Floating Villages

The last sight of this holiday is the floating village of Me Chrey on the Tonle Sap Lake. It takes a dusty ride on red unpaved roads and here you see the real Cambodian countryside life. During the 45 min drive we have seen a lot of rice paddies, lotus fields, water buffalos trying to stay out of the sun and villagers greeting us from their stilted homes. After our guide explained us a lot about the area, we arrived at a canal. During the rain season the whole area, including the villages on land, is completely flooded. The canal is shallow at the moment, but in December it was 9-10 meters higher here! The heavy rains and melted snow from Tibet arrives via the Mekong river in the lake changing the scenery dramatically..amazing! (You can see it on the picture with the green building how high the water actually gets)

We get on the boat and arrive at the floating village after 10 minutes. Around 100 families stay in this area on water. The guide told us they initially came here to stay out of the hands of Pol Pot during Khmer rouge and now they build up their lives there. There is a supermarket on boat coming every morning, a school for the kids and bigger events like weddings. Electricity comes from generators.

We go around with our longtail boat and have dinner in the floating village during sunset. The food is all local and the fish is from the lake. We say goodbye to the crocodiles in the floating crocodile farm and turn back to the mainland now with nightfall over the village creating an even more unforgettable scenery.

Angkor!

I think it was a pretty crazy idea, waking up at 4.30 in the morning, get on a bike and go to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise. I was convinced by Annemiek and Kim that stayed in the same hotel to do it...I guess being Dutch makes us want to cycle anywhere at anytime...right? This once in a lifetime activity did unfortunately not pay off completely as it was cloudy that morning and the sun didn't show it's face!

Anyways, while Dilek was still asleep (she had some meeting at the school so couldn't join us), we started exploring this amazing complex of temples and ruins from the Khmer period. The city of Angkor was built over 600 years and is surrounded by forests and at some places the forest even took back it's land. This is very visible in the Ta Prohm where trees merged with the temple structure, that is so cool to see. And maybe even cooler - at least for all the Chinese tourists - Angelina Jolie was here for Tomb Raider. Other highlights are Angkor Wat - the biggest temple complex in the world, Angkor Thom with the Bayon temple, and Preah Khan. A nice fact to know is that during the Khmer period, about 1,000,000 people lived here while in London this was about 50,000...

I believe we cycled at least about 20 km this day not to mention the trails we did by foot. After 8 hours of exploring we called it a day and cycled all the way back to Siem Reap, full of impressions. Definitely the best sight of Cambodia !!

Entering Cambodia

We travelled from Krabi 2 full days to finally arrive in the Kingdom of Cambodia! What a long and interesting journey that was. After arriving Bangkok, we took the early train leaving at 05:55 (!) to the border of Cambodia, a 6 hours trip on a hard wooden bench. The wooden floor and fans on the ceiling are classic. No wonder that this train cost us less than 2,5 $ for two tickets!

The last bit to the border goes by tuk-tuk and there we have been presented a high quality scam. All tuk-tuks running from the train station leave visitors at what appears to be an official "Cambodian Visa Office" on the Thai side. Nine out of ten people went in the office and were ripped off at least 20$, as it is only possible to buy the real Cambodian visa on the Cambodian side of the border! We were amazed to see how good this scam works and felt lucky we did some investigation before!

In total we spent 3,5 hours waiting to get out of Thailand and into Cambodia, arriving 2,5 bus hours later in Siem Reap. We catched a nice sunset over Cambodian fields while driving to town. We were very tired, but we still wanted to have dinner with our friends in town, as they were leaving the other day for Koh Chang. Meeting them at Khmer BBQ restaurant and sharing experiences was very nice! We couldn't keep up with their drinking skills for too long and went back to our guest house for a long rest. Ooopss, we had an unexpected guest on the top of our door waiting for us :).

The coming days is all about exploring Siem Reap with the temples of Angkor Wat at the top of the list!

Krabi paradise

After a 15 hour journey to the south of Thailand, including taxi, nighttrain, nostalgic bus and minivan, we arrived in Ao Nang. This little town at the beach is quite touristy (with a lot of Scandinavian visitors to our surprise), though one of the best places to enjoy the beaches and visit "The Beach" beach at Koh Phi Phi Lay.
The scenery in the whole area is so amazing with huge limestone rocks and little islands all around. We are not surprised that this is known as one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are a lot of little crabs on the beach and monkeys close to the rocky side of the beach, jumping on your shoulder or searching food in your bag.
During our stay in Ao Nang, we met again with Christopher (from UK) in our hotel, who was also with us in the national park trip just a couple of days earlier! We visited another amazing beach Railey and did kayaking around the giant limestone rocks.
The day trip to several islands was simply perfect (tough a bit too touristy) - we went on a packed speedboat and stopped at white sandy beaches, swam in the clearest water and snorkeled around coral reefs with a lot of fish. Amongst the cool fishes, we have seen a barracuda and the famous clown fish aka Nemo!