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A family travel adventure blog. Now featuring CANCERPALOOZA! |
Our last day in Siem Reap is a whirlwind of the best Angkor has to offer, sexy carvings, waterfalls and monsoons. We begin with the two major sites to see in Angkor and end with two distant ones accessable only by car.
Tonight we leave for Bangkok on our way to Chiang Mai and have to fit it all in before our 7pm flight.
Today is extra busy because we too yesterday afternoon off after the early morning sunrise. Unscheduled breaks are completely necessary sometimes.
‘Coffee? You want coffee? Yes? Maybe latah. You remembah me, ookay? Coffee. Maybe latah.’ In the dark, the young boy follows us persistently. ’No, thank you’ I say, even though Trish and I both would like some coffee. But the little ‘restaurant’ outside Srah Srang, which is a tiny temple at the edge of the baray (artificial lake) is not the place we will get it.
But damn it sure would taste good right now. It’s 5am, and we are here for the next hour watching the sun rise over Cambodia, one of the classic adventure travel events on the planet.
The smell is terrible. It’s 5:30 am.
I’m digging through my clothes in the dark for something to wear on our morning adventure: microlight flying over the Angkor Wat temples and Tonle Sap lake of Cambodia.
It’s simple to walk out the door of the hotel, grab a tuk-tuk and visit the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, along the Tonle Sap riverbank. It’s our first stop of the day.
Such ease was unthinkable until only very recently. Cambodia has been the pawn of local and world powers for the last several centuries and then once given it’s own independence, made a horrible mess of it. Cambodia has, indeed has been struggling for stable prosperity since the fall of the ancient Khmer Empire in 1300.
Some historians still consider Khmer civilization to be in a dark age begun when the last Khmer Emporer died in 1300. Though that’s a slight exaggeration, no one doubts that recent history has not been kind to Cambodia.
Red-eyes suck the life out of you. Even though I sleep most of the 4 hour flight from Islamabad to Bangkok, I wake up older. At least a month of my life was lost tonight.
You don’t feel it right away though. At 6am in Bangkok, I feel pretty good, though they make me walk from one end of the airport and back again.
I grab a cappuchino and sit in the waiting area of my flight to Phnom Penh where my family will be. I like Pakistan, but Cambodia is a new country for me and I’m excited.
