On Tuesday, May 12, we awoke at 6AM in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We ate breakfast at the hotel's outdoor restaurant and couldn't believe how warm it was even at 6:30. In my journal from that day, I wrote, "As beautiful as the hotel grounds are, I won't miss the bugs and the transparent poverty."
Cambodia is an interesting place. The hotel did a brilliant job of shielding you from the desolate surroundings. I mentioned this in my blog from our arrival, but the hotel package we bought really considered our every need. And once we entered the hotel, we really felt as if we entered through a portal to another dimension. Each time we left the hotel to go into town, to the Angkor temple complex or even back to the airport, we couldn't turn a blind eye to everything around us. Although we felt there was little we could do at the time, we did make sure to tip Adam (our tuk tuk driver) generously.
On our way to the Siem Reap airport, it finally dawned on me what those strange road-side stands were that had the 2-litre bottles with lemonade-looking liquid. Any guesses? They were makeshift gas stations. I kid you not. Imagine a long wooden bench with 6-10 soda bottles sitting out on those benches filled with petrol. No regulations. No way to check for cross contamination or purity. I'm still flabbergasted when I think about it.
The airport also surprised me, although I guess it shouldn't have. Tourists only come to Siem Reap for one reason: Angkor Wat. The small airport shops were so expensive. We paid $5.00 for the smallest dish of ice cream from the Dairy Queen. And yes, the teeny, tiny airport in Cambodia had a dairy queen.
We flew Air Asia back to Bangkok. The bumpy flight landed around 12:30 in the pouring rain. Something I noticed immediately but haven't mentioned until now is the advertising used on Air Asia planes. Look at the photo below. That is a picture of an overhead bin on the flight. Every, single, one had an ad on it. Can you imagine United or American Airlines doing something like that? In a way, it made the inside of the plane more colorful. And I wonder how much revenue the airline gets from the advertising, especially considering it's a budget airline. Does the advertising make up for the lower ticket costs?
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| Air Asia in-cabin advertising |
Our third Bangkok hotel was the VIE Hotel Bangkok MGallery which is near the MBK mall and the Siam shopping center. There was nothing fancy about this hotel. We paid $110/night, and I picked this hotel for our final stay in Bangkok because it got good reviews, had a reasonable price, and had a nice central location. You can read my Trip Advisor Review if you're interested in more. Of all the Bangkok hotels we stayed in, this was my least favorite, but it was certainly adequate and recommendable. Inside the bathroom, they had a sign that listed the toiletries they had available if we forgot anything. Can someone tell me one thing, however. What exactly is plaster? :-D I still laugh when I see that picture. I love funny signs in foreign countries.
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| Sign in hotel bathroom - Bangkok, Thailand |
With only a couple of hours left to the day, we went over to the shopping district and played in another one of those Escape Rooms. This one was so much more difficult than the Escape Hunt from Day 2 in Bangkok. What I loved about these places was that you didn't need a special reservation. And you didn't need to pay extra for just 2 people to have the whole room.
After the escape room, we did some souvenir shopping, and we passed a McDonalds. Nearly every country in the world has a McDonalds. That's not why I took a picture. Look at Ronald. His hands are folded like a Buddhist. THAT was picture-worthy. Haha.
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| Buddhist Ronald McDonald - Bangkok, Thailand |
Instead of dinner, since we ate lunch around 3, we treated ourselves to giant ice cream sundaes at Swensens.
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| Thai Ice Cream Sundaes |
I hope you'll join me for my final few posts!
Thanks for reading!
- Foxy the Traveler
Plasters are band aids.
ReplyDeleteSo fun to read about your time here.
Band-aids?? No kidding! Years later, and I still never knew. :)
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