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Published: August 7th 2007
Tarantula anyone?
Standard street food on offer at road side stopHi all,
Well, we are well and truely behind on our blog updates now (it is 11th April now and we are actually in Vietnam) as we have been so busy for the last couple of weeks. I have just lost the last hours typing of this blog as the computer went crazy, so am a little pissed off, but will give it another go! The internet service is touch and go, so another reason why we are so behind!
Thursday 29th March
After spending another night in Phnom Penh we caught the bus for the 6 1/2 hour journey to Siem Riep and the Temples of Angkor. We hopped onto our air conditioned bus only to find the air co not really working. Considering that it was 38 degrees and humid outside, it did not make for a very pleasant trip! It did get a little better after a couple of hours but we have decided we will not travel with this bus company again (Sorya). The floor beneath my feet was so bloody hot that it melted one of my thongs. Not easy to keep your feet of the ground for 6 1/2 hours. I
think I may have been sitting above the motor! Although uncomfortable, we knew we were better off than the locals we saw travelling around us. They were pilled onto the top of trucks and minibuses, with no protection from the heat or dust. I actually started to feel quite lucky!
We stopped about 1/2 way at a local street side restaurant for a break. There were a group of young kids selling street food that gathered around the bus door to sell their goods. As soon as Mia and I hopped off, they forgot all about their sales and rushed to Mia - they just love her here! We bought some mangos and sticky rice (cooked in coconut milk with little red beans and wrapped in banana leaf - yum! - after I realised the beans were not cooked flies) but I decided that we'd tried enough local food for the day when I was offered deep fried tarantulas! I had read that these were around but didn't think that we would actually see them. In one girls blog that I had read she ate one apparently just to get back at spiders! No thanks!
We arrived in
Siem Riep late afternoon and checked into the Siem Riep Riverside Hotel which our previous guest house had prebooked for us. We hadn't known whether to prebook or just wing it like we normally do, but as this gave us a free pickup from the bus stop, we thought why not? The room was really nice, but the location of the hotel was not great - a few hundred metres out of town but in a pretty boring area, and the atmosphere was not that great. So after dinner (PIZZA!!) we headed off to check a couple of other places we had read about and found the Golden Banana Guesthouse, It was also a few hundred metres from town, but was in a local area that had a great buzz about it, had a pool and included breakfast ($25USD) It advertises itself as being 'gay friendly' and all the staff were good looking gay boys. A very friendly place to stay that we would recommend to anyone. Needless to say, the next morning we moved to here and made it our home for the next 3 nights.
Friday 30th March
We were picked up at 10.30 in the
morning by tuk tuk to begin seeing the temples. We had decided on buying a 3 day pass for $40USD each (Mia free) and try and see 1 temple in the mornings and 1 in the late afternoons, as it gets very hot in the middle of the day. As we only had a half day to start our pass, we went to see Ta Prohm as it has the most shade cover. This is the temple that was used in the Angelina Jolie film 'Tomb Raider' and was great to walk around. Trees have taken over the temples and literally started to swallow them up. We stayed around an hour and a half before seeing another temple Bantrei Kdei. Interesting that it is so different from Ta Promh yet so close. After, we went to another temple to watch the sunset. We actually piked it about 1/2 an hour before the sun actually set, as there is only so much you can do sitting on the top of a temple for an hour!
Saturday 31st March
In the morning we went to Angkor Thom which is an ancient walled city that holds lots of temples including my
favorite - Bayon. Bayon has heaps of towers with faces carved in the rocks on each side. It was quite amazing and I think I could have stayed longer than the hour or so we did, but Gav and Mia were already starting to get templed out!
After going back to our place for a swim and relax, we headed off to see Angkor Wat. This is obviously the most famous of all the temples, and was good to see, although not as enjoyable as the others. We all climbed the steps to the 3rd tier which were extremely steep and quite scary. I had gone up and couldn't believe Gav had actually brought Mia up with him. I was actually terrified of going back down as even though there were 4 different lots of steps you go go down (all very very steep) only one had a tiny handrail, of which, there were a large buch of Koreans lined up to go down. I was seriously concerned about how Mia would get down and Gav ended up carrying her (she wasn't scared, I was). Looking back, great to do, but very nerve racking. There have been fatalities of
people falling down these steps.
We had planned for our tuk tuk to pick us up at 5.15pm to take us to another temple down the road where you can go and watch the sunset over Angkor, but as I had forced us all to wait 20 minutes in line with the Koreans to use the had rail, we were late and missed sunset. It was only later that we were told my another couple that we had missed nothing, as you could only just see Angkor Wat in the background and that it was pretty boring :-)
All in all, I really enjoyed the temples. especially Bayon. Mia had well and truly had enough by the end (& Gav) as there was a lot of walking and it was so hot. Siem Riep is a nice little town, but we had had a heap of people say how great it was, and I actually prefer Phnom Pehn. Not sure why, but still a nice place to stay for a few days!
Monday 2nd April
We caught the bus back to Phnom Penh and this time it was great. We went with Mekong Express who were
nearly double the price ($13usd each) but at least the air co worked well, my thongs and feet stayed cool and intact, and we had very comfortable seats. We also got fed lunch, so pretty good value.
We had been recommended a place to stay in PP that had a pool so made our way to there. (SCANdinavia) Fantastic place with not only the great pool, but also great food. Gav and I had a big Australian porterhouse each and yummy asian duck 'tacos' (wantons) on our last night there that were absolutely devine!
Gav went and put our passports in at the Vietnamese Embassy so we could get our visas for Vietnam. He had gotten there at 9am in the hope that we would have them back that night so we could head to Vietnam the next day. Unfortunately we had to wait until 4pm the next day which meant we would have to delay going to Vietnam by another day. A little disappointed as we were really looking forward to heading off, but we should have been better organised! We are learning as we go though and have started to think more than 1 day ahead
- der!
Tuesday 3rd April
Due to us being 'stuck' in Phnom Penh another day (not a bad thing really) we hired a boat for an hour to go along the Mekong. Not too exciting, as it is very wide here, but got to see a lot of floating villages with kids swimming etc. For lunch we went to one of our favorite places and bought lunch for a group of 10 local kids. We had been here the day before and bought lunch for a boy who we had sort of gotten to know (they are the kids who sell books on the streets) and as we had been about to leave, we had seen a group of kids all rush in to the restaurant and sit down to eat. We were told someone had paid for them all to eat, and we had decided to do the same the next day. Felt really good to at least make a small difference, even though not very big.
Into bed early that night, as finally, in the morning, we would be catching the bus to Ho Chi Minh City!
All in all, Cambodia is a gorgeous
Street vendors
The lovely kids who swarmed Mia and I on the way to Siem Riep place. The poverty is extreme, and it really makes you appreciate how lucky we are. The people are wonderful, the kids gorgeous and the country beautiful. We will definately come back in a couple of years.
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shelley
non-member comment
hello
hi guys, photos on blog have been great to see. Chaos has hit the beach household, Max is great, all he does is sleep ansd eat.We are the nuffies.Broke my tooth eating an olive. luv ya