I wrote this entire journal entry last night, and right as I clicked the "Post"button, I lost it. And I don't even know how! So I shall begin again.

After 5 weeks together, more than 2 of which were just the two of us, Marilyn and I have finally parted ways. It was so sad! And so fast! We stumbled off the bus at 530am in Bangkok, grabbed our bags, said goodbye and were off in different taxis so quickly! We had such a great time together though. We will have to travel together again sometime, hopefully dragging cousins Bailey and Cole with us.... Yeah.

So Marilyn took off for the airport and I grabbed a cab to the train station, with about 25 minutes to spare before the next train left to the Cambodian border. My cab driver spoke a bit of English, so he knew where I wanted to go, but then he got weird. He asked me my name and when I replied he acted like I was his long lost sister or something. "Natalie?! You Natalie?!" and kept rambling on and on about something, but I didn't actually get what his point was. Then the things he kept attempting to say seemed to be in favor of changing my plans, and after 5 minutes or so of him talking about the bus station, the sky train and himself driving me to the border I finally said "No! Train station!" and he finally shut up and seemed to take his job seriously for a moment. But when 2 minutes later he couldn't make the gear shift shift, for the second time, I had had enough and ditched him. I flagged down the next cab I saw, said train station, and much to my (not so) surprise, he did a complete U-turn and went about 10k back down the road we had just come up. Who WAS that first driver?! I was so creeped out, and now I only had 15 minutes or so to catch that train. I was resigning myself to a 6 hour wait in Bangkok when we pulled into the station. Praise the Lord for honest cab drivers! He was my hero. I made my train with 3 minutes to spare, threw down my bag and curled up as well as I could to sleep.

Five hours later I arrived at Aranyaprathet, the Thai border town and spent about 3 hours getting no more than 2k down the road, what with Visas to arrange and long stamping lines at both Thai and Cambodian embassies. When the waiting was finally over, a bunch of us travellers were thrown in a bus that would take us another 5 hours down the road to Siem Riep on the bumpiest road I've ever been on. You would never guess that at one time it had been paved. I didn't mind it as much as I expected to though, because the drive went through the most beautiful, albeit DUSTY, countryside. I felt like I was just seeing a slice of Cambodian life. It was wonderful. On the way to Siem Riep, I made friends with Jane, a sweet Aussie, and Adam, a teacher from Phoenix. We ended up hanging out together for quite a while, and we explored Angkor Wat together for the next two days.

As for Angkor Wat? What a blast! The guys at our guest house hired themselves out to us for 8$ a day to be our motorcycle taxis all over the wats. It was so much fun! Jane was scared of the bikes the first day, but after about 5 minutes she was loving it as much as Adam and I. We wandered all over these ruins, getting lost when things looked the same(which they frequently did), taking pictures of the trees growing on top of the walls and finding shady nooks to take breaks in, all the while being pestered by Cambodians selling postcards and "cold drinks! cold drinks!" Though I did buy my share of those, being that it was SO HOT all day long. Eventually, we climbed up to a wat on a hill to watch the sunset. The sun turned bright red and hot pink as it sunk lower and lower. The whole thing was gorgeous.

That first day was 8 hours of wandering and climbing around, but we were not detered by that and woke up at 5am the next morning to check out the sunrise being Angkor Wat itself. Wow. That is all I can say. Then we climbed back on our bikes with our driver buddies and they took us 35k away to another wat, and even though that wat was cool, the ride out was the best part. We saw the locals who weren't trying to sell us things, and who were just living their life. It was so beautiful. This is all at about 7 in the morning too, with the sun just barely coming up over us. It was just a fantastic experience.

Other than Angkor Wat, we just hung out a bit in the city of Siem Riep, which has next to nothing of intrest to a traveller. Unless said traveller is interested in seeing things other than churches and museums. I was so proud of the three of us! I don't think we ate in a restuarant once! There was a market just down the street and food stalls were all over, not that ANY of them had anything that even remotely resembled food. We had to be mostly daring to get anything at all to eat. I've eaten so much mystery mean in the last 4 days, I honestly don't even want to know what it all was. Then there was the market, where my favorite site was the buckets of eels or catfish (Icouldn't really tell) that were still flipping about. I particularly liked it when one of them flipped right into the vender's lap, and he didn't bat an eye. :)

Next stop, Phnom Pehn, and the parting of the new fellowship, Jane, Adam and I. Until then....