Day 13 – Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

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We got a bit of a lie in this morning but Jackie and I still got up at 7:30am to get ready, have some breakfast and go for a stroll. Emma and Sophie joined us; we were going to get a pedicure but as today was a National Day of Mourning for the stampede a lot of the places were closed. So Emma and Sophie went back to the hotel and Jackie and I went for a walk further to see what we could find open.
We managed to find a place that had the fish spa so we had our dead skin eaten off for $3 for 20minutes and that got us a free can of soft drink as well. We then headed back to the hotel, got our bags and waited in the lobby until the bus came to take us to the airport.
We got picked up at 11:00am and our flight to Siem Reap was at 12:55pm. We had some lunch at the airport because as soon as we arrived in Siem Reap we jumped on a bus to head out to do our private boat tour to see unique floating village found on the Tonle Sap Lake.
I really wasn’t a fan of this whole experience. I don’t know how they live there. Basically they all live on floating houses (some of them looked as though they were lucky to still actually be floating) and when the tide goes up and down they move their village around.
While we were cruising along the canal bit to get out on the lake these little boats would come up to the side of ours and the kids on them would try and sell you things. One girl even jumped off her boat while we were both moving and onto our to try and sell us cans of Coke etc and then jumped back on hers when she didn’t sell anything. Then there was another one that had these two little girls that had snakes around their necks that wanted “one dollar, one dollar” for a photo of them, it was horrible. It only got worse when we docked at the halfway point; all these little kids came running up asking for “one dollar, one dollar, one dollar” over and over again. Then what you could do (if you were really sick, and one of the guys was) is purchase this big fish then what they would do is tie it by the tail to a rope on a stick and you were to dandle it over a pen full of crocodiles. Yes, crocodiles. It was such a tease, it was awful. He was getting them to jump up to get the fish, completely barbaric, I hated it. If the fish had have already been dead it probably wouldn’t have been as bad but still.
After this joyful experience we headed back to the ’shore’ and got back on the bus to head to the Angkor Wat to get our photos taken for our tickets for our visit here in the morning. We were getting it done then because Dean TL said it was give us an extra 15minute sleep-in in the morning. It only took us about 10minutes and we were finally on our way to our hotel.
We got in at about 5:30pm and had enough time to clean up before meeting in the lobby for our walk to the markets and Pub Street. Cara, Nicole, Emma, Jackie, Leslie, Monica, Sophie, James and I decided on dinner at 'The Red Piano'. The Red Piano is quite famous because when Angelina Jolie was there filming 'Tomb Raider' she frequently visited this restaurant/bar. Angelina visited so often that the bar has named a drink after her, ‘The Tomb Raider Cocktail’; we all tried one and it was very nice. For dinner I went the Penne and Chicken pasta; it was delicious.
After dinner we headed around to the night markets. They were really good, cheap, though it did bug me a bit how much they would jump on you when you were looking while walking past. I bought a few things; Jackie bartered for me as I hate it, can’t do it.
Before we knew it the time was 10:30pm so we walked out of the markets and there was this massage place offering 10minute foot massages for $1. Bargain. We had our massage which was brilliant and found the others before making our way back to the hotel in tuk tuks.
We were in bed by about 12:10am, not great considering we had to be up early for our sun rise over Angkor Wat.

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