Blogging Pubbitch

After a little debate between Holly and I, we decided that a tuk-tuk would provide us with a happy compromise between being pissed on when it rained and paying through the nose for comfortable travel. Granted, we knew that it would be a little more expensive than cramming the both of us on to the back of a bike, but this seemed a price worth paying. After haggling with a number of people we ended up hiring Mr Mab for 3 days because he spoke good English and was good fun to talk to and he offered to take us to see sunset at Angkor Wat (and he wasn't too expensive either) We agreed to meet him later that day and spent the remaining free time wandering the streets like homeless waifs.

In reality, we purchased a handy guide book to the temples of Angkor and spent a bit of time wondering how we could get the local price for the boat back to Phnom Penh, but enough of this muttering! We had a cheapish ride around the temples, and things were looking good. Naturally, it came as a little shock to the wallet that the three day passes for Angkor came in at 40 USD each, but they did have natty photos of us on and we could keep them when we'd finished visiting the temples. Such generousity is seldom seen from petrol companies. You see, in order to make sure that everything was run well at Angkor, the Cambodian government (the CPP, at least) had awarded the contract to maintain and look after the temples to Sokimex, one of the local petrol companies. They rake in a huge amount of money that the country itself barely gets a fraction of. It's madness, if you ask me, which the Cambodians clearly didn't.

Ho hum. Sunset was lovely. We drove past Angkor Wat and clambered to the top of nearby Phnom Bakheng, a "temple mountain" from which we had a wonderful view of the surrounding countryside, Angkor Wat bathed in evening sunlight and a herd of other tourists who had had the same bright idea. Oh well, at least the view was nice, and we ran into Clare and Gene again to get some tips on visiting the temples.