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Published: July 20th 2010
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Our guesthouse in Phnom Penh had a sister guesthouse in Siem Reap with rooms at similar rates ($8 USD/night), so we arranged our stay through them. We booked a bus there and the guesthouse in Siem Reap sent a tuk-tuk to pick us up from the bus station when we arrived. It all went very smoothly and we were glad to have everything taken care of for us.
After freshening up, we headed down to the in-house restaurant for dinner. Its a small open-air restaurant with a free pool table, cable TV, and a few hammocks around the perimeter. When we went down it was absolutely pouring rain outside, I have really never seen rain SO heavy, torrential downpour. We ordered some meals that normally take about 10-15 minutes to make and about an hour later they arrived at our table. The power went out about 0.5 seconds after we got our meals, it was completely dark out so we tried to use the light from Binnson's Ipod to see what we had ordered! As we began to eat our meal in the dark, a lady that worked at the hotel came over with a candle and placed it on
our table. So we turned our power outage-thunderstorm situation to an impromptu candlelight dinner date and hung out their for a couple of hours until the power came back on.
We decided to make it an early night and planned to head for the Temples of Angkor before sunset. We hired a tuk-tuk that night and he agreed to meet us back at the hotel at 4:45am. Morning came all too soon and before we knew it we were on our way to the temples. The tuk-tuk dropped us off at Angkor Wat just as the sun was starting to come up. After watching the sunrise over the magnificent Angkor Wat and taking a hundred pictures we kept moving. Our tuk-tuk took us around the short circuit... which still took us 6 hours. Most temples have a Buddha inside somewhere, one lady asked us to come in at the Bayon temple and before we knew what was going on, we had incense in our hands and were praying to the Buddha for good luck. She was bowing to us and saying things in a different language as she tied red string bracelets around our wrists and thanked us for
our donation.
The temple grounds are FULL of children trying to sell everything - "Lady, wanna bracelet? cold drink? pineapple? painting? which one you want? 10 postcards, 1 dollar". Over... and over... and over again!!! I finally cracked for this one little kid who was selling bracelets that asked me about a hundred times before I entered the temple gate, "If you buy, you buy from me okay?" he says to me. I tell him, "Yes, if I buy a bracelet - it will be from you", "Okay, my name is ____, what's yours? Where are you from", "My name is Cheryl, I am from Canada". The kid proceeds to ask, "Where? Toronto? Vancouver? Calgary? You speak English and French? Here, I give you free bracelet but if you want one when your done, you buy from me, okay?" Midway during that temple I had already decided that he had suckered me and that I was going to buy a stupid bracelet from him. Hahaha. Oh well. SO, after an entire day of exploring the temples, we returned to our guesthouse and it was only noon! We grabbed lunch and went back bed.
Later that evening, we headed
down to "pub street" to check out the touristy section of town. We went shopping in the market with intention of getting rid of any leftover Riel that we had and ended up spending a bunch of USD instead. Oh well! We really haven't bought much in terms of souvenirs during the trip so far.
After a lot of discussion, we have decided to not go to Laos anymore. So tomorrow morning we will take a bus to Bangkok in Thailand and begin that section of our trip slightly earlier than anticipated! Looking forward to it!
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Wonder
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Try to make a trip to Koh Samui in Thailand, it is very nice place. We will be in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from Aug., 1 to 7 see if we can meet there.