Into Cambodia

The plane flight was fairly straightforward even being that we were flying on a communist run airline (Laos).  They were flying a newer Airbus 330 and the pilots seemed to know their stuff - although how ATC understood them, I'll never know.  They'd do English PA announcements and I could only pick out about half of what they were saying - even with their Chuck Yeager drawls slowing things down.

Corruption is supposed to be rampant in Cambodia so I was a bit surprised when we went to clear customs and they had about 20 different guys doing something with your passport (one to collect the money for the visa, one to do something, someone else to do something else... all the way down the line to where some guy calls our his best idea of what your first name sounds like in English.  It was almost worth the price of the visa to hear him attempt our names!

Then it was a queue for a taxi chit ($7) to our hotel.  When we got into the taxi (a nice fairly late model Toyota from Georgia!), we were delighted to find our driver spoke English very well and gave us a good tour of the city as we drove in.  We then arranged for him to be our driver for the next three days as we would buy a three day pass to see the temples around Angkor Wat.  He also promised to hook us up with a guide.

We'd worked up quite a sweat by this time with all the travel and were happy this hotel had a great pool so we took advantage of that for a few hours.  Then we took a tuk-tuk into town to hit a local restaurant (we decided upon Mexican as we had a craving the moment we saw the sign - the $0.75 cent drafts. $1.50 Margurita and $1.00 Authentic Mexican Tacos didn't hurt either!)  Then it was into their version of the night market...  quite nice but shops instead of stalls that move every day for traffic!  I saw an "Omega" Speedmaster watch (the one the astronauts wore to the moon) for $20 (retails at over $2500).  I'm sure it won't work next week but hey!  We were fairly tired by then, so back to the hotel for our early start the next day on the temples of Angkor Wat.  Cambodia is looking pretty excellent so far!

The tuk-tuks are different in Cambodia.... decidly more upscale and driven by a detachable motorbike (versus the three wheel trikes with a sit down seat for the driver).  We quite liked these versions.  Certainly a lot more maneuverable and feels more stable as well.  Yup, the four of us fit just fine.