October 29, 2006 Hello Siem Reap, Cambodia!

So our flight was delayed an hour, but it was nice and short. It was only about a 45 min flight, and Bangkok Air didn't disappoint by still serving us a meal on such a short leg! It wasn't a hot meal this time, only a boxed lunch with a bun and cold cuts, but it still hit the spot.

The airport in Siem Reap is very small. There are no terminals really and our plane was the only one in sight. Despite being small, the airport is quite new. I was expecting something old, and run down but I was pleasantly surprised.

When we arrived, you have to line up with your passports to get your visa. Kind of a joke, because it's just a money grab. After passing through immigration and grabbing our luggage, we walked to the exit and Darren quickly warned us to put on our deet (mosquito repellant) before leaving the door. OMG! The mosquitos!!!! You can see a million of them flying around the light bulbs. Very scary!!

So we’ve heard bad stories about transportation in Cambodia so it’s a good thing that Dar was able to get hold of a driver for us. He (his name is Marom – nice guy!) was waiting for us with a van when we came out.

There’s not much to see along the way to our hotel, other than hotels. It's a never ending strip of hotels – and HUGE ones too. I never knew tourism was that big here. The roads are not as run down as I thought they would be – paved pretty well, but there’s no real sidewalks. Seems to be a lot of open, sparsely grassed areas with pools of dirty water here and there. No wonder there are so many breeding grounds for mosquitos! Downtown Siem Reap kind of reminds me of Manila – but cleaner and less populated. (I keep thinking that everywhere else we go is cleaner than Manila!! So sad to think that Manila has gotten as run down as it has compared to all these other cities.)

Finally after a 15 min drive, we got to our beautiful boutique hotel! It’s called Hotel de la Paix and it’s only been opened for about a year. Walking through the doors, it feels like you are walking into an art gallery instead of a hotel. They walked us to the lounge and served us a cold pineapple ginger drink while they took care of our check in. The lounge is very cool and trendy. Here's some pictures of the lounge:

We also took a quick tour of the pool and the spa. This is definitely the most beautiful and artsy hotel we’ve stayed in so far. Here’s some pics of the rest of the hotel

After getting settled in our rooms, we met up with our group downstairs to head out to dinner. Marom (our driver) took us to a place called Arun. The restaurant was pretty empty when we got there and it kind of looked ‘bunk’ (as Wes would say). We sat outside with all our new friends (insects)! Yuck! They kept flying into our food and getting mixed in with the curry and swimming around in our drinks. Ew! I guess we’ll be having a lot of protein during this leg of our trip. Cambodian food is kind of like Thai food, but not spicy. They have the same stuff like curries, pomelo and papaya salad. Oh and everything is in USD, couple of dollars here and there for each dish. (Everything here is in USD oddly enough) But I think everyone lost their appetites because of all the bugs. =( The meal itself was actually quite good, and of course it was relatively inexpensive. Dinner came to 50 US dollars for the 9 of us.

After dinner, we went back to our hotel to rest for our big day tomorrow. Wes and I decided to enjoy the tub in our room. We took a bath while watching Grey’s Anatomy on Wes’ laptop. The tub is so cool because there is no faucet. The water runs down the wall of the tub like a waterfall. Very cool. Ahhh, so relaxing!! But one thing I don’t like about this place is that water is yellow! YUCK! You have to ignore it though.

Here's a picture of our room with the sliding door that opens to the tub.

The bath made me nice and sleepy so I was bed time for me at around 12:30! Night! Angkor Wat tomorrow! Yay!