Australia - thailand has gone...
So I am now in Australia, Sydney to be precise. I could be more precise I guess but I don't think its important. :)
As you can see I've not had time to do much updating recently. I have a half written post taking me to the end of china but the problem with traveling in company is that sitting down on my own to write stuff up isn't happening so much...
So another summary post. Cambodia was good. My ankle behaved itself due to being strapped up for several days and generally recovering (still feels a bit bruised but nothing more). Phnom Penh was interesting. We went to the killing fields and S21, the prison where the Khmer rouge held and tortured people...
In the afternoon we saw the palace and the silver pagoda and then a quick trip to Wat Phnom and then the lakeside for a drink to finish the Phnom Penh sights. Next day we got the coach to Siem Reap which was nice and quick - arriving an hour and a half earlier than expected which meant having to phone the hostel to get them to come pick us up. The earliness meant we had enough time to make plans for the temples as well as get to Angkor Wat to have a few hours there before sunset.
Next day we were up at 4:30 so we could see sunrise. We saw Angkor Thom at dawn which wasn't spectacular but did mean we could see the temple without crowds and it was dark enough that we couldn't see properly into the chambers...
Anyway, we saw lots more temples that day and got semi-conned into going to see the floating village thing on Tonle Sap (we didn't realise it would be $20 each but I decided it would be fun so paid for Hannah and I having established we could get more dollars (lonely planet knew nothing of ATMs).
Next day was a slightly less hardcore day of temples seeing some of the further afield ones. They were all cool and they need more writeup than I can give here...
The trip to bangkok was nice and easy (though long). Aranyaprathet was a fun place where I had about 6 people offer to take me to the border while I was standing on the road just looking around. Bangkok itself kind of sucked though. It was by far the hardest city to deal with yet. The taxi rivers had no idea where we were going, they tried to rip us off in a ridiculously blatant way (quoting nearly three times the price after the Thai tourist information guy had gone away). The hostel was not great and our experience of tuk tuk's was not great. One driver asked for 300 baht for a journey that should have been 50 baht.
In general we didn't like what we saw of Bangkok as a general place. To be fair we might have had bad impressions but unfortunately they are the only ones I have so am not bothered about going back again...
We were quite happy to fly out to Australia. Australia is nice and cool compared to other places though. We're off to the blue mountains tomorrow to see the sights, a winery the day after that and then who knows... Sadly its only two weeks now til we head back...
As you can see I've not had time to do much updating recently. I have a half written post taking me to the end of china but the problem with traveling in company is that sitting down on my own to write stuff up isn't happening so much...
So another summary post. Cambodia was good. My ankle behaved itself due to being strapped up for several days and generally recovering (still feels a bit bruised but nothing more). Phnom Penh was interesting. We went to the killing fields and S21, the prison where the Khmer rouge held and tortured people...
In the afternoon we saw the palace and the silver pagoda and then a quick trip to Wat Phnom and then the lakeside for a drink to finish the Phnom Penh sights. Next day we got the coach to Siem Reap which was nice and quick - arriving an hour and a half earlier than expected which meant having to phone the hostel to get them to come pick us up. The earliness meant we had enough time to make plans for the temples as well as get to Angkor Wat to have a few hours there before sunset.
Next day we were up at 4:30 so we could see sunrise. We saw Angkor Thom at dawn which wasn't spectacular but did mean we could see the temple without crowds and it was dark enough that we couldn't see properly into the chambers...
Anyway, we saw lots more temples that day and got semi-conned into going to see the floating village thing on Tonle Sap (we didn't realise it would be $20 each but I decided it would be fun so paid for Hannah and I having established we could get more dollars (lonely planet knew nothing of ATMs).
Next day was a slightly less hardcore day of temples seeing some of the further afield ones. They were all cool and they need more writeup than I can give here...
The trip to bangkok was nice and easy (though long). Aranyaprathet was a fun place where I had about 6 people offer to take me to the border while I was standing on the road just looking around. Bangkok itself kind of sucked though. It was by far the hardest city to deal with yet. The taxi rivers had no idea where we were going, they tried to rip us off in a ridiculously blatant way (quoting nearly three times the price after the Thai tourist information guy had gone away). The hostel was not great and our experience of tuk tuk's was not great. One driver asked for 300 baht for a journey that should have been 50 baht.
In general we didn't like what we saw of Bangkok as a general place. To be fair we might have had bad impressions but unfortunately they are the only ones I have so am not bothered about going back again...
We were quite happy to fly out to Australia. Australia is nice and cool compared to other places though. We're off to the blue mountains tomorrow to see the sights, a winery the day after that and then who knows... Sadly its only two weeks now til we head back...