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Charlotte's Travels
Hello, I'm now in Siem Reap. It was pretty exciting driving in last night and seeing the sign to Angkor Wat on the way since I've been wanting to come here since I was a little kid. Saying, that I thinking any signs of arrival would have been extremely exciting given we had been travelling since 6am in the morning and didn't arrive until 10pm at night. Because we had booked our tickets through our ambitiously helpful gueshouse man, Sophat, we didn't actually know whatr was happening and had to change buses several times often unsure where the bus was actually going. It didn't help that the fans on one of the buses wasn't working and a man on the same bus decided yesterday was the day to move his entire dining room, including a giant rocking chair which really doesn't belong balanced over two rows of bus seats.
We also managed our old trick of getting on public transport westerns don't usually going by having a five hour bus ride from Ban Lung to Kratie with a minority hill tribe who were going to a music festival. Luckily our experiences in the Ratanakiri province have geared us up well for being stared at.
On our first day in Ban Lung me and Sylva biked to a crater lake which is rightfully considered one of the most beautiful places in Cambodia. It was the perfect place to swim - clean, calm and cool, but not too cool. It's not really a tourist spot as lots of locals go there which was also nice except for a group of Cambodian guys who were getting a bit too friendly. Í feel sexually harassed' I told a British guy we'd been practicing jumps with after turning to find a dark hand stroking my pale shoulder. "That's because it's exactly what you are" the British guy told me and he was right. Luckily I figured out they couldn't actually swim properly so swimming out two metres from the wharf lost them pretty quickly.
We spent another day in Ban Lung cruising usually being stared at and hunted down by child desperate to yell hello to us (we think it may be some kind of competition) before heading out on a three day trek into Virachy National Park. Although the thought of spiders, leeches, tigers, snakes (it doesn't help that Cambodia has no anti-venom and some of the most poisonous snakes in the world) and landmines weren't the most reassuring in the world I think the most dangerous part of our whole trek was the motobike ride there. At first we just drove five minutes to market where we bought alot of vegetables and pork (which our guide later turned into deliciously fried into the best pork I've ever eaten) and I made friends with a little boy by both of us sneaking up on eachother round a table. That bit was fine, but the next part I'm not so sure about.I don't think it's a good idea to ride on bumpy dirt road for two and a half hours without a helmet, espcially if yoú're me and don''t realise that you're meant to hold on to the handles beneath you and so ride without holding on to anything the whole way. But compared to the people here who take their kids, toddlers and babies (usually all three at once) with them on their motobikes with no helmets we were probably doing pretty well.
After the moto and a two hour ride in a tiny boat down a turqouise river we stayed the first night in a minorit hill tribe village. We were lucky in that we managed to befriend a group of beautiful and hilarious kids. Having talked to some other people who had been in the village the night earlier than us I don't think these children usually interact much with Westerners.They were a bit wary of us at first but for some reason (probably involving the hilarity of watching us try to wash all the dirt from the moto ride off us, helped by a ball which it's skin head five year old owner reluctantly let us borrow to play a piggy in the middle/netball/hotpotato/soccer hybrid) the kids took a shine to us and we spent most of the afternoon and evening with them. None of us could understand a word the other was saying, but this just meant we had to get innovative. We played alot with the ball and a game of 'hi ya' which turned out to be tag which was not the easist feat given it was pitch dark and small people kept stealing my torch. The kids took full advanatage of the darkness by creeping behind us and turning their eyelids inside out and pulling their black hair (think the Grudge) over their faces to scare us. It worked but I think Sarah managed to get them back by taking her contacts out. The look on their faces was as though she had jus pulled out her eyes, which I think they thought she had. The only problem was that they then kept trying to get me and Sylvia to do the same and couldn't understrand why we wouldn't. But I think the coolest moment was when we learned we had one word we all understood - Çambodia'- and decided all dance manically together to celebrate while chanting it at the top of our lungs.
The next two days were pretty exhaustuing if, like me your are not used to walking for hours through a jungle that has no proper path in the heat while you're guide swings a machete two inches from your face to attempt (and mostly fail) to get the trees out of your way. It is made even worse if, like me, you have a terrible fear of leeches and there are hundreds of them trying to attach themselves to your legs. This did have the benefit of making me walk extremely fast so they couldn't get me though and I managed to get not one leech bit the entire time, although poor sarah got about six or seven. It was very cool to see such intense unexplored jungle and to sleep in hammocks under the stars (well, actually under a mosquito net, under the stars) miles away from anywhere. Quite a bit of the track followed the Ho Chi Minh trail and we say old rusted machine guns and bazookas left over frm the war.
It's nice to be back in civlisation in Siem Reap which has an amazing array of delicious food. Despite this, this morning at breakfast I was overjoyed to be able to eat peanut butter on toast, which I have not been able to have for a long long time. This afternoon we are going to the Angkor museum so we will hopefully be a bit fairly knowledgeable when we head of to the temples with our guide, who is competing with alot of his other coutrymen for the title of kindest and most helpful person in the world.
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