4. Bus trip to Seam Reab, Cambodia

The bus ride to Siem Reab was very rough. The first 1/3 of the way it felt as if I was in a 4-wheel drive in rough terrain. The bus was a 15-year old second hand luxury liner from Korea, and it had seen better days. Needed shocks. After 7 hours we arrived around 5:00 PM. Weather here is pretty great. Along the way I met my future tuk tuk driver, Oeun.

Oeun, a tuk tuk driver 

This lady is selling bunches of lotus flowers when the bus stopped for a break

You have to dig these white pea like things out, and that's about
what they tasted like to me, a raw black-eyed pea. 

He was very nice, and when some Cambodian ladies boarded the bus selling stuff to eat and me not knowing what it was, he schooled me on how to eat it. He gave me a bit of the lotus flowers, which produced bean-like things. I also bought some mango from them, the worst I ever had...crunchy and sour. I later asked my Cambodian/American friend about it, he said sour papaya with salt and hot peppers is a delicacy--but all I got was the papaya in my package...was I supposed to have my own condiments?

Oeun lives in Siem Reab but was in Phnom Penh attending to his mother who has cancer. We had a long talk about how difficult it is for him to buy the drug therapy and pay for hospital stays. Since he's a tuk tuk driver, I decided to hire him to take me around the temples. My plan was to stay 3 nights to be able to get a good look at the temples, and he charged $15 a day. When the bus rolled in, he packed me up and took me around looking at hotels. I looked at three, the first two had beds hard as stone. The third one I didn't like, but it had 3" of foam which made it sleepable. I just made that word up. Honestly, this hotel sucks, but I chose it because of the bed.

The CDC suggests you wear long pants and long sleeved shirt with everything buttoned down tight because of the mosquitos. Well I'm here to tell ya'll that is ridiculous advice. Of the 3 buzzillion--no I think it was a treskillion--tourists crawling all over these temples, not one of them dressed this way. Me and the security guards were the only ones, and they were sitting in the shade for the most part, not climbing up temples. Folks, just wear shorts and tee shirts, and use deet.

That's right, I'm wearing black socks. At least I don't wear Bermuda shorts with them.

I tried to meet up with Giuseppe and Danielle again for dinner, and they read in their guide book that Khmer Kitchen was pretty good, so I went there to meet them. I got a table, and texted them such. They promptly texted back that they had a table too. Huh? We never found each other. That's right, it was that difficult. I asked the waitress, she informed me that there were three eating areas. Aside from mine, there was a second area connected by the kitchen. We threaded our way through pots of boiling water and cooks chopping the heads off chickens, typical stuff for a kung fu chase scene. I entered the other area and looked all over, no lovebirds. OK, I ask the waitress where is the third area and she says, "Oh, it is 100 meters down this alley". Crap. So I start walking. Try as I might for about 15 minutes, I do not find it.  And to make it even more comical, I ran out of minutes on my phone in the middle of our trying explain where each other was. So I was just standing in the middle of the street trying to figure out what to do next when here they come. She has had some kind of flu symptoms developing and they decided to make a short night of it, and they just happened to run across me standing in the middle of the street, all befuddled and accosted by tuk tuk drivers who are sure they know exactly what I want (wink wink, nudge nudge). We decided to just go to the first decent place we saw and grab a quick bite, and that happened to be the Red Piano. Angela Jolie apparently ate there once, and her picture is everywhere.

After a mediocre meal I went back to the hotel, which was populated almost entirely by European or American hipster 20-somethings. One kid was playing pool with his friends as I watched, and he did one of my favorite Simpson's quotes. I recognized it and laughed, and everyone turned around to look at me. It was weird, so I went up to my room and cried myself to sleep.