So my tops list of things to do when I came to Thailand were 1. Cambodia 2. Krabi 3. Songkran. Starting this week, I crossed one off! Cambodia was seriously one of the most epic adventures EVER. Definitely not an experience for the rookie backpacker however. All the times we camped in the countryside here and Thailand were definitely good prep for our experience to come. SUN: So We took off Sunday morning with tickets to the border and knew from there we would have to wing it. Ironically after all my dreaming about Cambodia however, I never planned an itinerary (I should learn more from my mom). Woops! Even Andrew the normally detailed person, forgot to print off some of the particulars. We were just so stoked to actually get to go it didn't hit us till we were on the buss to Aranyaphated border station that we realized we had NO clue what we were going to do after! On the way we texted some people and got the names of the places we were going to stay on my cell phone. Getting to the border was a remarkably short drive and we realized when they dropped us off at this market...we'd been there before! On our last trip to Issan we'd actually SHOPPED at the border market without realizing we could have spit across the line to Cambodia. Hahaha, We're such American tourists sometimes. We made a deal with one of the 30 men trying to get us taxi rides across and probably got scammed a few more dollars than we should have but everything else was oddly painless. We shared our 'taxi' (a normal car with tape on the door saying 'taxi' haha) with a super nice couple from Russia, they wanted to know all about Bangkok on our way to Siem Reap. Arriving in Siem Reap we were basically pushed out the door and into a tuk-tuk that swept us away to the orphanage Wat Prah Yesu where an Australian Missionary family housed us in their guest "jungle house". MON: We got dropped off at 7am the next morning to catch a bus to Phom Penn (pronounced: bpen-om bpen) the capitol city of Cambodia. Surprisingly the drive there took us longer than our bus ride and the taxi the day before! The roads are so bad within the country and the roads are crowded with cows, water buffaloes, naked babies running, people riding bikes, motorbikes and selling giant baskets. Arriving at the embassy the police told us it was closed for some random holiday BUT for $100 they would get it ready for us by tomorrow. A scam you ask? Yes indeed! We said "Heck no! We'll come back." Some more mission friends of ours housed us that night and gave us the all powerful, all knowing Lonely Planet Cambodia guide book! Equivalent if not more informative than the Hitchhikers-Guide to the Galaxy, this book totally gave us all the information we needed to know to keep us busy in Phom Penn the next day. TUES: We dropped off the passport in the morning and ran into some issues. First, our letter of recommendation didn't say the right kind of visa so instantly the ticket counter lady tells Andrew, "Sorry, we can't do this here. Try America," (basically). So Andrew looks at his letter and realizes there was an error, it was asking for a different type of visa than the kind he needed! So he just scratched it out with a pen and wrote in the one he wanted. The lady wasn't phased by the unofficial correction technique and was like, "Oh, ok." So then she says, "Well we can do this visa, you can pick it up on Friday." My mouth pretty much hit the floor because that meant we'd have to spend five days in Phom Penn and we'd miss Angkor Wat! We were sitting in the lobby another twenty minutes discussing how to change the date and time and on our way out the same lady motioned Andrew back over to the counter. She grabbed his Visa Application and crossed out the 'Friday' and wrote 'Tomorrow-Rush' (basically). Yeya! I know she's Cambodian but I felt she'd understand and I gave her the deep 'wai', traditional Thai bow for thank you like three times. The rest of the day we decided to make all the tuk-tuk drivers trying to sell us rides angry and just walk everywhere, show them that white people do indeed have legs. We saw the grand palace, the national museum, a silver pagoda, and Russian market! It was super interesting because you could really see all the French influence on the architecture (Cambodia was occupied in the past by the French, just like Laos and some parts of Vietnam). WEDS: Finally we got to pick up our Visa Wedsnesday afternoon and we hopped on the first bus back to Siem Reap, back to the orphanage jungle house! The highlight of today was actually breakfast, haha. PANCAKES. Our hosts Ann and Mark reccomended this great restaurant that makes the most superb pancakes I've ever tried. Thin and cinnamon flavored with, instead of syrup, sliced mangoes and bananas with passionfruit seeds. Arroi mak! We stayed there another night and woke up at 4am the next day to go see Angkor Wat! THURS: We'd hired a tuk-tuk driver the night before for the entire next day. He picked us up at the gate to the orphanage all bundled up for 80 degree night weather *from the looks of it he'd probably just slept in the tuk-tuk there the night before*. Everyone had told us that to get your moneys worth you should see the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Our driver drove the tuk-tuk (basically a carriage pulled by motorcycle) down these little dirt paths behind a line of other tuk-tuk drivers. It was like a little lantern lit caravan through the forest until he just stopped and said, "Ok! First temple is here." Both of us looked at him like, "Okaaaaaaay? Where?" It was pitch black and what I had THOUGHT were treetops out one side was actually the front of Angkor. (Side note: Angkor Wat is the ancient capitol city of the Kmers. The city was built hundreds of years ago complete with a giant moat/gate surrounding a series of at least 10 ginormous temples you have to DRIVE between because their kilometers apart from each other.) So we kinda saw other tourists crossing this bridge and decided to follow, we could start to see more as the daylight started to come out. As we crossed we realized there were these ancient stone gargoyle like creatures and the gate was meters thick, and when we came out the other side it opened up into this giant field that led straight to the first temple ruins of Angkor. All the tourists were camping out next to this lake in front of it waiting for the sunrise... something we were questioning would even BE that epic because it looked like the day was going to be cloudy :( So we kept walking and thought we'd just get a peek at the outside before the mobs came but then realized...there was no security, no cameras, no guards, no checkpoints, no signs, no NO's! We could do WHATEVER we wanted. Go Asia. So while it was still dawn and all the other tourists were waiting for their sunrise...we tomb raided! We crept through these ancient hallways and towers and had the whole place to ourselves minus five or six other brave souls. Kinda a creepy erie feeling but super cool at the same time. As soon as daylight was officially out we were almost done, and as everyone else was entering the temple, we were leaving! This kinda kept us a step ahead of the crowds most the day (it didn't really even matter the place is so ginormous it doesn't matter you'll never see them anyway). Our tuk-tuk driver doubled as a tour guide and told us some fun facts about temples as we drove up to them just from common Cambodian knowledge. We got to walk through temples being constructed, even lifted a couple carved stones ourselves! Each one is being worked on by a different country in collaboration with Cambodia because the project is so huge. Japan, China, and India were all given their own temple-project. Our favorite, and probably any tourist you ask however was the temple Ta-Prohm. Sadly the crowds were just suffocating there but we had to hold back until lunch hour anyway thanks to a full camera card and got to see it a bit less populated. This temple is the most unique because unlike the others where they clear away the trees and jungle that just want to take over the ruins this one they left to the elements. The tree roots just seem to swallow the boulders and statues up creating this surreal feeling of being in a fiction story or something from Lord of the Rings. There's little butterflies floating everywhere and you had to find your way in or out a different direction because you get so lost in the jungle. Andrew and me accidentally found or way into some halls that WERE roped off (probably truly dangerous considering the freedom everywhere else) but it was honestly impossible to navigate inside Ta-Prohm. We found lunch at a booth our driver reccomended, Cambodian curry....WOW! So far Cambodian food has been my favorite, even over Laos and Thai. Surprisingly we were able to finish seeing all the major temples by 4:00 in the afternoon (a solid 12 hours of tomb raiding) and we felt we'd done Angkor Wat proud. It was super hard to say we were ready to go, you just don't wanna leave when you know you could still potentially find more. Lots of people come for 3 to 5 days straight its just so massive! FRI: Another travel day basically, we had to say goodbye to our orphanage friends and the jungle-house :( Great people! Traveling back we got to see more Cambodian countryside before we left, and I've officially concluded I now need to see Vietnam...from research and movies it seems like Cambodia has a lot more in common with Vietnamese landscape and culture than Thailand. I guess this pretty much wraps the epic-ness up! I'll be posting pictures slowly throughout the rest of the weekend, I think its gonna take me a solid 48 hours of editing :/
