Day 40: Siem Reap, Cambodia (February 16, 2011)

The first part of my day entailed flying from Bangkok to Siem Reap, Cambodia, which is near Angkor Wat (my reason for coming to this part of Cambodia).  Then a nap, to make up for rising before 6am.  This was the first flight on my itinerary that did not involve a time change, since the two cities are pretty close together.

I was a bit surprised as I first drove into town (via tuk-tuk, which is a moped pulling a two-wheeled cart behind it, and which will be my main form of transport around the temples too):  The main street between the airport and downtown was nothing but huge, tacky hotel after huge, tacky hotel.  Ugh!  The person who warned me about Bangkok being too commercialized has also been to Siem Reap, but did not make the same comment.  It's worst, IMO.

Fortunately, all the gaudy hotels are on the outskirts of town.  Downtown, where I'm staying, is still a warren of old buildings mixed with new.  There are a lot of tourists around, but that's fine.  It means there are lots of places to eat and drink, and people out on the streets, so I felt comfortable walking back to my hotel after dark.  A couple shots from downtown -- it's not pretty, but that's OK, it's lively instead:

For those who want to know what I'm eating along the way, I had a few new things tonight.  I ate at a Cambodian-Western fusion restaurant, and ordered amok fish ravioli as my main dish.  Now why didn't I ever think to put fish in ravioli?  Probably because it's a little weird.  The amok fish is a traditional cambodian dish, and they packed it in ravioli and covered it in a curry coconut sauce.  I found the fish to be pretty spicy.  So spicy, in fact, that I cooled my mouth with the curry coconut sauce.  I never figured that curry would ever be something I'd cool my mouth with.  But I've clearly developed more of a tolerance for spicy food than I had before, since I've been eating it so much.

For desert, I had vanilla ice cream topped with lychee, black jelly, and jackfruit.  Apparently this jackfruit is the same jackfruit that I first tried in Sri Lanka, although that one was unripe because it was brown and not sweet and reminded me of fish, and this jackfruit was squishy and bright yellow-orange and sweet.