Blogging Pubbitch

The next stop on the Cambodia tour is Siem Reap, gateway to the ruinious temples of Angkor. Despite numerous horror stories about the road from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, the journey wasn't bad at all. We later found out that the road had recently undergone some fairly major work, and has been in its present state for only a couple of months.

On arriving in town we were promptly mobbed by a murder of hotel touts, all keen for us to visit their place and willing to give us a free lift there if we'd just say that we would look at their rooms. Holly and I had already been offered a room in a guest house run by the nephew of the owner of the Royal guest house in Phnom Penh, where we had been staying, so went there first.

The room seemed fine, with a large ceiling fan keeping things cool, a view that wasn't of the back of another building (no, it was of the roof of the nearby market, but you can't have everything) and a TV with more channels than we knew what to do with, especially considering that we didn't come all this way to watch Forrest Gump. We even had our own bathroom, which provided hours of amusement for us the next day when we discovered that not only could we gawp into the one next door but that they controlled the lights in ours.

We haggled over the price, eventually managing to get the price of the room down by a few dollars and also getting free moto rides into town, which was about 15 minutes' walk away. We'd been trying for a free breakfast, but I'm not about to sniff at free rides on the back of a speeding scooter.

We spent dinner that evening in a place called the Khmer Kitchen, which does some of the best and cheapest food we had in Cambodia (and I'm writing this once we've left the country, so I'm not making this up) If you ever decide to visit Angkor, eat there! We ate with Clare and Gene, a couple that we had met on the boat from Vietnam, as well as Gareth, another traveller who we'd met at around the same time as James, slowly plotting how to go around the numerous temples that lay about 5km away....