Hey everyone,
well we're currently in Siem Reap, home to the Temples of Angkor.
We left Phnom Penh on Friday and travelled to Sihanoukville in the South West of Cambodia. There are some beautiful beaches there so we stayed for 2 days and just swam, read and sunbathed. Nice to stop for a bit.
On Sunday we caught the bus back from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh (4 hours) and then caught another bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap (6 hours) and we arrived here at 1930. When we arrive somewhere we normally get hassled by a few tuk tuk drivers but we were not prepared by the huge number, and forcefulness of the drivers here in Siem Reap. They all want to be your driver around the temples and are pretty aggressive in their manner. Carl found a young guy called Phrim though who was the least aggressive and he kindly brought us to the Golden Temple Villas, THE bext hotel we've stayed in so far. Only 15USD per night and the room is beautiful and there is a great restaurant too.
I had got a pretty bad cold on the bus journey on Sunday so Monday we decided to chill out and wander around Siem Reap. It's a beautiful town with lots of 100 year old French buildings which gives it a great character. Had a decent meal in a Khmer restaurant and a few beers and then off to bed...
Yesterday (Tuesday) saw us get up at 0440 to meet the tuk-tuk driver at 0500 to go to Angkor Wat to see the sun rise... What a great experience. It took a good couple of hours for the sun to be fully visible but the pctures we took are amazing and it was lovely to go somewhere in the pitch black and wait to see what the sun would show us when it came up... Angkor is enormous and very very packed with tourists. It's the Khmer's national symbol so there are thousands of tourists and nationals who visit every day. After that we spent the day trvelling around some of the smaller temples until about 1530 when we both decided we'd had enough for the day and came back to the hotel to shower because the temples are really hot and dusty.
Today (Weds) we're again taking it easy. We have a 3 day pass to Angkor so we may hire a couple of moto taxi drivers to take us to some of the less-popular temples for the afternoon.
Tomorrow Primh is meeting us at 0900 to take us on another long day of temple visiting. We will see the famous 'Tomb Raider' temples with the tree roots growing out of the walls and then Bayon which has 216 faces carved out of the rocks. We'll also get to see some monkeys.. Carl is very excited!!!
On Friday we're catching the 0730 bus from Siem Reap to Bangkok where we'll stay for 1 night before getting a flight to Ko Samui/Surat Thani for our week in Thailand over Chrismas.
Happy Festive Greetings to you all....
Mr and Mrs H xx
