Cambodia

Greetings all!

Well when we finally dried out from the Phnom Penh adventure it was time for us to head north to Siem Reap and the Temples at Angkor. We travelled by bus, and had a delightful lunch stop at a little village where they had some rather charming delicacies on offer including frog (whole) and deep fried tarantula. Yes, you heard - tarantula. Not only were there women walking around with trays full of crunchy looking spider crisps, but one woman was strolling about nonchalantly with a live spider on her shirt, occasionally stroking it as she went about her spider selling business. Did we try one, I hear you ask? Hell no! I'm all for trying out the local cuisine but the though of biting into one of the chubby little hairy legs didn't really appeal - we stuck to the safer and less repulsive option of a salad baguette A chap on our bus did buy a rather large bag of them although sadly we didn't see him tucking in to them. That was pretty much the highlight of a relatively uneventful trip, and about an hour ahead of schedule (unheard of!) we arrived at our destination.

Siem Reap is a pretty little town, that seems to exist entirely to service Angkor - it is thus full of 5* resort hotels and some rather lovely restaurants. We had a day to relax and get our bearings before being collected at 5am by Lee, our tuk tuk driver for our first view of the temples and a spot of sunrise. On the first day we visited 13 temples, including Prah Prohm - otherwise universally know, it would seem, as "The Tombraider Temple". Haven't seen the film myself, but we overheard many a tour guide explaining the scene in detail to people...something to do with tigers apparently!

The following two days followed a similar format - up at 5 for sunrise, a good 7 hours of templing, back to town for lunch and a rest then back to the temples for sunset. The three days were exhausting, most of the temples are in a pretty bad state of disrepair, and there are lots of very steep flights of steps to scramble up and down (not easy in flip flops, I can tell you!) - but it was an amazing experience. Words can't really do it justice, all I can do is pop some pictures on Facebook and encourage you all to go and see for yourself!

After our three days it was time to return to Bangkok - yet another terrifying twin prop plane (Siem Reap Air...would you trust an airline from a place with a population a fraction of the size of Reading? Think Air Wokingham!) but we made it back safely in the knowledge that our next plane would be something of the sturdier variety, and not with an airline that's not allowed to fly over Europe due to it's poor safety record as is the case with many of the SE Asian airlines! We had a pretty quiet few days of winding down and getting ready to head home, including a bit of shopping, a trip to the Grand Palace and the Khao San Road to see how the backpackers actually live and a visit to the most amazing cinema EVER! The room had no more than about 30 seats, and each of them had individual controls to allow you to completely recline, they gave you a blanket in case the air conditioning was too chilly and they even brought us beer which we stowed on our rather handy side tables. Awesome. We discovered just how patriotic the Thai folk are when just before the film commenced we were treated to the national anthem (everyone stands up at this point) which was accompanied by what can only be described as a music video with "We love the King" tag lines and lots of footage of him giving money to the poor and generally being an all round good egg. Can you imagine that in the UK?!

So before we knew it, we were sitting at Bangkok airport waiting for our 12.45am plane back to the UK. Four months, 10 countries, and more amazing people, incredible sights, stunning scenery and good times than you can shake a sizeable stick at. We hope you've enjoyed the blog, although it's occasionally been a bit of a pain finding internet access good enough to write it, it's been a good way to recall all our favourite moments and reassure people that we're not lost in the big wide world somewhere

That's all from us, hope to catch up with you all soon!
Over and out,
Sue & Chris xxx

So I thought I should tell you all about an experience in Phnom Penh with the monsoon rain.

We've had some rainy days while we've been here; apparently it's what it does and you get used to it. However, the day before we were set to leave for Siem Reap the rain had something else in mind.

Having set out to check email early doors the heavens quickly opened. After 20 mins or so it was coming down thicker and faster so safety was sought in a local restaurant. Usually, monsoon rain lasts for a couple of hours and has dried up in no time, leaving little trace that it was ever there, and that was what we expected to happen. An hour later, however, and the water had covered the road, overflowed onto the pavement and before much longer it was lapping at the doorway of the restaurant. At this point, we were still confident that it would stop raining and drain away pretty soon so we thought we'd sit it out and have some dinner. Slight problem though, no money! We'd only planned to be out for a short while and having read the many warnings about how many muggings apparently happen in Phnom Penh we'd left most of our cash back at the hotel. Being the gentlemen that I am I volunteered to go and get the cash from the hotel...if only I'd known what I was letting myself in for! I took a deep breath, tried hard not to think about the dead rat we'd seen on the pavement on our way to the restaurant, and waded in. After only a few steps out of the restaurant the water was ankle deep. Before long the water was up to my knees, then to my thighs (forcing me to sexily pull my shorts right up and dazzle the local population with a whiteness they've never seen before!). In addition to this things kept hitting my legs, and with no idea what they were an inner monologue occured:

"What was that?"
"A leaf"
"Are you sure?"
"Of course, can't you tell by the way it wraps around your leg??"
"Hmmmmm.....OK something hard just hit me"
"That was just one of them hard leaves"
"Hard leaves?? You're trying to tell me that....wait, that was definately furry!"
"A furry leaf I think you'll find"
"A furry leaf?!?"
"Oh sure, it's good luck being hit by the Cambodian furry leaf"
"A Cambodian furry leaf, you've got to be kidding...bloody hell that was a door!"
"You got me, that was actually a door"

And so this continued all the way to and from the hotel. On the way back I had possibly one of my favourite moments from our time away. As I waded through the hard, furry leaves I noticed a half sunken Tuk Tuk. I stood for moment and was saddened by it's half sunken predicament. While standing there, brolly in one hand, a set of flip flops in the other (I had to leave my shoes at the restaurant ) I heard a distant and hopeful "Tuk Tuk?". Looking up I saw a smiley man, the obvious owner of said sunken Tuk Tuk, looking at me with a cheeky grin. We both contemplated for a few moments before deciding that I was possibly best left to wade the streets myself.

2 hours (and a rather lovely meal) later we were very kindly driven to higher ground by the staff at the restaurant who managed to get an impressive number of people and a mopeds onto a pick up truck and made our way back to our hotel where we sat and watched people optimistically riding mopeds through tidal waves from our balcony. Impressively, the following morning all was (relatively) dry.

Sue will be with you soon to update you on our movements since the great flood!
Much love

Chris