Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 29 - Tuesday June 7th 2016 - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Siem Reap, Cambodia

As is always the way when you know you have to get up neither of us had a good night sleep and we were both up drinking coffee before the alarm time. With everything packed and ready to go we headed up to our last breakfast in The Rex hotel then down to checkout and pay our hotel bill.

The journey by taxi to the airport was a very stop start affair. The traffic was bumper to bumper the whole way there as the scooters weaved in and out of every conceivable space that they could. Eventually we made it with plenty of time to spare but this was just as well. Our flight time had changed and no one had told us! Instead of flying at 12:00 we were now flying at 11:15, still we had plenty of time and we breezed through check in (once again avoiding extra luggage fees) and security, got our passports stamped and headed down to the departure gate for our Cambodian Airways flight to Siem Reap. The flight time is only an hour so it really is a hop, skip and a jump.

So the plane journey to Cambodia and Siem Reap Airport took all of forty-five minutes in total. It’s an airbus flight that to be honest was not even a third full. You get served one bottle of water on the flight, given your customs and immigration papers and you are down on the ground. As we flew over Cambodia it looked lush and green and flat from the air with those red river ways that we had seen from the air when flying over Vietnam.

Siem Reap airport is tiny, and deserted. Its built in the Cambodian style looking like a

temple and everything looked very new, very very new.It was a visa on arrival application here so once we had all our forms in order we were first in line to receive our visas, another full page gone from our passport, and $30 lighter. Our passports travelled down a production line of officials all glancing and stamping and approving until our passports were handed back to us and we headed to immigration.,

This was a bit of a farce as there was only one desk open, we were then sent to a different desk who decided to close when we got there to go back to the original desk for another desk to open….gggrrr, still we were in no rush and the flight had left early so no worries.

We collected our bags and walked out into the stifling head of Siem Reap, wow, it’s hot here! We had booked a driver to pick us up from the airport and take us to the hotel but there was no sign of him yet but we got distracted by the big queue at the free phone sim window. Turns out that Data is very very cheap in Cambodia and we ended up both buying a Cambodian sim with six gig of data for a grand total of $1 per gig…. Trev was very very happy!

Driver found we headed up the road to our hotel. It seemed that hotels were all there were as we drove up the road, hotel after hotel. After 15 minutes or so we arrived at ours, The Palace Residences and Villas (five star don’t you know). All the hotel male staff are in some kind of traditional costume and they even banged a drum to signal our arrival at the hotel.

We were sat down, had ceremonial scarves put around our necks and served with a traditional berry drink and a cold flannel to freshen up.

We got taken to our room, it’s nice, we have a little ground floor balcony and a view over the koi pond filled with lily pads set in really lush green gardens.

As you do we went off to explore the hotel a bit and get some bearing around the place. It has a great spa, two huge swimming pools, restaurants, cafes, all the usual stuff but it feels deserted. I’m sure that this is because there is not really another reason to come here other than to visit Angkor Wat and that’s where everyone must be right? On day trips out to the temples? Time will tell but for the size of the hotel is does feel very quiet indeed.

We had access to the club lounge thrown in with our hotel deal, this means that we can basically have free drinks all day and snacks. It’s a bit lethal that as the free drinks include gin as well but for now we needed a little snack to keep the pangs of hunger at bay so we sat and picked at the limited selection, it was fine.

After that little snack we headed back out in the beautifully landscaped gardens, it was absolutely boiling outside, real burn your skin to a crisp weather but we both really fancied a swim so we went back to the room got changed and headed for the pool. In the time that it took us to get changed and back to the pool the weather had managed to change as well. It was now overcast and cloudy and you could not feel the burning sun like before. Still we needed to cool down so we both got in the pool (burning our feet on the hot tile surround). Within another 20 minutes or so we were both jumping out of the pool, the heavens had opened and it was now raining…. that’s twice now that Trev has got in a pool and its started to rain. We had no option but to retreat to the room for a while, not what we wanted to do but no choice.

The rain looked like it was in for a while so we settled down on the room occupying ourselves for about an hour before it stopped and we got ready to leave the hotel for the town. See we are not very good at being still, especially when we have just arrived in a new country. We had originally told ourselves that we would stay around the hotel all day today and leave the town until the day after tomorrow. Siam Reap does not look that big an area so we don’t want to overdo it all at once. We spoke to soon though as just as we were leaving the room, all changed and ready the heavens opened again.

This was not just a little shower, this was thunder and lightning and heavy heavy rain that was now sitting on the ground due to the earlier downfall.

We turned around and stayed in, mother nature was making us stick to plan A (staying in the hotel for the day).

This time we really did chill with Jonathan turning to his iPad and Trev continuing sorting out all the photos (he’s very nearly up to date with them all now).

Before we knew it time had come and gone and it was seven at night the problem being that neither of us was feeling in the slightest bit hungry. We both talked ourselves into going to eat anyway (I’m not saying anything about our expanding waistlines…. but ouch !!) but by the time we got outside the restaurant we changed our minds again and just headed for the club lounge, the free nibbles and the free booze. So a few chicken legs and a couple of gin and tonics later we had come up with another life plan, or should I say a desire, something that we would like to both do and out afternoon in the room and a bit of web searching had shown us that what we thought was impossible was actually not as long as we were more flexible with our expectations. So what is it…. I’m afraid that’s not for here, not yet, that’s not fare on many important people in our lives and it may never happen but we lost ourselves in the maybe of it for most of the evening.

So a few snacks, a few drinks we headed back to the room and finished where we had started…. chilling out.

It’s certainly not the best start to arriving into a new country but a t he same time you can’t manage the weather, tomorrow if it rains we will just get on with it but it had always been the loose plan of the day to just hang around the hotel and that what we did even though we would of escaped given half the chance. Here’s to tomorrow being bright and dry…. we know it’s going to be exciting already…. that’s the reason we came to Cambodia, our agenda tomorrow!