It's a holiday in Cambodia!

Ohhh Cambodia, how I love thee. We made it Siem Reap without much of a todo, which was such a pleasant surprise. From what we had read, there were tons of scams waiting for us at the border and it all depended on how big of suckers we were. We showed them. We sucked so little that we got them to pay us (not really). Siem Reap is home to Angkor Wat. Angkor what, you ask? Angkor What is actually a bar in Siem Reap, but Angkor Wat is temples, temples and more temples. My max quota for looking at temples is about an hour, but I decided to suck it up and spend the whole day with Hbf seeing the big ones. They are one of the wonders of the world, after all.. They didn't disappoint, either. We had a lovely day and I surpassed my quota 10 times over (I survived).

We were able to meet up with a college friend of mine that has moved to Cambodia for a year to work for a non-profit organization. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years so it was nice to see a familiar face and catch up. What are the odds that someone you know is in Cambodia at the same time as yourself? Pretty cool.

Our next adventure took us to Banlung, with a stopover in Kratie. Kratie is home to some freshwater dolphins and we decided to take a tuk-tuk (a motorcycle with a trailer in the back that has seats for 2-4 people) out to the river to investigate. We ended up sharing a boat with some belgium girls and hunted dolphins for about an hour. No one spoke above a whisper for all that time.. I think we didn't want to scare the dolphins away. It worked though, and we saw no less than 20 appearances by our freshwater friends. Our boat had floated down the river quite aways, and the captain tried in vain to get the motor started. He rowed us to the bank and proceeded to change the spark plugs, siphon out gas with a straw, choke on the gas a little bit, and who knows what else. After about 20 minutes, he got it rolling again and we were motored back to the correct shore. We had a bus to catch in an hour and a half, and it was a 30 minute ride back to town so we hurried and got on our tuk-tuk. 10 minutes later, we have a flat tire.
Our tuk-tuk driver did a little off-roading at the beginning of our trip that I think he quite regretted at that moment. We stopped at a local gas station (someone's house that sells gas) and got the tire fixed. There was even a little puppy for me to play with! We made it back with time to spare and were shortly on our way to Banlung.

I have to say, I am enjoying cambodian food. They have delicious baguettes everywhere and you can get little slices of laughing cow cheese. It's breakfast for like a dollar, sometimes less, depending on where you get your bread. Also, I have had some authentic cambodian food (I'm not lying!) and I liked the flavors. We had something they called BBQ mountain, where they had marinated beef and mixed it with egg, then cooked it right in front of us. I also had something they call luk lak, which is marinated meat over vegetables with rice. It has a very nice flavor. I know! It's crazy!