::A Geek in Korea::

After refreshing ourselves for an hour at our guest house, we got back in the tuk tuk and took a ride back to Angkor Wat. Every cultural site closed at 5:30 promptly, so we wanted to get in some more sights before the sun set. We also wanted to go to Phnom Bakheng before the sunset since we had missed it the previous day.

Armed with our new tour book from the previous day, we went around the walls of the temple, reading the various stories laid our by the bas-relief artwork. One of the stories, the battle of Ravana versus Rama that explains the origins of Diwali, was something I had taught previously in one of my classes last year. It was really cool to see it on the wall and be able to follow the story as it was explained by a nearby Korean guide. We might have had the book, but we continued listening in on tours. Yay, free information!

Once we had done a tour around the bas-reliefs, we left Angkor Wat for the last time to head to Phnom Bakheng. This place was absolutely swarming with tourists. There were elephant rides to the top, and a separate walking path for people going to the top of the mountain temple by foot.

It wasn’t a tough climb by Korean standards. It was a nice, wide, gravel path with the occasional stair for crossing streams. It reminded me of walking in a national park in the United States, except Chinese women in high heels were walking around instead of my family.

Who goes to Cambodian temple ruins in HIGH HEELS? We saw Japanese, Chinese and Koreans wearing high heels. We were wearing Crocs and as comfortable as they were, trying to climb the steep steps was still a dangerous experience.

Anyway, improperly dressed tourists aside, we made it to the top and got a perfect seat for the sunset. There were hundreds of tourists gathered at the top of the temple with extremely steep for sunset that weren’t familiar with their surroundings. Sound like a perfect place for pickpockets to you?

This was the only time in the entire trip where we felt that we needed to watch ourselves as tourists. There was a woman seated next to us that we warned about watching her bag a little more carefully. A Cambodian man was sitting behind her and was taking a little too much interest in her camera. He hadn’t done anything, but the way he kept peering over made him look like he was up to something.

We took a few pictures of the sky, then decided to leave before the crush of tourists made the stairs more dangerous. Soon it would get too dark to find our tuk tuk driver when everyone tried to leave anyway. We saw that the woman we warned left at the same time too. She had everything with her. She told us she had thought the same thing about pickpockets, and that she decided she’d rather be safe than sorry. Pickpocketing wasn’t common enough to be a constant concern, so people were lulled into a false sense of security.

We got down from the mountain without incident. We then tuk tuk’ed over to the Old Market once again. This time we walked around the corner to see some more tourist shops selling souvenirs. We marked that as a place to return to on our last day to pick up gifts for everyone we knew.

Following our previous routine, we returned to the guest house to clean up for the night. Since the next day would be exceptionally long, we tried to explain to our tuk tuk driver that he’d need to take us to the airport. We were willing to pay more money for him to spend the entire day with us, but we couldn’t explain the terms correctly. We got two or three other people to help us translate. Eventually he settled on $17 dollars for taking us to the airport. That was a huge relief, as we hadn’t dealt with anyone else for transportation since we had gotten into the city and we really didn’t want to struggle finding another driver.

We went to a Thai restaurant.I had Pad Thai that was easily the best Thai food I had ever had, and I had been to Thailand. After differ, we headed back to the guest house. I wrote up my journal, while my wife devoured more mangoes bought at the Old Market. Despite not having a knife, she was able to peel them with her teeth and we had a delicious snack before bed. Fresh, ripe, 3 for a dollar mangoes are certainly not a luxury you see in Korea or the United States very often.

We decided to get up a little later for our last day, since we had already burned through all the major sights we had wanted to see in the first two days. We had arranged to meet the tuk tuk driver an hour later, which let us rest a little more. We were still eager for our last day of adventure in Cambodia however.