good bye snow...

cambodia...

Hello again all...

Now we have pics! Yay for Canadian Internet!




it is now 9 days til I'm home, and it's taken me this freaking long to post this blog. I hate this internet, it's useless. I might as well have dial up. Anyway, I'm doing fine. I had a great long weekend at the beach. I'm ready to come home. I miss everything. Love to all - I'll keep working on adding pictures.... Cambodia post just doesn't work without visuals.

So just in case anyone is counting (it's not like I am or anything)... 18 days until I'm home! Horrah!

Anyway - it's been over a month and I'm only now blogging about Cambodia. Sorry for the delay. Please don't associate the lack of blog with my distaste for Siem Reap, because I FREAKING loved it. It was such an eye-opening, tragic, uplifting, awestruck experience.

And like all notable vacations, it began with a few problems. It was late at night when we arrived in Siem Reap. The first thing we did was convert some money into Riel, which as it turns out was unnessary, because the country seems to operate entirely on American dollars. In fact, many people don't even accept the riel.

We then headed out to find a cab. We climb in and the guy knows a decent amount of english... so we tell him the name of our hotel as he starts driving. The driver proceeds to tell us that the hotel is not built yet. Dad says, no no it has to be built... I have already paid. Meanwhile I'm like, that's surprising, please take us there anyway and we will check it out for ourselves. The driver continued to insist that there was no such hotel. I kept smiling, and ignoring... Dad was sweating about it a little bit. I look over to my left and happen to see a big sign that holds the name of our hotel.... the cabbie was ready to drive right past it... he half pulls into the driveway and says "What do you want me to do... it's closed." I tell him, "We will go inside and check it out... thank you." And sure enough... there was our hotel, in full operation. Afterwards I explained to dad that, that is just what they do sometimes... because they get commission from taking you to certain hotels.

We were pretty spent by this time... we grabbed a quick bite to eat at the hotel restaurant and then headed to bed, ready for an early morning of temples. However, my sleep suffered slightly by dad's incessent and loud snoring.

The next morning we had a really amazing buffet breakfast at the hotel and then met our guide and our car. To go see the temples you usually hire a personal guide to show you around and tell you about the history and what all the temples are, and the stories behind the carvings. It's incredibly facinating.

Much to my dismay, it turned out the car we hired was an Lexus SUV. Yuck! How awful I felt rolling around through ancient ruins, and past starving children in a Lexus. But it was a pretty sweet ride, and it did the trick of getting us from place to place... and that way we covered a lot of ground.



I won't bore you too much with the stories of the temples... it's really something that you have to see for yourself. I will post a bunch of pictures... but even still... does not even compare. Basically we spent the first day at the two major temples; Ankor Wat and Ankor Thom. Then we went to the top of a temple at sunset and watched the sun set. It was awesome... the sunset wasn't the most amazing thing I've seen but it was pretty cool sitting on the top of a temple to watch it.



I will make a few comments about travelling around the temples.... first off - SUPER touristy. It was great, but not so much a hidden treasure. Also, you would never be able to see temples like this in North America. They would all be covered in plexiglass, and guarded with velvet rope. But not so much for Cambodia... you literally climb ALL OVER the rocks and carvings, you can touch whatever you want, you can take pictures of whatever you want... kinda crazy. Kay also - a fun part... to get to the top of some of the temples, you have to climb up these really intense and ridiculously dangerous stairs. The stairs are covered in tourists, of all ethnicities and ages. The stairs are the very same that we created when the temples were built... so you can imagine the state of them.

It was amazing. I asked my guide, "Has anyone ever fallen off these stairs?" His reply, "One time a chinese lady fell and broke her leg a little bit." How someone breaks their leg a little bit is beyond me... but anyway - it was amazing... but kinda scary!

The next day we went to some of the smaller temples.... including one called the Jungle temple, it was amazing... it was one of the temples that they didn't hack all of the trees out of... so the whole temple was covered in these crazy beautiful roots and branches and greenery.



I'm kinda tired of writing now - and I wanna dedicate a significant amount of thought into my post about the kids in Cambodia... so I will leave that for another day.

I'm so behind... but I want to assure you all that life in bangkok is still grand... I have made another trip to Samet, and an unfortunate trip to pattaya which will be a post all of it's own - but just for a little taste... while in Pattaya this is the text I sent to Jamie: "I'm in a thai nudie bar, this hurts every feminist bone in my body." Stories to come... for some of you in real life... cause I'm coming home soon. Have I mentioned that yet?

Love love love to all... keep the emails coming.

posted by Crystal @ 5:37 PM