Day 1 – Tuesday 16th of December – Arrival

After having sat in different airplanes and airports for a good part of a day – all in all our journey took 25 hours or so: from 6am to 7am the next day (mid day in Cambodia) – it was good to spend some time in relative quiet of our new host town. Or so I thought.

After having settled in at our hostel – Advisor Angkor Villa – (as described in the previous post) and washing of the grime from such a long journey, we set out to find the famous pub street of Siem Reap in order to get some fodder and maybe a beer or two on the side. Buuut nope, didn’t happen (not that we knew about it at the time)… We ended up heading to wrong way and sat down on a cute lil local restaurant (not one of those styled solely for tourists) called Palm Cafe (or something similar) on Taphul Road just a rock’s throw away from our hostel. I had early on already decided to settle down with some western dish as I just really needed some non-airplane food already. So a cheeseburger it was, just as any proper tourists first meal in a new country should be! The burger was quite ok, though the 3.5$ was quite steep price in retrospective. We did some comparison in between a couple local beer brands – namely the two big ones Angkor and Anchor as well as one carrying the name of the country, Cambodia. Both of em are pretty basic lagers, though Angkor has a bit more bitter aftertaste and Anchor a bit more flavour on the palate. Cambodia is the softest of the three and also has least character. All of em are cheap and easy to drink on hot day.

Having eaten, we decided to go exploring a the neighbourhood for a while and ended up walking deep into the local suburbs. Which was a tad bit bad idea as the roads lead us to middle of nowhere, quite literally. On the way back, we did manage to reach a big road though in the immense worry for one of our dear chain gang members bladder, we did a stupid thing and spend $3 hiring a tuk-tuk to take us to the pub street so we could walk back to the hostel… Just to find out that we were just a couple blocks away from the hostel and nowhere near the pub street, so we stopped the tuk after just a couple minutes ride and still had to pay him all the money… Stoopid hunams!

First impressions: This feels a lot like the back country in Greece, both being relatively poor, littered with garbage and filled with dusty roads , though the vegetation is lush and plentiful. Meso likes.