Siem Riep - Angkor Wat

After what seemed to be the slowest bus ride ever we got to Siem Riep. At that point we where all in need for drink and a night out. The day after where recovery day with a bit of planing for the next coming days. 
The biggest attraction around Siem Riep is Angkor Wat and all the temples around. Most of the people I had been speaking to who been to Angkor Wat said that one day was not enough to see everything. So I bought a three day ticket and rented a bike to bicycle between the temple sits.

The first day we where going to see the sunrise above Angkor Wat. I set my alarm for 04.30 and began my bicycle tour up to the temple in complete darkness. It took around 30 minutes to get there and at that time it was crowded with people.

We where waiting and waiting for the sunrise but soon realized that a sun rise won't going to happen this morning. 

After spending some time at Angkor Wat I took my bike and continued to to Angkor Thom and the other surrounding temples.

It's so amazing that they built all these amazing temples for their belief. 
The day went on and it was a lot of temples to see. On may way back a got a flat tire but thanks to an incredible man along the way the problem was solved in no time. 
After a day full of temple watching I must admit I was a bit tired of it. I started to wonder if I've made a mistake buying the three day ticket. 
I talked with the guys in my room and we decided to rent a tuk-tuk the following day and go to the temples further away and also visit the landmine and war museum. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the history of the country. 

Pictures will come soon just need to find a computer with a output for USB ( I thought all computers these days had one, guess what I really need is a computer that is not from the 90's) 

Update

I've been so bad in update the blog recently. When you constantly have to look for internet cafes with a decent internet connection, outputs for USB and Skype and they are all crap it's easy to give up. It simply takes to much time and effort to even bother some times.

Time moves on and a lot of things have happened. At the moment I'm in the beautiful Cape Town which I just love. This week I'm going to start my journey up trough the east part of Africa with Nairobi as end destination. 

Here is an attempt to update you on what has happened since last time. Enjoy ;-)

The scam on the border!!

After Kachinaburi I went back to Bangkok to collect my visa, and most important my passport from the Indian embassy.

Happy to finally have my visa I decided I was done with Thailand for now. Next place Cambodia. I went to buy a ticket to Siem Riep. At the ticket office they were very careful to inform about how important it was not  to let anyone else do our application for visa at the border to Cambodia and that there will be people there try to scam us. We should not pay more than 20$ for the visa.

The next day we picked up by the mini bus to go to Cambodia. The company we where going with was called JT Travel and the man in charge of the company seemed very nice as they always do....

Everything went well until we approached the border. Then he took us to a restaurant for a lunch break. No one was really interested in lunch we just wanted to get to Siem Riep. At the restaurant he wanted us to fill in some papers for the visa before we went to the border and he replaced our bus tickets with stickers on our shirts.

Then he told us that if we just paid him like 1700 bath or 25$ and 300 bath he would fix our visas in 10 minutes.

We said that we where told not to let anyone else handle our visa application and that we wanted to do ours at the border.

He said that it was better if he did this for us, it would only take 10 minutes. We still said that we wanted to do it by ourselves. He got more and more frustrated and started to say things like that it was his company that we where traveling with and that he was the one who decided, in the end he was screaming at us.

Finally he said ok I'll take you to the office for visa application. When we tried to take our visa application paper (that he had handed to us) with us he stopped us and tore them apart. He also took our stickers that was the only proof we had of paying the bus.

When we arrived to the "visa application office" they told us about the formalities which was almost the same information that our angry driver had given to us. They could easily have fold us to believe that we where at the real visa application center but then they made a mistake by saying that it would only take them 10 minutes to arrange with our visa at the Cambodian embassy.

No, we said. We are going to the border to arrange with our visa from there. They started to yell again:

- and how are you going to get from the border to Siem Riep?? You don't have any stickers....!!!

- there is not possible to apply for a visa at the border!!!

- if you apply for a visa on your own it will take three days to get it!!

- you will come back here and beg me for a visa and then it will be me laughing!!!

He was furious with us, but we just walked a way.

In that moment I wished that I had applied for the visa trough internet so it was done and nothing to fought about(which I thought about a number of times but decided that it was to complicated because I had to upload a picture, stupid lazy me!!) 

When we got to the border we got our stamp out from Thailand and on the other side of the road we found the office for visa application. I payed my 20$ and than another 100 bath on the side and 10 minutes later we had our visa. We went straight to the emigration office to get our stamp in to Cambodia.

In queue to the emigrations the rest of our travel mates from the bus joined up behind us, this could not been a better time we thought. We talked about what we would do since they took away (the sticker) our only proof that we had payed for the bus trip to Siem Riep. We decided that we should just try to get on the bus and if he wanted to trow us out he could try...We would not make this easy for him...

So when we got to the terminal from where the bus was leaving one of the men from the office where there to make sure everyone got to the right place. We approached him and in the beginning he ignored us before he got mad again and started to yell at us. He didn't know who we where and he didn't know anything abut our bus tickets... We felt like we where getting no where with him and that it was better to just buy new bus tickets Siem Riep. Before we went off to the bus I just wanted to make his life a hell for a moment so I started to take some pictures of him with my camera and soon Christian was doing the same. This time he got completely crazy with me screaming that I was a very bad tourist: - YOU, very bad tourist!!! And I replied: - Yes I'm a very bad tourist but you are a very bad person. You don't have any moral, you're a scammers and I will show your picture to everyone so they will know.

Then we left to get to the bus. It felt a but funny when the rest of the group from our "scam bus" joined us on the bus but didn't have to pay since they had their stickers...we payed twice for the same bus.

In the end, I guess we payed the same price as the others who let the company handled their visa. Though it felt good to know that the extra money I payed went to the Cambodian government instead of a Thai scam company.

Kanchanaburi

Left Bangkok a few days to breathe some clean air and hike on the country side.

I wanted to go up to Chiang Mai to walk in the mountains but unfortunately I didn't have the time to go all the way up there. Maybe next time... :-)
Instead I ended in Kanchanaburi, a small town close to the border to Burma. I spent a few days hiking in the nationalpark, it was nice to feel smells that was not pollutions for a change.....     
On the way to Eravan Nationalpark. The steering wheel was almost as big as the driver of the bus which did not seemed to be more than 15 years old.... I felt like I was in good hands, not!!!

Entrance to Eravan Nationalpark with all the waterfalls. Starts at 20 meter and ends with the last waterfall 1520 meter above.

The beginning of the waterfall trek.

Bangkok

Bangkok is an ok city even if it's a bit to crowded, crazy traffic but with awesome shopping...

I'm happy I don't have so much money left because otherwise this could have ended up with a heavy overload on that airport....

As soon as I had left my luggage in my hostel I went to the Swedish embassy to get my passport. 20 minutes later I signed the visa application at the Indian embassy and left my brand new passport in their hands, I prayed to God it wouldn't get lost again.

After that I went out to explore Bangkok.... 

On the same street as my guesthouse I found this jazz bar. Inside the bar they have an jazz band playing live every night, they also serve the best drinks.

The huge Chatuchak weekend market, which is enormous. I don't know how many times I got lost there during the time I was there.

Just an ordinary bus trip.....

After a few relaxing days on Koh Phangan I took the night bus up to Bangkok.
The bus journey turned out to be a quite interesting one....
 
On the ferry I meet an older British lady whom were working as a theater director in UK and for the moment  worked in Thailand. She seemed nice and reasonable. But when we got to the bus everything started, nothing where good enough for her.
The bus didn't have enough space for her legs, it was to dirty and to crowded.
On top of this the bus broke down after 1, 5 hours so we had to wait for a new bus.
When the new bus arrived, it was cold and didn't have blankets, water and food packages like the old bus so now she was upset about that. The staff went in to the old bus to get all the blankets, water and the food packages for us. That wasn't good either, now she was unhappy to get a "used" blanket which had probably been lying on the floor.
After a while we were in our way to Bangkok again. But then hell really broke loose. The man who were in the seat in front of this lady put his seat down to sleep. She didn't like it at all, it got to tight for her legs. So she told him to put the seat back up again. He told her that it was the same for all of us and that he couldn't sleep with the seat up. She continued to nag about this and told him that she thought he was unreasonable and rude. He told her to accept the situation and go to sleep. Instead she put her knees up against the seat to try and force it up and in the same time she was hitting his seat and screamed how rude he was. He turned around and started to hitting her back. It was quite entertaining to watch this even if I think that most of us just wanted to sleep. 

After a while both of them calmed down and we could try to get some sleep.

A few hours later we arrived to Bangkok.    

Pictures from Koh Phangan

 Rented a scooter and went around the island, saw some temples on the way...

Along the way I also found some waterfalls.