Day 27, 28, 29, and 30

(Jamie)

The journey from Koh Samui to Siem Reap involved 4 buses, 1 ferry, 1 train, 1 taxi and a Tuk Tuk . Our first plan was to catch a second train in Bangkok to the Cambodian border, however we didn't have high hopes due to our previous dealings with Thai time keeping, and sure enough we arrived over 2 hours late in Bangkok and missed our train. We decided not to spend another day in Bangkok to wait for the next train, and instead opted to go via bus to the border with the deal including transport from the border to Siem Reap. We then had the choice of going by bus or share taxi from the border to Siem Reap, and so chose the taxi (we shared our taxi with an American guys from Alaska). It turned out to be a very good decision as the bus people had to wait longer for it to leave and had an extra 2-3 hours journey time to Siem Reap. The drive to Siem Reap involved one long, straight road flanked on both sides by dried out rice fields as far as you could see, with the occasional cow in the road requiring quick use of good brakes.

We arrived at our Hotel (Prom Roth) 31 hours after setting off from Koh Samui It was very nice for the price (£7). We were very close to the main backpacker area, which looked like a mini Khao San road. Everything seemed very cheap here after the Thai Islands, with a pint of Angkora lager costing about 25p!!!

We had a bit of a lie in the next day to recover from our travel ordeal. We headed out to explore abit of Siem Reap and were pleasantly suprised and with the low prices decided to treat ourselves to an ice cream and cocktail . We arranged with the Hotel to go to Angkor Wat for sunset and left at about 4.30pm for the main temple. Our first sight of Angkor didn't disappoint and we soon realised why many people have given this place the number 1 spot on Asia's must see list. We didnt have much time to go into the temple and as we had booked a full guided tour for the next day we decided to just sit and watch the bright red sunset.

We were up at 5am the next morning to watch the sunrise at Angkor. Michelle really enjoyed this but I struggled with the early start. We met our guide, Dara, at 7am and he brought along one of his students called Pis-ed. He spoke really good English and took us to the first temple, Bayon, via the Ankor Thom gate. Learning about the temples and the Khmer history was enjoyable but it was far more interesting talking to Dara about life in modern Cambodia and his thoughts on the present system. We soon learnt that Cambodian's dislike Koreans due to their tours not using local guides or tuktuks. We saw one other temple that morning before heading for lunch. Lunch was very funny as Dara, his student and our tuktuk driver, David, were very interested in what life is like in England asking us questions like, what does our house look like and what are our schools like? In the afternoon we went to the jungle temple (Ta Prom) or the Tomb raider temple. It was an impressive sight with trees bursting out of the stone. The whole scene looked like Disney had made it and it was hard to believe it was actually real!. Finally we headed back to Angkor Wat for the last part of the tour. On the way we stopped at the side of the road as someone was feeding a group of monkeys and it was a good chance to get a close up view. At the end of the day I gave my Torres shirt to the guide as he works for Global Child and we said our goodbyes.

Overall we really enjoyed our trip to the Angkor temple area, and both agreed that it had been one of the best days of the trip so far.