That's Me

This colour

All right..time to continue my picture journey...

After drinking our Singha beer, we took a speeding tuk tuk to the Morchit Bus Terminal(Below) near the fringe of the Bangkok city. However, we arrived at the bus terminal early. As a result, we had to wait for 3 hours or so til the bus ticket counter open. In the meanwhile, we hanged around aimlessly at the big carpark in front of the bus terminal. There were people sleeping literally anywhere you can imagine...on the grass patch, on the floors of the bus terminal...It's like anywhere is a comfy bed for them. From the bus terminal, we bought tickets and took an air-con bus that brought us directly to the Thai-Cambodian border crossing.

I was very fascinated by monks. They seemed to be everywhere. We had 2 monks sharing the same bus with us and they were only one arm's length away from me! Oh and being a monk entitled you to jump queue at customs and some selected places, how cool is that?

We reached the Thai-Cambodian border at the break of dawn. There was an exodus of Cambodians crossing the border into Thailand every morning, presumably to obtain things at the Thai markets. The number of people were just amazing. Below is the picture of the area around the custom. There were some construction works going around there. The place looked messy. Remember i said in my earlier post there were nearly no traffic lights at all in Cambodia? Yeah...you can imagine the beautiful chaos.

We couldn't found any pickup trucks and arrived too early again for the buses. The buses usually leave from the border crossing to Siem Reap at 2pm but we were there at 8am. So we were "forced" to take a taxi. This was not part of our original plan at all. We did not include this expense as part of our budget. Since we were unable to do anything at that point in time, we took the taxi in the end. Our driver was a policeman cum taxi driver (Pic Below). Total question mark! The road to Siem Reap was unpaved and extremely bumpy. I thought my neck was going to break by the amount of shockwaves i received from the ups and downs, left to right shakiness of the vehicle as it moved through the rocky road. People nicknamed the road as Dancing Road because vehicles would sort of "dance". I rather they didn't...it was the most bumpy 3 hours ride i ever had in my entire life.

Finally our dancing taxi arrived at Siem Reap. The weather in Siem Reap was baking hot. You could get an instant tan by staying out under the sun for an hour..Ha. We spent out first day in Siem Reap checking out the vicinity. There were temples scattered all over the town. Below is the picture of one the temples. It shows the entrance of the temple to be more exact.

We saw a man catching shrimps or prawns, whichever, in Stung Siem Reap, "Stung" means river in Khmer. The river water looked quite cooling especially when its all green and the weather was hot (even hot it is an understatement).

A short distance from Stung Siem Reap was the local market (Below).There wasn't much to see inside. Usual tourisy stuffs. BUT! The area is famous for selling pirated books at cheap, knockout prices. What do i mean by pirated books? They are books that are photocopied versions of the original books. And what is so great about these pirated books is their realness. They look very much like the original ones. So did we bought any of them? You bet! We did.

This was how the inside of the market looked like...quite dark and humid. Besides souvenirs, there were flower stalls, sundries, textiles, jewelleries, vegetables, fruits as well as book stores all under one roof.