Koh Samet to Siem Reap, Cambodia - Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

We have finally left the beach and are in our second country, Cambodia.

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9^th Feb

After waking up relatively late due to a long night of celebrations for Casey’s birthday, we had decided to stay in Koh Samet for two more nights. We found out that our current room has been previously booked, so we had to find some new accommodation. We walked around for about an hour in the rain trying to find a hotel, until we eventually found one just around the corner. Fortunately for us, the hotel was much nicer then the first and at the same price of 500 baht, or approximately A$16 for us both, was a steal. We inevitably spent the day relaxing by the beach reading, before Casey enjoyed a run on the beach. The day was then finished off by having dinner with some friends we’d made the day before, by the beach of course.

10^th Feb

As our final day on Koh Samet, we decided to make it count with some serious beach work. I, unfortunately for me, was roomridden due to a very mild bout of the runs, the first victim of what I’m sure will inevitably reoccur during our trip. Luckily that passed within a few hours and I was able to join Casey on the beach where he had accrued additional sunburn whilst reading his book and taking photos as you have probably seen in the tabs above (if not, check them out!). We enjoyed a bit of a workout session on the beach before a light run and enjoyed our final night by having another dinner on the beach at a place we’d frequented every night bar one.

11^th Feb

We were keen to go to Cambodia, and utilising the liberated Lonely Planet guide we had an extremely rough idea about how we intended to get there. We got off the island much later the expected and luckily were ushered to a minivan company, which did visa runs to Cambodia. They suggested we headed to the city Pailin, just across the border and then make our way to Battambang. We had no idea where Pailin was as it was not listed in the lonely planet, so we spent the next few hours on a bus that dropped us in a Thai city just near the border that we still have no real idea about. After waiting at an outdoor restaurant for an hour, we were both forced to learn our first real words in Thai, the words for “public toilet”. This was mainly due to Casey’s failed attempt of a hand rubbing gesture, which made a lady gesture towards a tap….. We caught another minivan to the Cambodian-Thai border, which was typical of a Thai town, happy people, colourful, graveled roads and buildings that I still would have considered pretty rudimentary, until we crossed the border and saw the ultimate contrast.

The border crossing was relatively painless, but as we crossed, we were hounded by men pulling up on motorbikes for lifts and taxi rides on the now dirt road. We ended up acquiring the help of an English speaking tourist advisor (who obviously would get commission out of any sale he assisted in) we reluctantly paid for a taxi to Battambang as the suggested alternative was to stay in a hotel that looked like it would be robbed the second we fell asleep. The roads we travelled down were mostly ungraded as we avoided potholes after pothole as we passed houses that were now made of wood and straw in the most part, we could visually see the difference between Thailand and Cambodia, and the harsh history of the country really did start to become highly evident. The taxi driver was in fact one of the men that had been stalking us down the street earlier, yet through his limited English, we could tell that he was actually a really nice guy as he stopped off at picturesque locations so we could take photos. After working out the debacle of paying the driver in Thai Baht and American dollars, which we have now learnt is interchangeable with Cambodian currency, the Riel (1 to approx. 4000), we found a nice hotel. Battambang was obviously quite a touristy town, but it was a nice place to start in Cambodia.

12^th Feb

The night before we had organised a Tuk Tuk with three other people to go around and see the local sights of Battambang for the day. We first ventured to the Bamboo train, which is just a rectangle formed by pieces of bamboo to utilise abandoned French train tracks. This was great to get a few pictures of the Cambodian countryside. We then went to a very old yet beautiful temple that was reached via a rather steep set of stairs at Phnom Banan. We then went to the only winery in Cambodia and had a wine tasting.  There is a reason there is only a single winery in Cambodia. I have a feeling we were drinking gasoline infused with grape juice…. Our final and most confronting destination so far was to a set of temples; bat infested caves and “The Killing Caves” at Phnom Sampeau. Visiting the latter definitely put things into perspective for us, as we learnt about the bloody atrocities committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during their relatively recent reign. This did not completely hinder the enjoyment of seeing the temples in the area, visiting a monastery where monks were living and accidently disturbing numerous classes of students in a school as they all wanted to wave and say hello as we passed. We then watched a consistent stream of bats leave their cave for roughly 20 minutes. It was truly incredible to see them uniformly weave into the distance and even more interesting to watch from a platform next to the head of a 30 metre Buddha being carved into a cliff face. We then went back to town and enjoyed a traditional Cambodian dinner with our friends from the Tuk Tuk.

13^th Feb

We decided to set out towards Siem Reap, which is the town that is within reach of Ankor Wat. We boarded a relatively small boat that uncomfortably took roughly 9 hours to reach Siem Reap port, passing by floating villages and the friendliest people, always waving and smiling. We then caught a Tuk Tuk into town finding out that most accommodation was full at this point, spending an hour with our packs trying to find a place to stay. We had to break the accommodation budget for the first night, yet we had a pretty nice air conditioned room. We ventured out into Siem Reap to discover how expectedly touristy it really was. There’s a street called “Pub street”, enough said. We visited the night markets, which is really just stall after stall of relatively similar merchandise such as the Khmer scarf.

14^th Feb – Valentine’s Day!

That brings us to today, a day we have decided to relax and try to recover from the sunburn and peeling that has been inflicted on us whilst on Koh Samet and the boat ride from Battambang yesterday. We had a nice scrambled egg breakfast with the most amazing bread either of us was expecting in Asia (probably due to the French influence on Cambodia). We are preparing our next few nights here and our trip to Ankor Wat and the surrounding temples, which is one of the main reasons we really decided to come to South East Asia, hopefully it’ll live up to the hype. Unfortunately for the day, we are each other’s Valentines....

We are loving the people we are meeting and the unexpected and different experiences we are already having. We can’t believe it’s only been 9 days. Hopefully it keeps up and you’ll keep reading about our adventures. Hope all is well back home, we both send our love.

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