Angkor Big Circuit Part 2 (and then some)

The bad news is, Henri has a bit of a fever. Today we are in Chiang Mai, and I'm half watching over Henri and half watching Star Trek on Syfy... The good new is that I have some time to upload pictures of our Angkor Wat visit, BUT it's still Henri's entry to write, so I'm just here to give you a backstory.

These are the last pictures from our first day on the site. The "Big Circuit" includes the wats (temples) east of Angkor Wat. These are the less touristic temples, so we crossed paths with less tourists in some areas, and sometimes there wasn't a soul at all.

Here we're standing on a hill south of Angkor Wat, some tourists didn't even know that the point of being here was to see the sunset on the famous temple. Most of the people with the nice cameras pointed their lenses at the jungle in the west, not noticing the golden glow that fell on the ancient wat. Heck, some of them didn't even know the orientation of the temples.

At dusk, the temples become a little luminous, and then dissolve into the dark.

Our shy tuktuk driver, he couldn't understand English so we communicated with hand gestures.

The next day, we rested. It rained really hard and we felt sorry for the people who were caught outdoors at Angkor.

It was a slow day, we watched people walking in front of the restaurant and we walked around, discovering a less expensive supermarket just at the edge of the touristic area. We found Boy Bawang, a puffed corn snack from the Philippines, and we stayed indoors watching TV like it was a weekend.

The next day, we met Angkor Wat. It's beautiful at sunrise.

But our battery died just after sunrise, so we didn't have pictures of that day. Don't worry though, we took loads of pictures on our third and last day (pics to follow).

That afternoon, the girls from the guest house invited us to dinner outside the center. It was our first time to try "Cambodian Soup."

It was delicious! I also discovered this odd drink that tasted like pandan and caramel.

When we went back to the guest house (the girls chatting side-by-side on the scooters while driving), we pulled chairs together at the garden and had beers.

They gave us Cambodian scarves as gifts and they made Henri try a grasshopper! (I couldn't anymore because my mouth puffed up the first time I tried it.)

They did everything they could to make us feel good at the guest house, and we could really feel the sincerity. It was a great night, and we learned a lot about Cambodia, but most of all, it helped to diffuse the bad feelings we had at the border. This feeling would be strengthened later, leading me and Henri to two but almost similar feelings -

HENRI: Cambodians are the coolest, the Nepali are the nicest.

ME: The Cambodians are the nicest, the Nepali are the coolest.

Cheers to Cambodia!