Advertisement
Published: April 15th 2010
Edit Blog Post
We left Phnom pehn on a bit of a whim as I suddenly felt better and ready to travel. Wies our lovely dutch girlie, left that morning very early for Kratie and we needed a smaller room as it was a three bed one with just two of us now. Non were available so we just got a bus to Siem Reap instead. We'd spent the last two days in phnom pehn doing nothing at all. Russ and Wies went to a water park and went down all the slides with the locals doing pile ups half way down and general goofing, much fun...for them, but I stayed at the guest house and slept, since the dengue I've been knocking up about 17 hours of sleep a day for 2 weeks, it's weird but it's also the best, nicest sleeps I have ever had!
After a 7 hour bus journey, very bumpy and slightly scary with a lot of very near misses with cows and chickens and children running in the roads we arrived in Siem Reap. Wies gave us the number of a man called Thel who was her personal Tuk Tuk driver for the time she stayed there, it's
the cheapest way to get around and you get a descent price for going around all the temples when you need, so any way he picked us up and took us to a guest house he recommended even though we wanted to go to the one Wies recommended, but went to check it out anyway. We got a crappy room with the promise of a nicer one with balcony and t.v the next day for very cheap.Being tired and travelled out we took it but after a really scroddy breakfast at their restaurant the next morning, we decided to leave and go to the guest house Wies had told us of. It was sooo nice, with wall hangings in the rooms and a nice roof top area serving food and drink and an internet and travel tour place all included and cheap too.
Siem Reap, although touristy was actually really nice. It's got a river running through the city with tree's filled with fairy lights and lanterns and further down stream lots of little temples and wooden stilt houses with kids swimming in the river and old women washing cloths and chopping veg, general rural day to day stuff. It's
also got loads of little, very cute and slightly Parisien like side streets with cafes and bars and boutique cloths shops all about, great fun to explore. We rented some bicyles and cycled around the rural areas and had such a nice day. It's so bloody hot though that we had to wear kramers ( traditional Khmer scarfs) around our heads to save our brains from boiling.
I don't really know what to say about the temples, they were literally mouth dropping, left you standing in awe of their beauty. We got up a 4am and we were driven by Thels brother to the angkor area, $20 each but worth every cent. We first saw the sunrise over Angkor wat, then we went to Ta prohm, (the one with the tree roots) then to Angkor Thom and last but definately not least, Bayon (the one with the heads). We gave in at three due to serious over heating and went to bed when we got home, for a well deserved cat nap, the heat is just too much to handle it's the hot season now and it's reaching 42+ nearly every day with no cloud ever!
Oh I took out
my dreads too. I thought about it for a while and realised I would get bored of them in about a year probably and then I'd have to shave my head, and I HATE having short hair so I decided to comb them out before they dreaded to much to undo. It was a long and painful process again and I lost a fair bit of hair from the knots but hair is back to normal now, yay!
Spent our last day we had an us day. We went to an outdoor pool and swam around for a few hours then want to an cafe that funds a teaching programme for disadvantaged youths. It was an outdoor garden with cusions strewn around on benches. The garden was covered in green netting and they kept about 1000 rare butterflies in there, so cool! We then wnet to the little back streets and had dinner and some very very cheap cocktails, 2 for $3 that's about 2 quid, so we got a little tipsy then went to the night market and brought pressies for a few people, we found someone making the Kramas on a weaving loom and ended up buying a
few so for those who end up with them, the lady in the photo made yours! Whilst in the market I managed to persuade Russ to let me get a foot massage. The lady who did it was an old grinny lady with some mean little hands, it was pretty violent with regular leg slaps and toe cracking but wow it was good!
We left at 7am to go to Bangkok, same old story, long journey, waited for a stupid 3 hours at the border because they only had an 11 seater mini bus to take 50 of us to the coach parked 6 miles away, very asian! Got two seats each to ourselves on the coach but the air-con circulated the aroma of piss. Got to Bangkok at about 6pm and are now ready to take on our next adventure! Bye bye cambodia xxx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.195s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0708s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb