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Our next stop was Siem Reap. This town is famous because of the Angkor Wat temple. We had a early start to see the temple at sunrise. I must confess I was rather underwhelmed by the sunrise. But once I got close to the temple it was pretty spectacular. We also saw Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Phrom, South Gate and the Terrace of the Leper King. It’s impressive seeing all these temples. They cover a huge area and it does take you back in time and one wonders how it might have been when the kings ruled there. We had an opportunity to visit the Cambodian landmine museum. Its more of a museum / orphanage / education center. There are a lot of landmine victims (mostly kids) that are affected. These kids are educated here, but also taught how to disarm the landmines. There motto is “One landmine at a time”. After this I decided to donate blood. Being O+ makes me an ideal blood donor I guess. This was an interesting experience as it was my first time and felt a bit nauseous afterwards. The doctor told me to lie down and have a coca cola. Sean, Krista & Sarah all went with. Dave, Linda, Sean & myself hired bicycles and did a ride out to Tonle Sap Lake. It’s the largest freshwater lake in Asia apparently. In the dry season it covers about 300 000 hectares, but in winter gets 10 times that size and rises by 12m. We rode about 30km that day and I was very impressed with Linda who out cycled Dave and Sean. Shame, Sean was taking strain and I think he was bonking and not in a good way. We did make it back in one piece though J. One good thing that I did manage to do in Cambodia was get my iPod filled with music. I bought my iPod in Hong Kong & was using it to store photos & had no music. Well I now have 110 albums to listen to. I must say I enjoyed Siem Reap. It was a smaller town & the venues we went to were really cool. The main currency in Cambodia is US dollars and as a result you tend to pay more than if you were paying local currency. But Cambodia is a very very poor place, so I guess it goes into the local ecomomy. Our trip from Siem Reap to Bangkok was interesting. We were loaded onto 2 pick-ups and then drove for 4 hours on sand roads that were potholed and flooded at various places. When you got to the other end we were all covered in red dust that got in everywhere. Krista gave us each a large plastic bag to cover our packs, which worked a dream. Crossing the Cambodian / Thai border took about 2 hours. A doddle if you consider my 9hr Russia / Mongolia crossing.
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