Cindy and John’s Adventures

So we leave Buenos Aires for a ciudad called Mar del Plata.  They totally have the comfiest buses here – the long distance ones are double-decker and some of them are totally plush – this began the first of many buses for John and Cindy – the only thing that kind of sucks is that when you have buses that don’t stop very often and you have smokers like Argentinians…well, you’ve got a bunch of guys heading to the bathrooms a lot to smoke.   Which kind of blows if you’re uphill from the bathroom.  And if you’ve got a kid why would you sit upstairs and as far away from the bathrooms as possible so when, in a 4 hour time-frame you’ve got to walk the kid down to the loo like 20 times.  But I guess then you can go smoke.  Hmmmm…now it’s kind of making sense…

Anyway Mar del Plata is one of these towns that Argentinians flock to in the summer.  It’s a pretty good-sized beach town.  But it would have totally sucked if you were on a short vacation and you were down there when we were down there…because it was not super warm and it rained a bunch.   So not very many people were able to lay out and bake in the sun.  But we liked it (except that one night we decided to go walk around and were completely drenched by a storm — but the bonus is we found a good Mexican restaurant that had awesome margaritas while trying to duck out of the rain).  Since playing on the beach was kind of out we looked in our faithful Lonely Planet (which, if you doubled the prices of everything in the book it was kind of accurate — amazing that in 3 years prices of accomodations had quite literally doubled — they’ve got some inflation problems around here) and found this Museo del Automovilismo in a town not too far away called Balcarce.  It was a totally beautiful bus ride there, although I don’t know how going 60 km took us an hour and a 1/4 (roughly 40 miles) when we really didn’t stop.  And in this cute little town was the most amazing car museum.  Okay, how many car museums have I been to?  Okay, probably just this one but it was so cool and I’m definitely not a car freak.  It was established in honor of some guy named Juan Manuel Fangio that was from there – but apparently he had some ties to Mercedes.  It was cool to see those tiny little cars and I guess he was a road racer too because they had cars covered with mud – they must have had a few million dollars worth of cars in there and about a gazillion trophies.

Ooh and we saw this fight in the street.  I wish we knew more Spanish but apparently this older guy had stolen something from a lady because he was crossing the street and this mob of people were following him and one guy ended up hitting him in the face.  John’s first instinct was to see if the guy was okay but he would have probably gotten nailed too…it was quite amazing – the crowd grew to like 30 people and they were waving down the cops and…it kind of sucks we don’t know more Spanish…but I’m not sure they’d teach us THOSE kind of words…

So we grab another bus to a town called Bahia Blanca where we spent the night, and then down to Viedma where we spent 2.  Kind of the purpose for us getting on and off the bus is that to get from Mar del Plata to Bahia Blanca it was 7 hours on the bus.  And to get to Viedma it was another 4.  So we were kind of trying to break it up a bit.  Because it just isn’t the healthiest thing to sit in a bus for a gazillion hours.   And we wanted to see Viedma because I’d read in the book that they had these things called burrowing parrots and the oldest lighthouse in Patagonia in this town right outside of Viedma.  We ended up staying at this cushy little hotel that was reasonably priced in Viedma and just day-tripping out to El Condor which was probably a good idea considering NOTHING was open except for a grocery store in El Condor.  So we would have been freezing our butts off sleeping on the beach or something.  So we get out to El Condor and actually had a really good time!

We start by walking on the biggest beach I’ve ever seen – and there are probably 20 people walking on the beach and a couple of brave souls playing in the surf – so we walk to where the burrowing parrots are supposed to come back to (our intention was to bop around this town for several hours and come back to the cliffs where these parrots apparently sleep – but there was no way we’d have been able to see these parrots up close later — plus with nothing open it didn’t warrant more than a 3 hr stay anyway) – so anyway, we kept walking and came to where you could walk back up to the road and there were these 2 kids with a wheelbarrow coming down the driveway.  And they had a penguin in the wheelbarrow.  Oh my gosh, the penguin was so darn cute but we’re going – why do these kids have this penguin?  When the penguin colony we’d heard about was quite a bit farther south.  Then they placed him in the surf.  And we figured out what they were doing.  The penguin had injured legs.  He couldn’t even stand up.  Well, the dad came down and from what we gathered, they had found the penguin somewhere nearby and brought him down so hopefully he could find his family by swimming.  After we petted the cute little penguin and watched him for a while, it became evident that this penguin wanted nothing to do with the water.  So sad – I’m not sure what happened with the cute little guy…

We continued our romp through town and saw the lighthouse (which of course was closed)…it ended up being a pretty enjoyable day…not many people and just beautiful…

We continued down south to Puerto Madryn and now we’re in Trelew.  This is supposed to be a highly Welsh area (apparently the Welsh were trying to escape English rule and so a small colony came to Patagonia), but it didn’t look very Welsh to me.  We went to this town called Gaiman and aside from having tea shops everywhere, it didn’t look very Welsh.  The towns are very nice down this coast, but nothing to really write home about (which is kind of funny considering I am sort of writing home about it!)  And yes, my hopes were very high…way too high…tonight we get on an overnight bus trip to Rio Gallegos and from there we’re flying to Ushuaia.  On Aerolinas Argentina.  By far the most confusing airline we’ve ever encountered.  Like you can book a flight on their website but then you have to call a 1-800 number to pay for the flight.  And they let you book a flight on the website and then when you try to go and pay for it they say you should never have gotten that rate because it’s only for Argentinians.  Well then perhaps you should put on there where you have to enter your DNI number (like the SSN # in the states) before you can book it?  But some things are unexplainable and you just have to accept.

Like daylight savings time — the government decided to enact it from January to mid-March.  And they decided to enact it in the last week of December.  Go figure.

So that’s that!  More from Ushuaia.

Okay, not really out, out…but we’re finally leaving Buenos Aires after staying here over a month. It’s been good but difficult at times.

Spanish classes have been really interesting. We feel more comfortable with the language but it’s still really hard. We’re thinking about taking more Spanish in Mendoza (about a month away), but it will definitely need to be taught differently. Like maybe one-on-one. I had to go to class alone one day when John was on the phone with one of our lovely financial institutions (and no, it hasn’t been resolved in around 2 weeks which is really convenient since we’ll have limited internet access until we get to the end of the world) and it was like night and day. Like I had to actually pay attention to everything for 2 hours. Because the teacher actually expected me to respond to everything. I can see why people do one-on-one…I felt so tired but it was kind of an amazing feeling…

Next, we head down the coast. Our plan is to start in Mar del Plata — which is supposed to be really crowded right now until Easter (they celebrate Easter here for a week — it’s called something that has totally escaped me)–oh and we had totally seen a dumbed down version of Carnival here. I mean dumbed down in terms of not like in Brazil. For a few weeks they’ve had closed down some of the streets on weekend nights and they’ve had little fiestas. And the foam soap comes out which is kind of cool–anyway, then we just keep heading down the coast until we get to a place called Rio Gallegos which is kind of the last point until you get into all those problems with water. Meaning you either have to jump in a plane or cross into Chile and transport across the Magellanic Strait. Not sure how that’s going to work out but eventually we plan to get to Ushuaia (end-of-the-world), loop over to Chile and see those cool spires in the park there (you know, those ones from the advertisements for Patagonia?) and then head north again and back into Argentina until we eventually get to Mendoza where we’ll drink wine.

Did I mention they have really good and cheap wine here!  The most we’ve spent it probably 7 USD (most of the time quite a bit less than that) where we’d probably be spending at least twice that for an equivalent in the US…

Anyway, we’re outta here!

Hello All! So I totally forgot to post this and haven’t really done really anything regarding this blog since it would not have been particularly interesting – so it’s February 17th and we’ve been here since end of January.

Let’s see — we rented an apartment in the neighborhood of San Telmo which is kind of an older neighborhood that sits next to another barrio called Puerto Maderno which is like the anithesis of old. I mean, we’re talking about a neighborhood with old crumbling buildings sitting across the avenue from modern, huge apartment buildings and businesses. Both areas are really nice…San Telmo is what you always think of when you think of like old Europe with the cobblestone streets and the antique stores and Puerto Maderno has the new cineplex sitting next to a Burger King. Enough said.

Anyway, since we rented an apartment, we decided cooking/grocery shopping was in order. Which we haven’t done since Africa. Because that would require staying in a hostel with a kitchen which really hasn’t happened since we left Africa (well, I guess they had them in Taiwan but it was way too easy to go buy a ramen or some random street food that was dirt cheap). That has been quite the experience. The grocery stores have been, well, of course smaller than America’s monster grocery stores, and with limited selection. Always tons of wines, meat, and pasta – but it’s kind of a crap shoot after that. So when we’ve been bopping around the city we’ve also been bopping into grocery stores and depending on the area (like of course the ritzier areas have more selection of “ex-pat” stuff – like peanut butter and junk like that) the selection is different.

We’re also taking Spanish. Oh geez, that’s been a struggle. We’ve taken over 2 weeks – what they call semi-intensive (2 hrs/day) vs the more popular intensive (4 hrs/day) which is, in our opinion, the way to go. But we’re making progress and John was able to have a fascinating conversation with a taxi driver about car racing.  Since it’s high season, the Spanish schools kind of fill up too so we started with one teacher named Yael who is from Argentina to another teacher, Nunia who’s from Spain.  John would NOT AGREE, but I actually think it’s kind of good we had to switch teachers because we’re talking like the difference between a prima ballerina and a gogo dancer.  Yael talked slow and was able to understand some English (she’d been studying for like 20 years but wasn’t particularly fluent – scary!) and Nunia talks super fast and understands pretty much no English.  Anyway, we’ve learned a lot about learning Spanish…we learn VERY DIFFERENTLY!  I know, it’s a shock…

Anyway, we’ve done another couple of cool things although Spanish seems to have been taking up like 24 hours a day…we went to a Davis Cup match and we went to a musical.  Davis Cup was awesome.  We took the subte (subway) to the premetro (light rail) into this kind of sketchy part of town to get to Parque Roca – a tennis arena (or whatever you call those type of things).  Then we watched Argentina totally trounce Great Britain.  I have to say, watching doubles is a lot more interesting watching in person than on TV.  I think it goes way too fast on TV but in person it’s actually followable.

Then we went to a musical entitled El Burdel de Paris.  It was essentially a theatre version of the movie, Moulin Rouge…except for the singing (with the exception of the 2 main characters) totally sucked.  But it was interesting and entertaining.  In true Buenos Aires style it started at like 10:15 pm.  Oh, did I mention that whole time thing here?

So they typically drink cafe (coffee) and eat medialunas (croissants with a sweet glaze) in the mornings…then they eat lunch around 1 pm…and then…well, let’s just say we’ve been walking around at night around 10:00 pm ish and there have been people just sitting down to dinner.  Clubs don’t really start getting going until 2 am.  Oh, and what’s for lunch and dinner?  Beef.  Steak, sausage, hamburger…okay, slight exaggeration, but it seriously is the menu of choice.

Mostly, we’ve been looking around the city. We went over to the Recoleta Cemetario which is where Evita (you know, that movie where Madonna sings “Don’t cry for me Argentina…”) is buried. It’s one of those old cemetaries with whole family enclosures – quite impressive. They have awesome parks here. And man, do Argentinians know how to bake the skin. There’s always people laying out in the sun. And people actually exercise here. I think I’ve seen more people running in one day here in Buenos Aires then the whole time we were in Asia. And women have noticeable “assets”. And they flaunt it. But, wow, the shoes are very different than in Asia. The shoes were really cute in Asia…here they are sort of cute in an 80’s kind of way. We’re talking color variety – shoe color to match every outfit. No basic black to cover a variety of outfits – nope, if you’re wearing turquoise, you need some turquoise shoes.

So at the end of the month we’re going travelling again…heading south towards Patagonia…we’re getting itchy feet…

It was actually, really sad to leave Asia.  We had really enjoyed it.  But Latin America is calling our souls.  Someday we’ll return to Asia…maybe someday soon…or maybe not…

I think this trip we’re taking is making us somewhat crazy.  You kind of think you know what you’re all about and then you realize after a month or two into a trip like this…nope, you have no idea.

I tried to sketch out one of those tree things where you put something in the square and then attach yes or no arrows to them.  My tree started getting very out of control.  Too many decisions hinge on so many other things…life was so much simpler when you only had to decide on the left or right roads.  Do I take the safe road or the not so safe road?  Well, it seems like we’re on a road where we can take a left, right, second left, second right, straight, back, around the curve…too many options…

So stay tuned for more indecisions…
So anyway…we boarded a plane from Bangkok (after spending one last evening with Jeff – so sad – we were getting so used to seeing Jeff every few weeks for a lunch or dinner!) on a airline called LTU.  German.  This airline was so cool.  I mean, we were offered shots after dinner.  Leg room kind of sucked but it got us to Berlin.  With our bags.  In Berlin was spent one night.  And it was COLD!  0 degrees C.  We got up early to look around the city but ended up going back to our hotel room until check-out because it was so friggin’ cold.

From Berlin we went to Madrid on Easyjet.  After a layover of a few hours we went on a plane to Buenos Aires on Air Plus Comet.  Remarkably we landed safely and with our luggage on 3 different airlines that are all known to be kind of sketchy and semi-on-time.  And we found the apartment we are renting without actually knowing the address.  Only the cross-streets.  Kind of amazing.
But if we ever tell ANYONE we’re going from Asia to S America again without stopping…please SHOOT US!  Oh my gosh, I’ve never been more jet-lagged than after this trip.   I mean we were literally flying for over 24 hours and that doesn’t include layovers.  Like smart people would have spent a few days in Europe.  Had a few tapas in Madrid and a few beers in Germany.  Not us.  Yes, we’re insane.  Unfortunately, we are also on a budget and the friggin’ Euro kicked our butt on this trip.  I mean when a hostel bed in a dorm costs 3 X what our apartment is costing in Buenos Aires, there is something seriously crazy about this world.

By far the coolest thing we did in Chiang Mai was go to the Elephant Nature Park.

Which we almost couldn’t do since our guest house told us we only had to book one day in advance…but when we asked them to book for a Monday (it was Saturday) they called someone (who, I have no idea) and that person said it was booked until Thursday.  Well, we were going to leave Thursday so we were resigned to the fact that we weren’t going to be able to go and were kicking ourselves for not booking earlier.  Luckily, John likes music.  So he was looking at this place in the Night Bazaar that had a bunch of “his type” of music …well of course I got totally bored – John suggested I go and ask this tour place behind the stall to double-check on the park’s availability.  So I’m like, well, can’t hurt to ask.  So I go up there and ask the girl working there and say “when is your next availability?”.  She says, tomorrow.  I’m like, tomorrow?  So I had her check availability for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  They had space for Wednesday so we put down a deposit and did a little dance.  Score!  (We came to find out later from other people that they also had a lot of problems since it’s not government funded and must not give out good commission)

So we were picked up and driven out to this park.  And got to feed elephants.  We got to feed a very picky baby elephant.  They all have their own baskets (since some of the elephants are total hogs and will eat all the fruit).  This baby elephant wanted only melon.  And then when that was done she wanted bananas.  But forget about the pumpkin and pineapple.  She was having none of that.  Luckily another, bigger, elephant helped her out.  The coolest thing though is we both got elephant kisses.  The baby took it’s trunk, put it to a cheek and did this vacuum thing with it.  SO CUTE!   And then we gave them baths.  We went into the river with them and splashed water on them and scrubbed them with brushes.  Then the elephants got out and proceeded to splash sunscreen on themselves (dirt).  And then the teenagers played around by pushing each other into the mud pit.

But the sad and glad thing about this park was the condition of the elephants.  There were some sad elephants.  Since domestic elephants are considered livestock in Thailand, some of them aren’t treated very well.  One lady was blind because she had lost her baby and refused to work.  So her owner put her eye out with a slingshot.  And when she still refused to work he put the other eye out with a stick.  Lek, the woman who started the park (and she is TINY!), saw this elephant running into trees in the forest and asked the mahook what was wrong with the elephant – when he told her she offered to buy the elephant from him.  And another elephant pretty much adopted her and now they’re inseparable.  Lek has pretty much devoted her life to help elephants.  One kind of sad thing you see in Thailand is elephants walking around the streets with their mahook and you can buy sugar cane to feed the elephant.  Which sounds kind of innocent except for elephants have really sensitive feet.  They can feel vibrations and must feel crazy when they’re in cities.  Plus, Thailand is really hot.  Hot asphalt can’t be pleasant on anyone’s bare feet!  So the park is trying to get enough signatures to stop elephants in the city of Chiang Mai.  Anyway, one more sad thing – Lek had a documentary made.  It showed some really bad things (like how domestic elephants are trained – put into a cage and poked with sticks/nails for days until they bend their legs how their trainers want them to bend), how some trekking companies treat their elephants, etc. etc.  So when it came out she had death threats to herself because it showed a negative light on Thailand, and a baby elephant featured in the movie was killed.  It was poisoned because of the documentary.

It was really a fun, informative day.  Elephants are like the coolest.  They have such personality and…well, they’re just the cutest.  I’ll never forget that kiss…

Okay, so we didn’t do a ton in January.  Possibly because we knew we were going to have to actually use our minds when we hit Argentina because, well, learning languages is not really our thing.  Some people are just naturals at that sort of thing but our strengths lie in different areas.  Or so we tell ourselves anyway…

Anyway, we did a couple of cool things – one of which was so cool that I am going to put it in another post since I’m sure to ramble on about it for too long…

Another anyway, we mostly just hung out, went to the gym, studied Spanish, caught up on movies, and started a new addiction for John…drinking coffee.  Which, considering where we came from where there’s a Starbucks or Tullys or whatever like every 2 1/2 feet, is kind of funny.  But, we were in a town where it was kind of chilly, and we liked to hang out in cafes and our drink of choice, the lemon shake (I am soooo going to miss the fruit shakes when we leave Thailand!!!), was, well, kind of cold – so we ended up getting coffee.  Which, for some reason really appealed to John – especially since they make coffee FRESH – not out of the big jug thing – even the regular coffee.

We had met this couple, Simon and Louise, like a couple of times in this trip — once in Krabi (Southern Thailand), and again in Siem Reap (Cambodia) – and we met them again in Chiang Mai.  Anyway, we all decided to go to see this strip of places where they make stuff.  The first stop was umbrellas.  Or parasols, I guess, technically.  I mean, who would have thunk it took so much effort to make a parasol.  I’m not even going to go there because I don’t have any idea what the heck I’m talking about but it took a heck of a lot more work than I would think was really worth it since it’s not like they’re even useful.  But it was kind of cool because you can also get pretty much anything you want painted.  So I got an elephant painted on my pants.  I’ve yet to wash them so it might become a lovely blob after a washing but it was kind of cool.  Anyway, other stops included laquered ware, jewelery in different forms and leather.  The leather place kind of was disturbing since not only did they have leather from a cow but they also had it from elephant and those sting-ray things (the thing that killed that famous Australian nature guy).  They say they don’t kill elephants in Thailand and only use the leather after it’s died…yeah, I’m sure that’s the case.  For some reason, I’m sure it’s just because we don’t have elephants wandering around, the cow thing doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the elephant thing.  Needless to say we didn’t buy anything there.

Another cool thing we did is we went to the Sunday walking market.  I have to say this totally kicks markets like the Fremont market in the butt.  They close down the streets in this one area of town and there are a ton of small little vendors with all these different kinds of things.  Thailand really knows how to do a market.  I guess when shopping is ingrained into your soul it’s natural for you to put on a good market.  Tons of colors, tons of people…John bought a ton of CDs…it was totally cool.

Yes, I’m supposed to be learning Spanish right now.  John vanquished me from the room because he needs to concentrate.  So what am I doing?  Writing a blog entry…

Anyway, we’re in Chiang Mai.  We bopped back from Cambodia on John’s birthday where we hit a good barbeque place in Bangkok run by an American.  Pretty darn good.  And the Thai woman in this band that was playing was SOOOO good!  I mean, you would have no idea she was not American – she was singing American songs – no accent…and the owner of the place treated John to this awesome chocolate brownie and ice cream with a candle.

Chiang Mai is 10 hours by bus north of Bangkok.  We took this thing called a VIP bus.  It totally rocked.  There was like 32 seats on a double-decker bus and since it was at night it was cool because the seats totally reclined and they gave us these little box meal deals and water.  Although I will never understand about these overnight buses.  Why must we stop at midnight for a snack?  The snack was included in the price of the ticket (which was like 25 USD – kind of expensive but we figured if we’re going to be on a bus, at least it should be a good bus) but looked kind of revolting so we passed.  Anyway, except for the little kid crying for a few minutes because his mom woke him up for the midnight snack (why, we have no idea) it was very pleasant – it even played half of Terminator 3 although it was dubbed in Thai.  I guess it would be kind of good if you were Thai and wanted to hear the movie in Thai but Arnold dubbed just is wrong.

What have we been doing since then?  Well, not a whole heck of a lot.  First off, we decided we wanted to work out.  And since the national sport of Thailand and Hong Kong commonly referred to as shopping does not count as a sport, we decided to look for a gym.  After a couple of days of bopping around we found a cheap one at 35 baht a day (a little over a dollar) on top of a mall.  It’s good enough – not great (like most of the treadmills only work for walking, not running).  Secondly, we’re trying to get a jumpstart on the whole learning Spanish thing since we’ll be arriving in Buenos Aires without having classes.  So we bought some CD’s and are working on that and over the internet they have games and stuff.  Thirdly, we’re trying to stock up a bit on some t-shirts since we’ll be taking Spanish classes daily and while wearing the same shirt seems to work okay when you’re bopping from city to city, I’m sure our teachers will be very glad that we’re not wearing the same 2 scuzzy t-shirts every day.  So instead we’ll be wearing like 5 scuzzy t-shirts.
Doesn’t our life sound exciting?  Oh, and we leave for Argentina on January 22nd if I hadn’t mentioned that earlier.  We’re renting an apartment in a place called San Telmo.

Oh, and Christmas.  It was an exciting event.  We bopped around all day looking for a place to have Christmas dinner.  There were tons of places that were having it but it just didn’t excite us that much so we went to…The Sizzler.  Which are not quite as run-down here as in the states.  It was pretty darn tasty and didn’t break our budget…plus, it wouldn’t really have mattered that much because, well, the atmosphere is just not the same in a Buddhist country.  Maybe next year we’ll be back in the states for a cooler one.

We started our final day at Banteay Kdei.  For some reason we didn’t go through the whole thing the first time through and we liked this one so we put it on our repeat list.  And we finally bought the 10 pack of postcards for 1 USD.  I know this is just going to give John’s brothers ammunition to make fun of him but I thought it was sweet and a I felt bad after the fact.  This kid was RELENTLESS – would not stop bothering John to buy something from him – usually you can shake these kids after a few minutes but this one wouldn’t go away.  Finally, John said “give me a dollar” to me since he didn’t have one on him.  I said no, this kid will bother every tourist that comes through here if you buy from him.  I turned my back and walked away.  I was not going to give this kid a dollar.  John runs up to me a few minutes later and says “give me a dollar – this kid is so upset and he’s crying – he tried to hide his tears from you but I could see him crying”.

I gave him a dollar and walked away.  John caught up with me holding the pack of postcards.  He said he just couldn’t watch this kid crying his eyes out.  He just couldn’t take it.  That the kid was so unbelievably happy when he handed him that dollar.  I’m not sure if that kid was the best actor in Cambodia or if he really needed the money for something.  We’ll never know…

Anyway, on to more temples…

We went to Ta Phrom where Tomb Raider was partially filmed – it was kind of hard to see through all tourists…for some reason, maybe because it was Friday?…there were SOOOOO MANY TOUR BUSES!

And we went back to Bayon.  There were probably 20 x as many people there then the first time we went but it was kind of fun.  We sat in this one corner that was a bit shady and tour guide after tour guide came up to this one spot to tell his tourees to take a picture from.  It was totally funny.  And tourist after tourist was told not to climb on the carvings.  I guess there’s a huge desire to have a shot of yourself next to a big head.

We also saw here and at Phrom a guy doing watercolors that were amazing and this other guy doing these amazing sketches.  I didn’t realize all these sketches and paintings around here weren’t screened on – they looked like prints but apparently there are some amazing artists around here.

After a brief, last stop to look at Angkor (sob!), we were done with our 7 day trip.  It was amazing.  Better than I had hoped for.

Bayon.  The Lonely Planet was right in saying it looked like a pile of rubble until you get close to it and saw the magnificence of it.  We rode up to it thinking we were going to start with the farther out temples but decided to go in since there weren’t many people crawling around on it yet.  It was almost spiritual.  And for 2 people that aren’t particularly religious it was an awe-striking experience.

This temple was full of these huge faces.  216 of them to be exact.  All over the place.  You just wander around and see face after face.  It was so cool.  We could have sat there all day.  But we figured we could come back since we still had a couple of more days.

We went to a bunch of other ones Preah Khan, Neak Pean (one-time surrounded by water), Krol Ko, Ta Som (had this gigantic tree engulfed in it) and then we worked our way back to Angkor Thom to see the Terrace of the Elephants (which, amazingly enough had a bunch of elephants)…

By this point we’re like – we’re hot, tired and pretty much, in the words of our friend Ro, Templed out.  So we decided to call it a day and take the next day off so and go see some more ruins on the last day of our pass.

I can’t believe we decided to get on the bikes today.  But we figured if we didn’t at least get on them for a little while we would regret it…

So we went.  But we decided to not go very far.  I thought I was going to die just going to Angkor Wat which was like 20 minutes away.

But death didn’t come and Angkor Wat was AMAZING!  This was the creme de la creme of the Angkor temples.  We came shortly after sunrise and everyone was leaving.  Apparently everyone comes for sunrise and then takes off for the other temples shortly after.

We attempted to eat a pineapple on the shores of the moat of Angkor Wat for our breakfast but it was kind of nasty so we ditched it and ate the remains of dessert last night – sandwich cookies.  Oh well, it would get us through Angkor Wat.  Angkor Wat was probably the best-restored and most beautiful from near and far.  Not like some of those women that you see from really far away and then you get up close and you’re like – oh my gosh – have you heard of Loreal.

We stayed for a really long time just enjoying the temple and watching the funny monkeys playing around.  Because it was beautiful.  And we didn’t want to get back on the bikes.

But we did and went to the next one Phnom Bakheng.  This is apparently the place to go for sunset since you can see Angkor Wat (it’s set up on this hill).  There is quite literally this tiny little spot on the top of the temple where you can see Angkor Wat because of all the trees between the two spots.  It baffles me.

After that we were ready to head back.   A half day was enough after that crazy day yesterday.