Siem Reap and Angkor Whaat?

We left Bangkok with the group and headed for the Cambodian boarder, which took about 4 hours. We'd heard that it can be a bit of a nightmare getting across without paying 'extras' to officials, but we had no problems getting through. After the formalities at the border we headed to Siem Reap.

In the evening we all went to a local Khmer village by tuk tuk for dinner- a five course meal cooked by a local family. Before we ate we had a tour around the village, which was very rural and so different to city life. The food was great (the best Amok we've had) and the people were friendly.

The following day we got up at 4.30am (!!) to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat (Wat = temple).
After a sleepy start, we headed to Angkor Wat in the dark and grabbed a coffee, served by a little boy called Spider Boy. In Cambodia, children only go to school for half a day, so a lot of them work the other half to earn money for the family.

Despite the mass crowds who were also there to catch the spectacle, the sunrise was awesome and just about worth getting up so early for! Once Marc had taken over 75 photos of the sunrise, we headed back to the hotel for breakfast (and a nap) and then went back to Angkor Wat to look around 3 different temples.

The first temple was called Ta Prohm (or Jungle temple), made famous by the Tomb Raider movie. It was built in the 12th and early 13th Century, so was pretty cool to look at and climb around. At one point we stopped for a group photo , only to be photo-bombed by a load of asian tourists who then proceeded to take loads of photos of us! They love westerners apparently.

We then headed to the main temple, Angkor Wat, for a look around it in the daylight.  It's the largest Hindu temple in the world, built in the early 12th century, so pretty old! We headed to one final temple, but by then we were all templed-out.

One of the streets in Siem Reap was called Pub Street, which sounded like our sort of place. There were quite a few bars to choose from, so we decided to sample a handful of them along with 4 girls from the tour group. One of the bars was called Angkor What? Genius.

We got back to the hotel at around 4.30am, and had  to check out at 11.15am the next day to get a 6 hour bus to Phnom Penh with a stinkin' hangover. Ugh.

Bangkok Revisited

We got a taxi from the airport to the hostel that we booked just off Kaoh San Road.  The hostel was above an Indian restaurant, and looked okay from the outside, but turned out to be the most horrible place
we've seen so far!

We had two private rooms with en suites, but there were no windows, there were holes in the walls and ceilings, everything looked generally dirty, the beds were rock hard and there were lots of crawly things! We had booked the rooms for 3 nights, but after one night we decided we definitely didn't want to stay any longer!

We headed to Kaoh San Road and found a much nicer place to stay, at a not much higher price. We found it on a nice street running parallel to Kaoh San Road, which we didn't even know existed the last time we
were in Bangkok.

One of the things that we didn't get a chance to do the first time round was visit the floating markets, so we booked a day trip and did this on our second day in Bangkok before checking into our new nice hotel.

This is a guy cooking our lunch!

On our second night back in Bangkok, we thought we'd head away from the main tourist street for a night out in Silom. The next day we nursed our hangovers with some retail therapy at the markets.

The next day was the beginning of our Roam Cambodia tour with G Adventures. The first night of the tour was a night the Bangkok Centre Hotel and we met the group that we'd be travelling with for the next
10 days.  After a briefing from our tour guide called "Bank" (a nickname we later found out was given to him by his mum as they had to go to the bank when he was born to pay for the birth!) we went to dinner.

There were 16 people on the tour, a mixture of Icelandic/German/Norwegian/British people who fortunately were all very nice! We all went for a meal together and then had an early night ahead of our 5.30am start in the morning for our 6 hour journey to Cambodia.