Temple Town Cambodia

Welcome to Angkor Wat. Please remember it is July, it is hot. You might think you do, but you do not have enough cold water or enough sun block on. Have a good time exploring and I hope you're not afraid of heights.

So, Tania (pictured above) and I (not pictured) went to Cambodia and Vietnam. We started by flying directly to Siem Reap (where all the broken temples are) with only a slight (45 min) delay on the plane in Ho Chi Minh (still called Saigon by everyone who lives there and in neighboring countries). We got on the plane and a good twenty minutes after we were supposed to be in the air an announcement finally apologized for the delay and told us that there was a passenger problem. Alright then. This wouldn't have been that big a deal, but my sinuses had decided to develop an infection at some point during the first flight. I really just wanted to get to a hotel and sleep. Not a good way to start a vacation.
We got to Siem Reap and went through immigration and customs with no problems. Then we needed a hotel, or hostel or other comfy place to stay. We got a driver and asked him to take us to a particular place that a friend had stayed at and recommended. He wanted to take us somewhere else, insisting that this hotel was too far away from the center of town. We finally got him to take us to the place we wanted to go only to find out that it was fully booked. Dang.
It was hot and I was tired and not feeling stellar so we decided to check out the place he was pushing. It was clean and the owner was friendly so we checked in.
We hired the driver to take us around to the temples the next day, which ultimately turned out to be a mistake. I was under the impression that he would drive us around and tell us about the temples that we went to. I wasn't expecting him to give us full on tours of each place (which he didn't do), but I also wasn't expecting to have to ask him a dozen questions just to get some basic info out of him. In addition he kept trying to push other touristy things on us (and come to find out later trying to charge us double the normal rate) and when we ultimately refused he got sulky.
The best part was on the second day when we were heading back to the hotel he wanted to drive us to Phnom Penh for only $120 US dollars. He would even drive us around the city and show us the sites for only $150 US dollars. He didn't seem to believe us when we told him we couldn't afford that and even if we wanted to spend that much money we did not wish to spend six hours in a car with him and its barely functioning air conditioning. The bus takes the same amount of time and only cost $10. It also comes with the added bonus of videos of people screeching (they say it's singing) in Cambodian.

Siem Reap itself is pretty cool. In the main town area there is almost nothing but tourism so there are lots of really good restaurants offering Western and traditional Khmer food. It would be easy to stay there for a couple weeks just to try all the food and drink at all the bars.
Another really nice thing was the ease of being able to get antibiotics without visiting a doctor and getting a prescription. The first thing we did after getting settled in was find a pharmacist and tell her what my problems were. She knew immediately what I needed and talked me through the doses and why I needed what she was giving me. She was great.

Oh yeah, there are temples with statues and towers and carvings. They are pretty awesome.
Here's some pictures.




Just because elephants are pretty cool.



This video is of rain. I realize all of you have seen rain and been caught in rain, but how many of you have witnessed a tropical downpour. The video goes for just under a minute, but after the first ten seconds you get the point. Soon after I stopped recording half of the plants were nearly flattened to the ground. We were at the restaurant for almost half an hour of this rain before we finally decided to drive to a temple where it probably wasn't raining. It wasn't.

I took too many pictures to post them all here, but I will put a few more up in future posts.