ours took 7.5 hours unfortunately due to an elderly woman throwing up (at least I hope that's what it was) in the isle of the bus as the bus pulled out of the Phnom Penh bus station. May I just say it was one of the most putrid smells I've ever been around and unfortunately hung around for the 45 minutes til we made it to a depot thing towards the outskirts of Phnom Penh where they washed out the isle. I pity the poor guy who had to clean up the mess. The good news about the bus ride to Kratie was that the 'smooth as silk' road that Lonely Planet talked about was still mostly in tact. The route did ... read more

To be fair to Phnom Penh, it really did have a tough act to follow after my ecstatic time in Siem Reap. However, I can't help but feel that the capital of Cambodia has lost the exotic feel that the Lonely Planet guide talks about. After the emotionally draining day of visiting the killing fields and the site of the S-21 prison, I decided to do what I was hoping would be an upbeat tourist thing today and head to the Tamao Wildlife Sanctuary which is a good hour to hour and a half drive from Phnom Penh. There are no buses that go here and the hotel I'm staying at isn't really that helpful with tourist stuff, so I booked a taxi through the tuk-tuk driver from yesterday for the trip. The Lonely Planet guide ... read more

Travel days are never my favourite day on holiday, especially when it's a 6 hour bus ride on a road that isn't anywhere near what I thought it woud be. The day started sadly as I said goodbye to Siem Reap, to the lovely staff of The Villa and to one of the tour guides who escorted me around the temples who has to be one of the most gentle men I have ever met in my life. I was picked up from my guest house in a minibus just before 8am in the morning. The minibus was already mostly full of people with eight of them being from a Singapore university on an end of study adventure. We talked for most of the minibus trip from the centre of Siem Reap to the bus depot ... read more

A huge thank-you goes to Villa Siem Reap for organising this tour of some of the harder to get to temples in the Angkor region. Today my group consisted of four of us, plus our tour guide (the same one I had for the stilted village tour) and our driver. We visited some of the oldest temples in the region, some built prior to 900. The older temples were far less complex or mindblowing as the Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom group of temples but were still very impressive in their own right. The fact that they could build these monuments without machinery was an achievement. The older temples are built using mostly brick and volcanic rock. There's no floor to ceiling carvings on the wall however the first temple we visited did have sculpting made ... read more