Day 13 All Parts – Angkor Wat and Photography

tl;dr Took a photography private class while exploring the Angkor Wat grounds and went out in Siem Reap – 3 activities.
Activity 1 – Welcome to Siem Reap:

Cambodia requires a Visa to be purchased upon arrival (you can do it online in advance, but that requires 3 days processing time and I had booked my flight the previous day…). Once I was finally through customs/immigration, I went to the cab stand to get driven to my hostel – The Siem Reap Pub Hostel.

Two quick points about money: 1. Cambodia has their own currency, but USD is widely used. Cambodian currency is often used to distribute change. It is about 4000 to 1USD. 2. USD are distributed from ATMs.

I end up taking a Tuk Tuk to my hostel (for those that do not know what this is, google it!). Also, I am at the mercy of my driver here since my Singapore SIM card will not work in Cambodia and Verizon does not have a $10/day deal for Cambodia. Thankfully, I make it smoothly to the hostel – well maybe not smoothly, it was quite a bumpy ride (many of the roads are not paved). 

I get to my hostel around 9am and of course my room is not ready. I am also exhausted so I grab a pool chair (yes, there is a pool at this hostel) and attempt to nap. I also go for a stroll to experience the city and get a local SIM card ($6 for 1gb). 

Activity 2 – Photography Private Class of Angkor Wat:

A few days before my trip to Siem Reap, I stumbled across a CNN article discussing ‘what to do’ in Siem Reap. One of the ideas was to take a photography tour of the temples. This seemed like an incredible idea! But, I did not have a true camera and I was not about to do a photography tour with my iPhone 6. I reached out to a company that provides these tours and was able to secure rental and instruction for a half day trip. My instructor picked me up at my hostel and we got into the Tuk Tuk that he hired for the day to take us around to the different sites.

The Angkor Wat grounds are huge. DO NOT TRY AND WALK IT YOURSELF. Hire a Tuk Tuk for $20 for the day and move seamlessly from site to site. The drivers will remember you and know the best pick up/drop off spots. Also, all of the pictures I took are on a memory stick…meaning I will upload them when I get home and have access to a computer. For now, you will have to look at the few pictures I took from my iPhone.

The temples are incredible! I am not going to bore you with a history lesson, but they are really cool. It is also really interesting to see some of the on-going restoration work. We ended up going to about 4 or 5 different temples as part of the photography tour, with the final stop being sunset over the actual Angkor Wat.

Activity 3 – Out on Pub Street:

After a long day strolling through Angkor Wat, it was time to refresh – enter the pool. It was such a nice and relaxing swim. Before I got out, I played a couple games of pool volleyball with some random Brits. 

I explored Pub Street – the main tourist and bar area – while debating what I wanted to eat for dinner. I settled on a place that had a classic Cambodian dish: Fish Amok. It is a sort of fish curry. It was really good! I also had spring rolls.

The bar scene here is 100% completely geared towards tourists. When I first got to a few of the bars, they were not that crowded, so I decided to explore the area a bit more. I cam across Tuk Tuks that were outfitted as bars. The best part was, these bars (they can move, but if they were in a prime location – would not move) had laptops attached to massive speakers, thereby allowing you to sit down, have a drink, and pull up whatever music you like on YouTube. I camped out at one of these ‘bars’ for three beers while listening to whatever music I wanted to.

I also went out to a couple of the bars on pub Street. The bars were fun, but definitely not as fun as bars in the other cities I had been to.