Cambodia Day 4 - The day I met a real Hunk

Saturday, 17 October, 2009

A full day at the temples was enough for us. Time to do something a little different today.

First off, a good hearty breakfast at Jasmine Lodge. (Everytime I see these breakfast pix I need to remind myself that this place cost us only 6usd/night/person, and includes the above breakfast!)


Nice place to chill out, where we have breakfast as well.

Today we're gonna visit the floating forest and floating village at Kompong Phluuk. The very trustworthy owner Mr Kunn of Jasmine Lodge arranged our boat tickets for us, costing only $8 each, instead of the $15 that I read about elsewhere. All we had to do was to go there, and the people there already expected us to arrive, just had to hand them a receipt prepared by Mr Kunn.

vanna loves to help us with photos


travelling to the place on a speedboat


this little island has cows on it!



they use these car batteries which have to be charged since there's no electricity.


presented with a menu once we reached! Our guide ordered for us since we are quite blur


we transfer to little row boats. We felt super paiseh that this strong little girl 'meg' was rowing for the 3 of us.





in the floating forest. you get to 'float' around the tree tops!




i was trying to help her row!



singing us a Cambodian love song





This is my hunk. Some new hunk criteria:
1. Shaves off finger dead skin with an AXE.
2. Bites toothpick
3. Pencil on top of ear
sigh




pencil: check





Fantastic lunch! fresh fish and prawn. The prawn came with this pepper/salt/lime dip which was awesome.

I later saw the family eating similar things as us at the back of the house, however their soup had no ingredients in them, and for the fish, they were only eating bones. Felt quite bad but hey I suppose we helped them in a way.

our hunk says good bye!

As we were leaving the little village we noticed that the kids had donned their uniforms and were on their way to school. What hit me was that they were all very smartly dressed, shirts tucked in and hair combed neatly. What a contrast to our youths who try to abuse their uniforms in anyway they can. I suppose that to these kids who have little, having a chance to education is a privilege, unlike us who easily take such things for granted.

Vanna saw some people roasting some snake and haha! here's our chance to try them!


good luck, little fella


you gotta peel off the skin and that's all we ate.. yum!

Our lovely guide managed to squeeze in a visit to Beng Mealea. This temple has also been ruined by the spung trees like Ta Prohm, but it hasn't been as well manicured. Hence it means more fun traipsing along the ruins!

See all that mud? Always cleaned off by the time we come back from the next place of interest


Vanna first stopped at a place where the sandstone used to build Angkor Wat was retrieved. It was then sent down the stream towards Angkor Wat.



We begin to see the start of Beng Mealea..



Met a few kids out to make some $ out of us. They spoke great English, provided some useful bits of information as we walked around, and even held us and tried to pull us up as we navigated along the rocks.




vishnu







the inside of the spung tree



vishnu is everywhere


teaching erwin n sbass how to whistle with their hands


at this point they started calling each other monkeys and themselves spiderman. very adorable kids really.



our guide was quite a monkey too



teaching them the wherethehellismatt dance




after giving them a 1usd tip each, they were so happy and started dancing again! haha. very cute.


picked up a pretty beetle



new scandal

Oh, did I mention that our tour guide had 'volunteered' to bring us out today? The previous days at the end of the Angkor tour, he mentioned that he was free and could hang out with us today. Just have to give him 'a small tip', he said. We were more than happy to have him around! And we really enjoyed ourselves today at the surreal floating village/forest, and the adventurous Beng Mealea temple.

He even had to cab back from Beng Mealea to Siem Reap alone cos we were to go back to Phnom Penh straight. So as we parted at Beng Mealea we paid him and reimbursed his cab fare back.

Now for a long drive back to Phnom Penh. The poor driver must have been real tired and we didn't even stop for dinner. Finally reached back in Phnom Penh at 9plus and had a good , hearty and cheap Chinese dinner. ($21usd for 7 of us!!)

Our lousy Goldie Boutique Hotel had a blackout and the generator didn't seem to work. We spent most of the night with this lousy backup lamp (and the first one kept swiching off, this is our 2nd one) and cold water for shower.