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The past few days have been pretty damn good. Siem Reap is a lot nicer than Phnom Pehn, in fact one of my favourite Asian cities, it's much more chilled out and everything is in one place rather than walking around for ages and not finding anything. We met up with Elena and Holly and met Marcel, a guy they had been travelling with.
The first day was spent travelling, and when we eventually got to Siem Reap found that Elena and Holly had saved us a room in their guesthouse so we didn't have to bother with finding somewhere to stay which was great. We were intending on all getting an early night so that we could see the sunrise over Angkor Wat in the morning, which meant getting up at around 4.30. We went out for dinner and then to the bar over the road for a single drink. Which turned into multiple buckets of whiskey and vodka. The idea of going to sunrise had been abandoned. I went back to the room a bit early and about an hour later everyone else came back, announcing that we were going to sunrise now. So we jumped in the tuctucs and at 4am and drunk we went to the temples of Angkor. We had to wait for the ticket offices to open and when we did had to have pictures taken, these are great, Holly has the best photo ever. We watched the sunrise and took a million and one pictures, of exactly the same thing but with slightly different lighting behind it. We then went back to the tuctucs and had to explain that although we'd booked them for the day, we just wanted to go to sleep and therefore wouldn't pay them as much as they wanted. This led to a bit of an altercation which meant that we had to get a new tuctuc and when we arrived at the guesthouse one of the old drivers had followed us and threw a bottle of water at us...
After our naps we went back to the temples, this time hungover, as we had paid $40 for this ticket and needed to make the most of it. We got driven around temple after temple, I couldn't really differentiate between some of them, but they're better than the usual temples. They're all ruins, which I like better than actual working temples. We were going to stick around for sunset but couldn't really be bothered and it looked a bit cloudy so went back to the guesthouse and got dinner.
The next day we went around a few more temples, got caught up in a thunderstorm and didn't bother with the sunset again. We saw Angkor Wat that day, the 8th Wonder of the World. To be honest, it wasn't that impressive, out of all the temples it's the one in the best condition but it's all a bit samey... We went out that night, as we decided to take a day off tomorrow and once again drank a lot of buckets. At one point, Elena disappeared outside and returned arms in the air, with a motorbike helmet on. There is no explanation for where it came from or why she had it, but it was absolutely hilarious!
On our day off we didn't do too much, slept for a while and sat around in restaurants for a while. I got some new stuff put onto my ipod (not a great thing as I ended up watching 5 episodes of House in a row and barely sleeping that night) and we visited the night market. We all tried the "ear candleing" where you get a piece of paper put into your ear and set on fire, it was a bit odd and I'm not convinced that it cleans your ears properly.
We intended on using up the last day of our temple ticket on our last day in Siem Reap but I think everyone was a little bored of temples and we'd seen all there is to see in the nearby area anyway. Marcel had been talking to a guy about going to teach english in a school in a local village nearby and we all went over to have a look. Most of us ended up having a go at teaching, where the kids were surprisingly good at English for their age and what they had, and they were all so eager to learn! It was really nice to interact with some children who don't really see many westerners so got a bit excited and loved to try out their English. Once again, we went out to celebrate our last night together before all going our separate ways. Only problem was that we didn't get in until 5am, and me and Grace had to catch a bus at 7.30. Suffice to say it wasn't a fun experience and we didn't get into Bangkok until 5pm!
The plan is now to get a bus over to Koh Tao and do a few of the southern islands in the 15 days that our visa allows.
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Arun Tailor Wow Cambodia seemed like fun... i suppose it was refreshing seeing people you know... I'm glad you got to see the sunset...