Here are my two highlights from the month of August...
Cambodia…I forget the holiday (this is why I
should have kept blogging!) but we had a four day weekend the first week of
August. I was wavering between going to
Koh Phangan for a Full Moon Party or going elsewhere and finally Bronwyn and I
decided to make the trek up to Cambodia and soon we had a crew of six other
teachers that joined us. I originally
thought a trip with eight people was going to be a nightmare to coordinate but
seeing that everyone over here is so laid back and chilled, it was so smooth
and so fun. We flew up to Bangkok
Wednesday after school and took a 5 am train to the Cambodian border the next
morning…5.5 hour train ride = $1.52. Not
kidding. I won't even get into how sketchy the border at Poi Pet is but seeing that there were eight of us who actualy lived in SE Asia and knew when someone was trying to scam us, we were able to get through without much of an issue...
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| Train from Bangkok to the Cambodian border |
We explored Siem Reap, Beng
Mealay temple and of course Angkor Wat.
If you don’t know about Angkor Wat, look it up and plan a trip
there. We explored temples, ate
baguettes for days, got massages, danced the nights away on Pub Street, paid
off Thai border officials, somehow made our flight home Sunday night and
thoroughly enjoyed our long weekend. I
don’t know if I’ve ever laughed as much as I did that trip. Cambodia, I’ll be back, there’s so much more
to see.
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| Beng Mealay Temple |
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| Exploring Beng Mealay |
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| Angkor Wat at sunrise |
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| Angkor Wat |
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| Faces Temple, Angkor Wat |
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| Tomb Raider Temple, Angkor Wat |
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| Climbing the Tomb Raider Temple, Angkor Wat |
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| Pub Street |
Flooding… Overall, rainy season wasn’t so bad
for us and the Thais said it was the driest one they could remember. I was dreading rainy season having heard
horror stories from years past but I actually enjoyed it a lot due to the lack
of tourists and the beach chairs crowding the beaches and the lower
temperatures at night. However, that
does not mean that we didn’t have our fair share of monsoons. We had two epic lengthy monsoons that I can
recall in August where our house completely flooded multiple times. I won’t really go into how our toilet and our
shower drain projectile spewed lord know what but I will say that we spent a
good amount of time bailing out our house with buckets. One of the worst moments of panic was one
morning in August when I woke up and got out of bed and when I put my foot
down, I just heard PLOP as my foot plopped into the small lake that my bedroom
had become. Nanc was on the other side
of the island and our landlord was out of town so let’s just say, I was about 3
hours late for school that day trying to save our belongings and our
house. I wish I had videotaped it. We actually seriously considered moving houses in Kamala but miraculously our
plumbing/house was saved after our landlord called someone who put in a weird
large blue pipe and we never had a problem again. I
think the pictures that I stole from Nancy below are a good representative of our street every time it monsooned. Drainage and clean sewers were not Phuket's strong point, though you think they would make it a priority seeing that they have monsoon season every year. Wish I had taken more pictures of the flooding but stopped carrying my camera in my backpack during monsoon season because I didn't want it to get water damage after I lost one to water damage on New Years Eve...
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