Cambodia

Hello family! We just got back from our two week vacation to Cambodia and Krabi! I will just recap our Cambodia trip in this post. It was a crazy experience! We left early Thursday morning October 23rd. The van picked us up at 4 AM for the 5 hour drive to the Bangkok Airport. We flew Bangkok Airways to Phnom Penh. It was the nicest airline I've ever flown. We got served lunch even though the flight was only an hour long. We got to the Phnom Penh Airport and bought our visas on arrival. We took a tuk tuk to our hostel to drop off our stuff and then we went to the Killing Fields. It was such a humbling and sad place to visit. Cambodia lost almost a quarter of its population under Pol Pot's regime. They had an amazing audio tour with stories from survivors. The Killing Fields was an amazing place to visit. We went back to our hostel and that was when the trip took an interesting turn. We found out that our hostel had visa renewal services and that they could take our passports to the Thai Embassy to get our new visas. Since we no longer had to go to the Thai Embassy the next day, we had no reason to stay in Phnom Penh and decided to ditch our hostel and take the overnight bus to Siem Reap. This is when it got sketchy. The tuk tuk driver who had been driving us around all day took us to this travel agency to buy our bus tickets. We bought tickets for the 11 PM bus to Siem Reap, but we didn't have enough change to buy our return tickets. We went to a restaurant for dinner and one of the girls (definitely not me) wanted our tuk tuk driver to eat with us. He was friendly but semi pervy. I was rolling my eyes at the rest of the girls who wanted him to eat with us. Then a guy from the travel agency appears out of the blue and sits down at the table with us. He actually followed us to the restaurant. He pressured us to buy the return tickets and promised us free transportation in Siem Reap if we bought the tickets. I was skeptical of this because of all the rip offs in Cambodia and sketchy travel deals. However, we ended up buying the tickets from this travel agency guy while the pervy tuk tuk driver was flirting with Courtney. Everyone in the restaurant was staring at us knowing we were being taken advantage of. I had no idea what we were getting into. The woman at the hostel had never heard of the bus company we had bought our tickets from. To make a long story short, everything worked out. It was a legit bus company and the travel agency guy delivered on his promise of free transportation in Siem Reap. I will never do that again though. The overnight bus was a crazy, uncomfortable experience filled with interesting characters. It was something I'm glad to check of my "life experiences" list, but I never want to take an overnight bus in Cambodia again. We got to Siem Reap Friday morning and took a cooking class later that day. It was a lot of fun and we made yummy curry. We also got fish foot massages that day. On Saturday, we saw Angkor Wat at sunrise. It was beautiful and all the ruins around Angkor Wat looked like they came right out of a movie. On Sunday, we went to a temple and a waterfall on Kulen Mountain. It started pouring rain and we got soaked. It was beautiful to see all the water rushing down the moutain. However,I didn't have that good of a time though because I wasn't feeling well that day. We took another overnight bus back to Siem Reap and got back to Phnom Penh Mondy morning. We got our passports and new visas and that was a relief. We also visited an orphanage. We had heard of the scam orphanages in Cambodia that charge money but we found a legit one online. We went to an orphanage called Lifhouse Society and it was so much fun to hang out with the kids. There were mostly teenagers there during the day. They were very nice and painted our nails for us. We also bought some bracelets that they sell to raise money for the orphanage. We spent one more night in Phnom Penh and flew to Krabi on Tuesday. Cambodia was a nice trip, but I like Thailand much better. I will do a post on Krabi next!