Day 4 - Siem Reap 9/13

Having to sleep on chairs in the airport, Kara and I only got a couple hours of course, and if you are counting, that means I have had three days of little or no sleep out of the four since I left Michigan. Of course we were hungry, and knew that we wouldn’t get anything for free on the airplane, so we found a café in the airport that gave us free hot water and we had oatmeal packets, so that made a nice breakfast (with tiny spoons for stirring coffee because I didn’t see their regular spoons!).

We had an hour delay getting on our final flight to Siem Reap in Cambodia due to a rain storm, so after a lot of traveling in just a few days, I was more than ready to finally get to our destination.

Can you tell it is rainy season?!?

We took a tuk-tuk from the airport to our hostel (which was very nice for only $10!!) and then walked into town to meet Kara’s friend Enice for lunch.

The food was good, and we got to eat with geckos climbing on the walls and everything. Enice joined us a little later and we sat around and chatted for a while. Then Kara and I walked around town, shopped a little bit at the market, and just basically checked things out. We enjoyed a snack from The Blue Pumpkin, which is a Western bakery in town.

Then we got back in out tuk-tuk (Tom was our driver while we were in town) and headed out to the Angkor Archaeological Park where we could buy our tickets to see the temples the next day, and get in free to watch the sun set that evening. Their sun rises and sets at pretty much the same time every day – 6 AM and PM. That was kind of strange to me, too, but I guess it makes sense, with them being so close to the equator and all.

On the way, I got to see monkeys just hanging out in the street, and although I was fairly close to them, I only have blurry pictures.

Angkor Wat on the way to where we were going for the sunset (more on that tomorrow)

Kara surprised me with an elephant ride (another first!) to the top of Phnom Bakheng where the temple was, which was very cool. We climbed up on top of the temple (along with lots of other people) and waited – but there really wasn’t much of a sunset.

You can't really tell in this picture, but the steps were super narrow and very steep...which made going up and down them interesting :)


A view from the top


This one is blurry because the person that took the picture stood way far away and we were tiny specks in the picture :) :)


Still can't tell how steep it is :)

Then we headed back into town to have dinner with Enice and her sister Maya. For $1 I got a huge plate of delicious food! It started pouring (typical since it is the rainy season) so we waited for a while, but then put on our 50 cent ponchos that we bought earlier that day in the market and headed to a store across the street to wait out the rest of the rain. Then we went back to our hostel and went back to bed because we were both very tired!!