Before I continue with my South Korea rant I thought I'd send word about Cambodia.
I made it here alive after some problems with immigration in Korea and then some more problems trying to take out cash to pay for my visa upon arrival in Phnom Penh. Met up with a my extremely bearded man and made it back to the hostel. It's been a great week. Kept things low-key after not sleeping for the past two weeks in Korea and we spent the first day wandering down the Mekong and grabbing cheap ($2 cheap) mojitos at a riverside place. Best part was walking around Wat Phnom and coming across an elephant... just chilling and what not... and then even better was feeding the elephant. I helped a brotha out, snuck him some bananas.
Being in the city feels like going back in time a bit. It's very old-world asia, with crumbling french colonial buildings mixed in with the Khmer palaces and temples. Tuk-tuk drivers seem to lurk everywhere as do small, surprisingly pushy children selling books about Cambodia.
Made it up to Siem Reap and toured around the temple for a good 3 days. Saw a lot of different temples - Angkor, Roulous, ..... the Tomb Raider one. We had a good time with Toi, our tuk-tuk driver and had almost as much fun sitting in the tuk-tuk, watching the countryside go by as we did seeing all of the temples. That might have been partly due to the fact that I had some rough food poisoning the entire time and I may, or may not have thrown up in Angkor Thom.....
So right now we're back in Phnom Penh. We decided to go down to Mui Ne beach in Vietnam instead of Thailand since apparently they've been having some trouble with flooding... However we had to wait over the weekend to get our visa's sorted out. It was an interesting bus ride back from Siem Reap. A group of five Cambodians that seemed to be the ringleaders of the bus group packed as many people as possible onto the bus to make a few extra riels. It got to a point that the entire aisle was full of people, plus there were people just standing, hanging around the front of the bus. The toilet stop... was interesting to say the least.
2 hours to go until we catch the next bus down to Ho Chi Min City. By tomorrow afternoon I should be sitting on a beach, looking out towards the South China Sea. Oh, and don't worry, I've got the next part to my KOREA rant all written out and just need to type it up. Till next time!
