So a girl from my bus/taxi ride, Martine, from Boston, stayed at my hotel and we decided to do Angkor Wat together.
I decided that the best way to go would be to hire a tuk-tuk to take us around. Bikes was another idea but the temples are probably 8km away from the hotel and big surprise, it’s SUPER hot out!
The hotel guys asked me like 3 times if I wanted to do the “short tour” or the “long tour”. I told them the long tour would be better each time, $18 (cold water included!), everything is cool. Then in the morning I was having breakfast, and my driver came over to me and asked me a question. I thought he was just saying “leave at 9?”, so I said yes. And he looked surprised, but it was like 8:45 so I wasn’t sure why. We would find out later.
We first did the big temple at Angkor Wat.
This day was more about pics than stories. The only story was that my camera battery died about halfway through the 2nd temple, so I’m going to wait to get a bunch of pics from Martine to fill in the gaps! Here are a few more.
Before lunch, our driver mentioned something about us being on the short trip. There was some confusion which stemmed from his question to me at breakfast, which he said he asked me (again!) if I wanted the short tour! I guess I didn’t hear him right (I’m still terrible with accents!), and said yes…anyway, we ended up paying him a few more bucks and got both the short AND long tour! Kinda funny, since you would think the long tour would include everything.
I’m adding more photos later. There’s a lot to like in Siem Reap, besides the temples. The little downtown area with “Pub Street” is full of good restaurants with Khmer (prounced “Ka-May”) food and western food. I loved a lot of the Khmer food including the Amok sauce and the Lok-lok (which I think is pork with some kind of good sauce). We also hit up this bar called “Angkor What?” and added to the graffiti all over the walls.
Side note: the tuk tuk drivers are so trusting here, lots of times they will give you a ride somewhere and not even take money and they’ll just say “find me later when you’re done eating and want to go back”. I think this is a risk-reward thing. They could get like 2 bucks out of us if they take the money right away, but if they stick with us, we may want to go to 2 or 3 places and they could get $10 or more using this strategy!
More coming soon!
