'Bangkok take TWO'

Bangkok - 21/08/2013 - 27/08/2013

MeeeeeSCOOOZI... This reminds me of the film Eurotrip when there on the train.. haha

Back in Bangkok but this time we decided to stay in Sukhumvit, it's a little more expensive but it's more central to all the markets and nightlife etc. The skytrain in Bangkok covers most of the inner suburbs but it doesn't go out to Koh San Road (the old quarter), so it would of meant we would of had to get a tuk tuk in everyday so we just chilled out here.

It wasn't nearly as good as the Koh San Road area which is amazingly lively and very backpacker oriented, but we found alot to do and even just wandering about provided us with entertainment. We even saw a man dressed up as a giant pot noodle running about!

REALLLY???   Mcdonalds are EVERYWHERE!!!!!! GO AWAY!!!!!!

We had heard about a big cheap mall called M.B.K so we wandered around this hugggeeee mall in search of some good bargains before we left Asia. Also the tablet screen had been broken in Siem Reap, not sure how but we managed to get it fixed in an hour, so we were happy! 

We got some awesome bargains, fake calvin klien underwear for next to nothing, got to be done! This mall we came to realise was by far the best (except for the weekend market) It's actually fucking scary when you go to massive cities like this, you can walk down a stretch of road for half an hour and you will see maybe 7 or 8 MASSIVE shopping malls, some classier than others. It puts into prospective how much of a consumer nation we are! We managed two days shopping one here and one at the weekend market which was beyond crazy, and that was enough!!!! 

Yummy lunch to break up the shopping, I also got a colourful braid put in my hair :) she glued an extension in the back and went to town wrapping string and stuff around, I love it!

Taxi anyone? Pick a colour!

The skytrain was awesome, you are literally cuddling everyone around you, squeeeze on! 

Haha....

We found a pub in the evening that had some 'out of date' old rosie in the back, we managed to get several pints on the cheap. It tastes better with age so i wasn't complaining. Started chatting to a crazy Canadian guy called Wald, what a legend! Spent allll night getting really messy with him and sharing stories, Olly conked out in the morning and we went to a dodgy pub and carried on the drinking, I met a Danish guy who made his own liqourice vodka, for all the liqourice fans out there if you've ever had pontifract cakes, it was like a liquid version of that. I rocked up at 3pm steaming drunk shouting at Olly telling him he had to try it. We eventually found the bar again and Olly loved it, damn so good.

The famous liqourice king!!! Name unknown due to social confusion and lack of memory.

We decided to go to the IMAX in town because we'd never been before, we watched a documentory on the hubble telescope narrated by Leonardo dicaprio, it was pretty special!!!

This was on the way to the weekend market, as I said before it was absolute mayhem. We spent the day getting lost in a sea of shops, it stretched over 35 acres and had over 15,000 stalls selling anything u could imagine. No joke.

We left on the skytrain to head to the airport, next destination SINGAPORE!

I'm not sure why I have to give my seat up for a monk... anyone?

'Siem Reap-ing it in'

'Siem Reap' - 14/08/2013 - 20/08/2013

The slow boat to Siem Reap was really noisy and not so enjoyable for the first couple of hours as the river was so narrow the boat kept crashing into the bank and tree's, spiders and insects all climbed aboard. In the last part of the journey we sat up on the top deck in the sunshine passing many floating villages as we made our way across Ton Sap lake. (Which is huge in the rainy season and swells up to about 10 times its original size).

When we finally arrived in Siem Reap we wen't straight to a hostel we thought a couple of friends we'd met were staying at and pretty much partied all night and into the next day. The next day was a right-off, we had at least 5 days in Siem Reap and apart from the temples of Angkor Wat there isn't so much to do! (Except party) Oh no...

The following day we explored the city center and markets and booked a show and buffet for the evening, we went quite tipsy which made it fun as the dancing was so slow it was almost going in reverse! The women were incredibly beautiful and it was cool to have a little glimpse into there cultural dance routines which tell stories. The buffet was amazing, and we left feeling realllly fat!

We spent the next day going around the Angkor Wat temples, we were originally going to do three days but one day was enough, some of the ruins and especially the big temples were just incredible but it's hot and neither of us although fascinated by it are temple enthusiasts. I'll let the photo's do the talking, we didn't want to pay for a guide so I don't really know much about the history of them individually, only what I saw on national geographic. The best part of the day for me were the temples at the end where nature had tried to reclaim the buildings and huge trees just emerge from the bricks!

The main temple - Angkor Wat

The carvings on the walls took 17 years and were all done by hand, some of them look almost 3D.

Bayon Temple (The one with faces)

I can't remember the name of this one... looks like a Mayan temple though.

Different temple again...

It's amazing to think all the carvings and building of the temples were done over 1,000 years ago, you can't even fathom how you would do it nowadays without cement, and all the hand carved stone... mind blown!

Siem Reap had awesome night life, the bridge which lit up and changed colours looked sick at night, and the infamous pub street saw us more than once!

The final day we booked a transfer bus at 5:30am to take us to Bangkok! Excited to get back to the big city and see a different side of things!

'Battenburg mm'

'Battambang' 13/08/2013 - 14/08/2013

We only ended up staying in Battambang one night and one day but while we were there we managed to do so much! The tuk tuk driver who'd met us from the sleeper bus offered to take us out for the day to see and do all the things we'd wanted plus more!

Our first stop was the famous bamboo train, it's not quite how I'd imagined it in my head but it was such good fun, the locals were given use of the old rail lines 7 years back as the track wasn't good enough for commercial use. Everytime you met a bamboo train coming the other way one of them would have to be dismantled and the people clamber into the bushes as the other 'train' passed. No wonder the track wasn't good enough for real trains it was curved like a snake and had huge gaps in the track which made for interesting if not painful jolts (especially if your sat at the front)!

We traveled on it at pretty high speeds for about 20 minutes until we arrived at a little village, the kids immediately jump on you and shower you with gifts as well as trying to sell you bracelets and what not. They also took us to a rice making factory and showed us how different grains were harvested which was cool, as I had no idea before this!

This was a grasshopper they'd made out of banana leafs, awesome!!!

After the bamboo train was the amazing 'suspension bridge' if anyones been to Bristol or seen bigger you can understand why Olly and I thought this one was shit, but we were told how vital it was to the local villages, if anything it was fun to swing on!!

Fruit bats were the next stop, they were HUGE! I'd never seen such big bats and they eat 'fruit' as their name suggests and so are not nocturnal like most bats! Apparently according to our tuk tuk driver ' Mr Excellent' it's not uncommon for the locals to catch them slice there throats and BBQ them up. There is pretty much nothing the Cambodians won't eat.

This was a temple we stopped at and had lunch, there were 376 steps up to the top and it was over 1,000 years old.

After this we hopped on the back of moped and rode up a mountain to get some good views of the Cambodian countryside around Battambang, Cambodia oddly in most of the places we've been to is really flat, especially at Battambang which is one of the best places for growing rice in the country. Due to this there are many more killing fields in the area, as this is where a lot of people where forced to work in the Khmer Rouge regime, we wen't to a killing cave, which as the name suggests is somewhere they would push men, women and children in. They didn't necessarily die on impact either which made it really haunting. 

We drove down the mountain and were told if we wait around for a couple of hours millions of bats come out of the caves to feast, so we grabbed a few beers with the German guys we'd met and waited up high on a cliff we'd scaled! They apparently came out at 6 pm on the dot. Having been waiting for a while we were getting impatient. Quite funny really as I thought about David Attenborough and his crew waiting for weeks just to get a shot of a rare animal, and here I am getting ragey 2 hours in. When they finally came it was absolutely wicked, there were literally millions of them, I have some brilliant videos but this is the only half decent photo I managed to get of them swarming in the distance!

Up early tomorrow for a slow boat to Siem Reap.