Unfortunately, we had to return to the hotel for a moment after making it to Angkor Wat because we didn't have the right currency to pay for our admission ticket. Luckily, the hotel was kind enough to exchange our yen for us. We still made it back in time to watch the sun rise over the main temple. It was amazing.
For two hours, we wandered around the main temple, looking everywhere we could and taking a lot of pictures. We were not sure how long we were allowed to stay, and feeling guilty about keeping our driver waiting, we headed back out to find him sleeping in a hammock in the tuk-tuk. So we walked over to the nearby cafe and ordered a couple smoothies. My mango one was delicious!
When he finally woke up, he asked if we wanted breakfast. We let him know we had already had some, and he took us to the next temple. It was at this point that we realized that he was our driver for the day, so we took our time exploring and admiring the temples and ruins of Angkor Wat.
It was gorgeous. The sad thing was the number of children wandering the temples trying to sell good. The impressive thing was how easily and quickly some of them switched languages depending on who they were talking to. It was limited, but still. We passed on girl who was speaking to a woman in Japanese, then seemlessly switched to English when talking to us. For the most part though, they were easy to ignore, and as long as we didn't respond at all, they quickly left us alone.
Around one, our driver took us to lunch. So delicious! While we were sitting there, it began to pour. A nice, heavy rainstorm. We stayed in the restaurant and listened to the rain for over an hour before it finally let up and we felt it was safe to start again. Unfortunately, half way to the next temple (and the one Nikki had really wanted to see), it began to pour again. Our driver handed us an umbrella and pointed us in the direction of the temple, before he climbed into the tuk-tuk for refuge. By the time we reached the temple, we were soaked up to our thighs and our pants and shoes were muddy.
The temple itself was cool because it has trees growing over the walls. Sadly, we stayed long enough to get one picture with Nikki's camera before heading back to our tuk-tuk. I felt really bad because our driver was sleeping again, but Nikki was pretty miserable in the downpour. Luckily, one of the other drivers woke ours. We apologized for interrupting his nap. He asked if we were done, and when we confirmed, he took us away from Angkor Wat.
We thought he was taking us to the hotel, but he passed the turn and kept going. I think it was about an hour, and we both started to get a bit nervous about where he was taking us. Finally, after a very bumpy and uncomfortable ride, he dropped us off for a boat tour that would be about an hour. We thought it would be cool to see the house-boat community, but instead it ended up being a tour of Siem Reap's poor and a plea for us to contribute in some way to helping them. It was depressing.
After that, we asked our guide to take us back to the hotel. He offered to take us to get some food, but we refused. We just both really wanted to get back to the hotel and to figure out how we were going to get to Thailand the next day.
Luckily, our hotel had an answer for that as well. They booked us on a bus that would take us from the hotel to Bangkok for fourteen dollars each! So cheap!
We really appreciated the hotel. Originally we had planned to only be there one night, the next to be spent at another hotel that was included in a tour package. It would have cost us at least a hundred dollars. However, we never heard back from the tour, so we asked the hotel if we could stay an extra night. They were more than happy to assist us in everything we needed and the whole stay didn't cost us more than sixty dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment