Final Thoughts: Cambodia

Highlights –

• Meeting Alice, Sandy, Phillip and Ross on the bus to Siem Reap
• Exploring Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Prohm (“Tomb Raider”), and other temples
• My first shiatsu massage by a blind person
• Visiting and supporting local community – Butterfly Garden restaurant, Angkor Children's Hospital, Handicap International
• Talking travel for hours with Alice, the girls from Finland and Norway, and a guy from Philadelphia on my last night in Siem Reap
• The scenic boat ride to Battambang
• Moto tours through rural villages to killing caves and fields
• Hearing Phi-lay describe his first hand account of life under the Khmer Rouge
• Eating dinner and watching Bollywood movies with Phi-lay's family (twice)
• Completing the dog dare

• Pushing myself to try local foods like snake, grasshopper, and frog (just not the spiders….or the little fried birds….or the BIG cockroaches)
• Reading “First They Killed My Father”
• Visiting the Royal Palace
• Eating dinner at the Foreign Correspondent's Club (FCC) along the riverfront in Phnom Penh
• Spending an emotional and quiet morning at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum (S-21)
• Walking through the killing fields at Choeung Ek
• Buying 40 albums of mp3's at $0.75 apiece
• Buying 4 paintings by Cambodian artists
• The epic 16-hour minibus ride to Ban Lung with 16 Cambodians and a lot of bags/luggage
• Swimming in my first crater lake and visiting waterfalls via moto rides through rural villages
• 4×4 action and scenic boat rides to ethnic villages in remote (by my standards) northeastern Cambodia
• The friendliness, smiles, cheerful “hello's” and hospitality of Cambodians (especially the kids in the countryside)

Lowlights –

• My brand new ASUS AC adapter breaking (third occurrence overall)
• The epic 16-hour minibus ride to Ban Lung with 16 Cambodians and a lot of bags/luggage
• My Creative mp3 player breaking, as well as the first replacement I bought

Eating –

Amok with chicken or fish and rice, Cambodian curry, fried rice, baguettes, coffee, pizza, ostrich, bugs, grasshopper, dog, snake, frog, Angkor beer, banana pancakes, parma ham risotto with mushroom sauce (Phnom Penh)

# of Days Couchsurfing –

0

Average Cost Per Day –

$63 (would be about $10 less if I didn't buy a new mp3 player, lots of music and souvenirs)

Dave Lee

Dave is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Go Backpacking and Feastio. He's been to 66 countries and lived in Colombia and Peru. Read the full story of how he became a travel blogger.