Say Wat?

March 10 - March 13

I forgot to mention that I had the best massage ever in Phnom Penh.  It was at "Seeing Hands Massage", which is a company that hires blind people and profits go to support the sight-impaired living in Phnom Pehn.  It looked totally dodge from the outside, and well, even from the inside... old, run-down, even a little dark.  But we had heard great things so we thought we'd give it a whirl... anything to make Phnom Penh a more pleasant experience!  Anyway, my massage therapist was named Nigah (no word of a lie, I even asked her to spell it in case I was hearing her incorrectly).  She kept calling me "sister", which made it even better and her English was phenomenal.  She was awesome ((she was trained by a Canadian) and she totally killed me, which is hard to do because I'm so tense!  She kept saying "Sister, I'm going to hurt you.  You are too stressed. Okay sister?"  And I kept responding "Nigah, please, you won't hurt me." I'm totally kidding.

The next day we went to Siem Reap.  It was incredible from start to finish.  First when we arrived at the bus station, there were not one but two dudes holding signs with my name on it.  WTF? How did they get my name? It was totally spelled wrong, but spelled well enough for me to decipher that it was mine.  Turns out that our hotel, where we bought our bus tickets, sold my name to a tuk-tuk driver so he could get our business when we got of the bus.  FYI - there is a huge boxed paragraph highlighting this exact situation in the Lonely Planet, which I obviously missed.  Anyway, we went with the first guy who approached us, for no reason in particular.  The guy who we didn't chose, was very upset claiming he was the "real" one.  Who knows?  We figure one of them was real and one them must of photocopied my name.  Anyway, maybe we did chose the wrong guy because I think travel karma bit us in the travel-ass, because in the the guy we chose ended up being a bit of a schizester (sp?). 

After our tuk-tuk driver dropped us off at a hotel he recommended (and would get a commission from), he wouldn't leave until we settled on a price for him to take us to Angkor Wat for one or two days.  These guys are relentess, I tell you.  But we got a good deal, one that he wasn't happy about $25 for two days.  He wasn't happy because what we realized was that he was actually paying someone else to do the actual driving so his profit was less than if he was doing the driving.

The first day Beth and I took a cooking class.  Or rather, learned how to follow the recipe they gave us.  Still so much fun and so much food!  While we looked like total dorks in orange aprons and chef hats, we learned how to make Amok which is a Cambodian curry.  Yum!  Cambodian food (and culture) is very similar to Thai.

Angkor Wat was amazing.  Even if you're not a ruins or temple person, you would be amazed by the grandeur and age of this place.  It was absolutely overwhelmning.  We arrived about 7am and spent 6 hours discovering the ruins of Angkor Wat, Ankor Thom and Ta Prohm - where Tomb Raider was filmed with all of the trees literally growing through the tomb, I mean wat.  I got a kick out of all of the danger signs around the temples because the entire place is falling apart... not just the parts in the danger zones.  You wouldn't want to be there during an earthquake, that's for sure.

I still wasn't able to talk and was starting to get a little worried (Google does not help in these situations).  After 4 weeks of not being able to talk and 2 rounds of antibiotics I needed to do something drastic or else I would have to start considering going home : (  After going to the over-run and run-down hospital in Saigon, I couldn't imagine that the Cambodian hosptial would be any better.  So I started to consider doing a detour to Bangkok before continuing on into Laos. Looking through the guide book I found out that the International hospital in Cambodia was affiliated with the Bangkok hospital, so it was worth checking out before heading all that way and thank God I did - the hospital and doctors were amazing, not cheap, but amazing.  I ended up having to stay behind in Siem Reap for an extra week to check in with the doctor but it was worth it.  After some very hefty antibiotics and three trips to the doctor I was on the mend and got my voice back!  Woot woot! And I can yell that now!

More soon...

xoxo