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We spent one night in Bangkok before heading off on the worst journey ever. It took 4 hours to the Cambodian border, where we had to stop for 2 hours and paid well over the odds for our Cambodian visa. As we finally crossed the border the rain started we then had to wait another hour for the bus to take us into Siem Reap. The bus turned up and was pretty terrible, but things got worse the road was horrendous a bumpy track for 7 hours made worse by the rain. We had to stop on several occasions for the driver to clear the windscreen of mud. It is rumoured that an airline pay for the road to be left as it is so more people fly! As the journey took us 7 hours we were then dropped off at a guesthouse of the drivers choice even though they assured us it was not a scam. We were so tired that we decided to just stay as it was clean and cheap. In the morning we checked out and were told they would give us a lift into town, but when we said we wanted to be taken to bar street and not the guesthouse they wanted to drop us off at they got quite nasty and told us to get there ourselves. As we were walking out another couple were doing the same so we headed off together. We managed to get a tuk tuk to take us to the centre and then we found a nice guesthouse "popular guesthouse" to stay at. We then went for breakfast with James and Rachel. As we still had most of the afternoon left we decided to all take a tuk tuk to the floating village and the Tonle Sap lake. We had a boat to ourselves and so we set off. Apparently as we are visiting in the rainy season the area is flooded and normally the villages are much further out on the lake. The houses are wooden rafts and you can see the locals going about their daily jobs and some of the children playing pool, very surreal. Once on the lake (the second largest in the world) it was amazing, it was as if we were at sea and there was just lake as far as the eye could see. Our boatman pointed out a water tower 2 km out and told us that was where the lake normally started in the dry season. On the way back we were taken to a crocodile and fish farm, the crocs looked pretty bored! We ended up getting back quite early and having Khymer Curry for tea and Angkor beer we managed to eat plenty and drink some jugs of beer all for a total of 10 quid between us bargain!
Our second day saw us getting up at 5.00am to meet our tuk tuk driver who would be taking us around Angkor Wat and the other temples. We arrived at Angkor Wat first just in time for sunrise, which unfortunately was not a great one because there was too much cloud. The temple is amazing and Wayne was awe struck it is one of the things he wanted to see most on the trip! Outside the temple there were loads of children trying to see us postcards and water, their English was great and it was really sad that they were doing this rather than at school, maybe one day they can earn enough money by being an English speaking tour guide themselves. We had a wander around and then we were taken for breakfast. After this we had a chance to look around Bayon temple inside Angkor Thom, this also had one temple that was under restoration and also the wall of elephants. We then made our way out to Ta Keo, an unfinished temple. We were able to look around them all but this one had really narrow steep steps, we got a few feet up and then decided it was too risky. Our final stop was Ta Prohm, the jungle temple that was used in Tomb Raider. This temple has been left to nature and there are trees growing all over the walls, it feels very strange, but this was definitely my favourite one. We had managed to see all of the temples we wanted to in under 5 hours. As it was still early we decided to check out of the guesthouse and head off to the capital Phnom Penh.
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