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Cambodia
To get to Cambodia, we first had to get a short flight to Bangkok from Chiang Mai. It was quite sad to say goodbye as we had a great time there with Dave, Nuiy, Mutley and Fat Dog. Yeah, they called one of their dogs Fat Dog. Oh, and Sachwon who drove us everywhere, including the airport at 5.30. He was so happy about that.
It was early and the plane was 3/4 full of retard, sorry, retired Americans who were all part of the same huge tour. It was as if they had never taken a flight before. What should have taken 20 minutes to board the plane turned into an hour. Just dauldling along without a care in the world - apart from getting their ridiculously large hand luggage into the overhead storage.
Anyway, we eventually landed an hour and twenty minutes late for an hour and a half flight where our taxi driver was patiently waiting.
It was a 3 hour drive to the Thai border in Poipet which should have been straight forward enough, apart from we needed some more cash. So we stopped at an ATM in a petrol station and I proceeded to obtain some monies.
It has to be said that the ATM process in Thailand is plain stupid. The machine is setup to give you your cash, then your receipt, then your card. Lunacy! This makes it very easy to forget your card, trust me, I did it, and I have a very good memory. Stop laughing.
All I can say in my defence is Alex distracted me but really I blame the Thai banking system. I certainly had nothing to do with it.
This made a straightforward journey rather stressful as we had to go to the bank and try to explain what happened/get our card back. We were highly unsuccessful in both of these matters so got back in the car.
Once we reached the border we were hearded like sheep towards the three different check points to obtain our visas and stamps. This was all rather confusing but we made it through eventually and met our man on the other side. We then got a bus followed by a taxi into Cambodia and to our hostel. The taxi ride took us two hours down a straight road the whole way, passing hardly anything apart from crazily over loaded motorbikes and a pick-up truck who's wheels had literally fallen off. Fortunately ours didn't and we reached Siem Reap and Two Dragons guesthouse.
The following evening we went to a restaurant called Le Tigre de Papier for a Valentines Day, Cambodian meal. They cut out the garnish in the shape of hearts and I shamelessly claimed this was at my special request. Alex obviously wasn't fooled for a second but it was a nice touch and a good meal to prepare us for visiting the Angkor Wat temples in the morning.
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