Endless Summer Tiny World

Pnom Pehn ended up being a horrible last night as we found out our bed had bedbugs! So we didn’t sleep much and instead packed up our stuff and waited for the bus starting at 4:00 am. We are really hoping we didn’t bring any with us, but only time will tell. We got everything we could possibly wash done as soon as we got to Siem Reap!

We had planned to meet up with our Canadian friends Lindsay and Jeff when we got to Siem Reap and we found them right after we got here. We went out for dinner and drinks that night on Pub Street. The next morning we were up again at 4 am to get to Angkor Wat and see the sunrise over the temple. It was great! Angkor Wat is HUGE!! It is twice as tall as the london tower and the wall around it is 2 miles long and yet it only took 35 years for them to construct it! We spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon seeing several other towers. We all agree our favorites are Bayon, a temple with over 50 towers with faces on all of them, and Ta Prohm, the temple where tomb raider was filmed and it is being taken over by massive trees all over the place! Everyday after our temple viewing we come home to cool off and jump in the pool. This day we also needed a nap after being up so early! We had another dinner on Pub Street and Chelsy and I stayed out dancing and hanging out at the bars there.

The next day Chelsy and Lindsey and I headed off for the temples since Jeff had gotten sick. We saw a lot that were in ruins and cool ones, but after a bit of being sooo hot and seeing so many the excitement wears off. Last night we got the best foot massages ever for only $3 for an hour and we got to watch a video all about the building of Angkor Wat.

Today was our last day of temples and then a sunset on the mountain temple. We had a great time in Siem Reap and I loved Angkor Wat! It is really an amazing place and to sit at the top of some of these temples and think about all the work that went into building them and just how big and old they are is crazy! Definitely belongs as one of the wonders of the world!

We said goodbye to Lindsay and Jeff today, as they head into Vietnam and we are headed back for Thailand, which was sad since we got along with them so well, but we are planning to meet up with them again in Northern Vietnam where our paths will cross again in April! Tomorrow morning we are making the long haul to Ko Samui Thailand to meet up with two of our friends from ship! Im so excited to see them as its been over a year! We have 5 days with them before we are off to Singapore to meet up with some other ship friends! The next three weeks are going to be super fun but are also going to fly by!!

From pakse we headed to don det, or an area known as 4,000 islands. It is a fairly tiny little island that is soon going to be very touristy and popular. We found our very humble guesthouse and headed to get a boat to see the freshwater dolphins that live in the Mekong river at the border of Laos and Cambodia. As we were looking we found our Canadian friends we had met at a temple outside of pakse. We stopped to chat for a bit, then a bit turned into an hour and having beers, which then turned into dinner which then turned into us having some great new friends and a lot of fun just hanging out for the night. The next morning we got up and rented a bike and biked down to an even smaller little island nearby where we got a boat to the dolphins. They were far away but we saw lots of them. They are so different looking because they have round little faces instead of the bottlenose or spinner dolphins we are used to! We then biked to an awesome and huge waterfall! It was about four rivers converging together at one point! We then biked to the beach so we could jump in and cool off and then spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach with our new friends jeff and Lindsay.

The next morning we were off to phnom phen, Cambodia. This was supposed to take most the day but it became even longer when, as usual the bus was late and then again when we had a problem with the tire that took about an hour to fix! But it was bound to happen sometime with the condition of the roads. We made it finally to our place and had dinner and drinks with our new British friend mike.

This morning we were up to get the tuk tuk we hired for the day to take us to the genocide museum. It was so crazy, really interesting and of course heart wrenching. This is the prison the Khmer rouge used to torture people and imprison people in phnom phen. It was so crazy and we actually spent about 3 hours there! We then went out to the killing fields, the area outside the city where they buried thousands of people in mass graves! It is so crazy to all of us that this only took place in 1975!! It just seems so recent! Like we all should have known better after Germany and all the concentration camps. We finished off the day with a quick visit to the Russian museum but found that it wasn’t too special. So now it’s time for dinner and a couple much deserved drinks after putting all our hearts through the wringer today. It was very I treating but definitely not an easy day!

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So this morning Chelsy and I got up and decided we should go to the weekend market. It is one of the largest markets in Thailand with over 8,000 stalls! They sell everything. We didn't buy much or stay too ... [Continue reading this entry]

We had a couple days to kill before our day with jib and Joe and before Tasia and Angie fly in so we headed to kanchanaburi, mostly famous for the bridge over the river Kwai. We settled in to our ... [Continue reading this entry]