25.08.2009

We are currently sitting in our latest hostel room in Sihanoukville and the power has just gone off so we’ll see how long we can last without our air con! I’ll start by filling you in on our thoughts of Siem Reap.

Alex and I enjoyed our time in Siem Reap. We have found Cambodia slowing moving, gentle and calm. Their version of Tuk-Tuks are a joy to get into especially with the rare cool breeze and I could spent all day driving around in one. In fact, our Tuk-Tuk driver took us on a long ride through villages to get to the port in Siem Reap to go to the floating village and when we got there we decided we preferred the ride more and got back in the Tuk-tuk back to the hostel! We were very tired though as we were up at 4:30 am to go to Angkor Wat (temples) to see the sunrise which was very beautiful and then we looked around some more temples and as we were there so early we were the first to go into most of them. We’d spent the day before at Angkor Wat too and saw most of the temples then with lots of other tourists so today it was much nicer although I did walk through a HUGE spiders web at got it all over my face! The temples are truly incredible, especially as they were built between the 10th and 12th Century. We are trying to upload the photos but having a few technical problems.

We really enjoyed staying in Siem Reap and staying at a really friendly, family run hostel. The town has lots of choice for where to eat, one evening we ate at the ‘Khemer BBQ’ restaurant where there was a table top bbq with a sort of moat around the outside. They gave us a variety of meats for us to cook on the top such as chicken, pork, squid, crocodile and beef. We opted out of having the snake though! The juices from the meat then ran down into moat which was full of a broth with vegetables and noodles in which made a lovely soup! I then had an ice-cream that came out with a sparkler in it and I felt very special!

After a relaxing final day in Siem Reap we got an over night bus to Sihanoukville which was surprisingly nice and comfortable. We even had on board entertainment of ‘night at the museum two’ which helped make to time go by quicker. Once we arrived we checked into our hostel and then after a bit of a snooze we went to the Vietnamese embassy to get out visas which was very stress free and only took about ten minutes in total. We then went to explore the town, ending up on the beach. It was very hot but had a nice breeze. It’s a very narrow beach, most of which is taken up by beach bars with their tables and loungers so you had to go to one of them, which isn’t too bad as their draft beers are only 50 cents! We then went for a wander around the town but found it very humid and realised the town in bigger than we thought! It is a lot grubbier than Siem Reap and everything is widely spread out. For dinner we went back to the beach and had bbq food which was very tasty and the views out to sea were beautiful and very tranquil. We shared a Mekong bucket and then slept for about twelve hours! Whilst we were having our dinner a man who was severely physically disable came over to us and our initial thought was that he wanted some money as in South East Asia beggars are a regular occurrence. In fact he just wanted a chat and was practising his English and he then went off to sit with some Germans who had bought him dinner.
Today we are going to go to the beach, however it’s a bit winding but still hot so it will be a welcome breeze!