Siem Reap, Cambodia

Traveling with someone who is not on a budget and is generous is wonderful. Instead of taking an excruciatingly long bus ride to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh, Lance and I flew on a painless 40 minute flight. When we got off the plane we didnt have a hotel but told our cab driver our budget and he said he would make some good suggestions and wait until we found one we liked that could take us. I forgot about cab driver commissions and scams until the 5th hotel we were shown. We finally asked our driver to take us to the FCC, a hotel that we had seen in a guide of Siem Reap and we wanted to see. Our driver told us it was a very bad hotel in a very dangerous area and that young cambodian children got drunk around the corner and then came and robbed you. Finally we asked him to call the hotel and ask about availability. He called them and spoke in english saying, "oh! you have NO availability? You only have 20 rooms? Ok thank you." It didn't make sense that he would call them and speak in english so we had him take us there anyway. Not only did they have room for us, but it was a beautiful hotel, right around the corner from all the other hotels we had seen. Our driver seemed fairly embarrassed and probably angry that we didn't decide to stay in one of the hotels he got commission from. As a belated birthday present Lance bought us a 3 day package from the hotel which included breakfast, a 3 day pass to Angkor Wat, a tour guide, driver to take us to watch the sunrise there, dinner and lunch, as well as a 15 minutes foot massage.

Our day trip to the Angkor Wat temples was very nice. Our tour guide was perfect in that he gave us lot of information, but wasn't constantly talking. As I often become very ADD around tour guides and would rather just wander, it was nice to only learn the essential information. Of course if either Lance and I asked any questions we was always ready with a perfect answer as well. We saw three temples that day, Bayon, the temple where Lara Croft Tomb Raider was filmed and Angkor Wat. Of all of them the Tomb Raider temple was the most impressive. It is being held up by tree roots and if they were to deteriorate the entire temple would collapse. Another amazing thing that happened there was that I ran into the Bildners, who had been on my mom and my Backroads trip to Napa. It was a very funny coincidence and I talked about it for the rest of the day which I'm sure irritated Lance a lot. Bayon and Angkor Wat, beautiful as they were, were both under very heavy construction, which took away some of their beauty. Even though they were being reconstructed with original stones it felt very artificial. Angkor Wat is really beautiful from a distance and I definitely appreciated it as we approached it, but once we got up close, yet again we were surrounded by roped off areas of construction and refurbishing. One thing that was lucky was that the 3rd floor of Angkor Wat that had been closed for the past 5 years due to reconstruction, of course, had reopened 5 days earlier. The views from the 3rd floor were incredible, but it smelled as if for the past 5 years the construction workers were using it as their very own personal port-a-potty, which made me feel very sad considering the original purpose of Angkor Wat and its timeless beauty. A few days later Lance left to go back home and Ashley left to go to Northern Thailand and work at a school. They both left on the 14th, Valentines day, which for the first time I was happy no one was celebrating. To my surprise though, the night before Lance left I came back to the hotel to find a dozen roses on the bed. It was sweet and corny and after he left I carried them around for two days and everyone looked at me like I was nuts.

One evening Mimi, Katie, Laura and I went to the Floating Village for sunset. It was beautiful and sad at the same time, completely filled with poverty, but set out on a beautiful body of water and as I watched the sun set I thought if anything they could feel lucky once a day that they got to witness something so beautiful. At the place where we stopped to watch the sunset there was a little room in the deck below filled with crocodiles which gave me the idea for our dinner. That night we went to a Cambodian bbq restaurant and ordered Crocodile, Snake, Ostrich, Kangaroo, and Frogs Legs. The snake was not good, but the Kangaroo was probably the best tasting meat I've ever tried in my whole life. We all had a lot of fun trying the different meats and it was definitely one of my favorite food experiences on the entire trip. That night, mostly by pure chance, we ran into Allie and Haley, from Skidmore. We had known that they were spending a little less than a month traveling S E Asia, but thought at that point that if we hadn't heard from them yet it was not going to happen, so we were not only surprised but so happy at this crazy coincidence. We went out with them for a few nights on Pub Street which is filled with bars and clubs. It was really nice to see them and took away and pangs of homesickness I might have been feeling. After Siem Reap we all went out seperate ways. Allie and Haley went to Laos, Laura went to Ho Chi Minh, Katie went to Hanoi, and Mimi and I went to Bangkok. It was a bittersweet goodbye, but we were definitely ready to move on from Cambodia.