Cambodia Week 2

Our second week in Cambodia saw us in Battambang, were Clarissa met a wonderful guy who was her moto driver for the day (she didn't even share!). It's the kind of place that still has horses in the streets. From Battambang we took a very crowded ferry to Siem Reap (the picture in the middle is of the back of a forerunner type vehicle, there were 12 people inside and another three or four on the roof).

The moto rides, car rides and ferry rides all, as our guide book put it, in no way meet international safety standards. Personally, I think they used them as less than guidelines, but when in Rome... The ferry ride was billed to be around 3 and half hours, although as much as 8 hours. I guess we were lucky it was only 7 and half (We kept singing the Gilligan's Island theme song...). On the up side, we effectively toured the floating villages on the lake, because the ferry stopped to drop off people and products again, and again, etc.
We met David at our guest house and proceeded to see all the temples we could absorb, resulting in new english phrases such as "templed out" and "templeton", the last being the feeling after seeing a ton of temples.

 

Cambodia Week 1

We ended up in an amazing country: It's all one big wetland! We hit the end of the rainy season and if it was one thing Cambodia has, it's water~ on the roads, in and under houses... you name it. We met up with Jana, who cheerfully toured with us on tuk-tuk, bus and motorcycle. We did mostly cheaper guesthouses, but splurged one night at the Foreign Coorespondents Club (FCC)~ you can see Miranda lounging on the bed there!

There were many monks wandering around, and beautiful temples, and the day we went to the secluded beach it poured literally buckets (I can't tell you how many they bailed out of the boat, or how long it seemed before we were rescued when we lost the prop, or how high the river was we followed up the hill, mostly wading in it). We still managed to enjoy the day though!
We were a little taken aback at the amount of begging and solicitation we encountered, we tried to buy some lunches and I have sworn off gambling after losing a tic tac toe to a 13 yr old girl from Vietnam (I don't want to go into it...). Beware tourists of the sneaky tic tac toe players, especially on the beach!