Cambodia – Siem Reap – 7th February

The bus journey from Battambang to Siem Reap took around 3.5 hours and opting for a cheap ticket, only cost us $4 each. Again packed with locals in every corner of the bus we stopped a few times along the way for food, pick-ups, toilets, smoking and so on. We figured in English time and transport this journey would probably take under 2 hours.

So we were in Siem Reap earlier than expected and were dropped off quite centrally just down from pub street and opposite the river bank. We knew which guesthouse we wanted to go to as Doug and Emma were already there and paying a good price. We asked at the tourist information who were sending us off in completely the wrong direction so instead of following their route we took a tuk-tuk to where we wanted to go. He was young and had no idea as to where the hotel was, he struggled to say the name properly and stopped a few times to ask others where it could be, it turned out the hotel was less than 2 minutes walk from where the bus originally dropped us off. We couldn’t believe it but paid him a dollar in good will all the same, he was a good laugh so it didn’t bother us too much. We managed to get a room at The Angkor Park guesthouse for $7 and that was that. Later on we explored the market and sorted out more travel arrangements for getting to Kratie our next stop after Siem Reap, we also looked for some decent bikes to get us to Angkor Wat and back.

We settled on some mountain bikes from a place a few doors up from the guesthouse, we got two bikes for $5 for a day and a half rental, this seemed fair. Once we got them we cycled to the Angkor Wat ticket office which took around 15 minutest to get to, it’s really easy heading straight out or Siem Reap towards Angkor and the ticket office is on the right. We got in the queue at around 4.30pm and picked up the tickets at 5pm when the offices opened, by this time the queues were very long so we timed this well. We’d decided to get a one day ticket to the site but if you buy it the day before you can get the sunset for that same evening, so in theory you can end up with 2 sunsets and a sunrise at Angkor Wat if you get your timings right. We didn’t quite manage this, the main reason being that we didn’t want to head straight to Angkor Wat itself and instead wanted to go to Ta Prohm which we’d read shouldn’t be too packed for sunset. The only problem was that we didn’t plan on the gates to the temples closing at 5.30pm, so when we got there after a fast bike ride at 5.31pm we were told we couldn’t go in. This was very annoying and could only be our fault for not checking on times but we had cycled around 13km to get there and couldn’t event take a peak. With sulks we plodded back to Siem Reap on our bikes and made sure that the next day was going to go our way!!

Back in Siem Reap we met up with Emma and Doug and made our way to the Blue Pumpkin bakery, perhaps the best thing going in Siem Reap! At 8pm they have a half price shelf and most croissants, pain-au-chocolat and breakfast pastries go. We took advantage of this and stocked up for the next day, we then went to a local restaurant for some decent food.

Tomorrow is Angkor Wat, up early and ready for a long day in the Cambodian sun!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

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