After 30 hours of travelling, we finally arrived at the Little Mermaid Guesthouse in Phuket. Do any of you watch Lost? Do you remember the episode with the flashback to Jack in Phuket? I'm pretty sure they filmed it in some completely different place. There are many wondrous sites here, but they involve quite creatively obscene outfits more than picturesque beach bungalows. More on that in another post....I am so behind!
There's tons of stuff I didn't get to talk about in Lao, but rather than run through all of them, I'm just going to make myself a reminder list so I can remember later.
Ok Cambodia....We flew to Siem Reap from Vientiane on December 1st with the intention of staying 2 nights then leaving for Bangkok to catch our December 4th flight. However, the protests were still going strong, so we decided to linger in Cambodia for another day or so and take our time with the Angkor temples. We found our guesthouse, dumped our stuff, and then met Mr. Pidor, the guesthouse's unofficial tuk tuk driver. He was incredibly patient and knowledgeable and listened to all over our ideas for iteneraries without telling us how ridiculous they were and nodding and smiling when we yelled that we'd changed our mind and wanted to go with his idea. The temples were absolutely amazing. Just....amazing. Mr. Pidor picked us up at 4:45 each morning to go see the sunrise. The first morning he took us to a mountain temple where we'd gone to see the sunset (along with 100 other tourists) the night before. It was mildly terrifying and incredibly creepy making the 10 minute hike up to the temple by ourselves, in the dark, and with what we later learned were monkeys making strange noises in the trees around us. It was completely worth it though when we climbed the treacherous stairs to the top of the temple and could sit there in silence and sloooowly start to make out the outlines of the temple towers. We had the whole place to ourselves for about 15 minutes before 5 or 6 more people showed up to watch the sun rise with us.
The food in Cambodia was also amazing. Mr. Pidor always took us to breakfast and lunch spots that were reasonably priced and delicious. Psic chicken? I'd never heard of it, but it was killer. As was a sour soup with lime, chicken, and tamarind. Oh! And there was ice cream! The real deal and in a cafe with giant beds and pillows. I realize this experience was completely manufactured so that people like me would come spend money, but whatever. You manufacture some caramel cashewnut ice cream, and I'm there.
Mr. Pidor's "best friend" was conveniently a regular taxi driver, and agreed to drive us to the Cambodian border where we could catch the bus to Bangkok. We'd heard horror stories about this road and were braced for the worst, but it was completely fine. We rode for 3 hours past hundreds of bicycles carrying impossible amounts of cargo, and then walked the last 30 feet or so into Thailand along with a parade of men pulling carts of chickens, baskets, etc. From then on we were back to the land where we always feel like we're being a little bit taken advantage of :-P
