Two Wrong Decisions Don't Equal a Right

So, we were well rested after three nights in Sihanoukville and took the bus back to Phnom Phen, where we stayed for the next two nights. We really wanted to go to another orphanage, but our driver did not get back to us via e-mail on the one day that we could have gone, and he had lost his phone! I guess that will just be reason enough for us to come back to Cambodia, Phnom Phen in particular.

So, while we were waiting to hear back from our driver, we checked out the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. The Royal Palace is located right along the river, with a beautiful courtyard dazzling in with color. The sky was so blue on the day that we visited, so it made for some great pictures. No smoky haze filling the sky here! The Silver Pagoda was a lot smaller than I was expecting. The floor is covered with over 5000 tiles made of... yup, you guessed it,  silver. You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the pagoda, but we managed to sneak a quick picture of some of the silver tiles. Hey, they charge you to take a camera in!

So after one more day in Phnom Phen, we decided to skip the early wake-up call of 5:30 AM to catch the boat directly up to Siem Reap and take a bus up to Battambang in northwest Cambodia. The boat ride from Battambang to Siem Reap is supposed to be the most scenic in Cambodia, so we thought that the 5 hour bus ride to Battambang and a short overnight before the boat trip would be kind of adventurous, rather than taking the easy way out on a quick 5-hour boat straight to Siem Reap.

We chose poorly.

I mean, who wants to make things easy anyway? Obviously, not us. The bus ride wasn't the worst in the world and we got to take in more sights of the lovely  Cambodian countryside. 

Arriving in Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city, was a little hectic and the tuk-tuk drivers were all over us. Literally. They grab your bags, throw hotel brochures in your face and pull you by any limb they can get a hand on over to their tuk-tuk or motorbike. We found the one guy who wasn't all over us and had him drive us around the city looking for a hotel. Battambang is situated on a small river, the same river that we would be embarking on early the next morning... or so we thought. You see, as we were soon to find out, to travel down a scenic river, one needs to have water to float on along the river. As we are here during the dry season, that makes for either a non-existent or painfully long boat trip. After a quick dinner at a restaurant called White Rose (really delicious fruit shakes and Khmer food), we went down to the boat docks and asked about the boat ride in the morning. A trip that in the rainy season takes about three hours or less was now a 9-hour trip. Oh boy. The river water was too low, so they have to take smaller boats that can navigate the shallow waters. That scratched the "scenic boat ride" right off our trip plan.

I don't think we got too much of a feel for Battambang, as we arrived at dusk and left mid-morning for Siem Reap, but we hear they have some interesting temples to see and it was nice seeing another city in Cambodia that we have been reading about in our books. Besides having dinner there, we stopped at a place called Riverside Balcony Bar, the most happening bar according to Lonely Planet and frequented by Angelina Jolie. Lonely Planet is either a little outdated or there is not too much going on in Battambang, as there were about seven people in the place. It was a tiny little bar in an old two-story wooden house. Very cool, local ambience. So, Kevin and I played a few games of shoddy pool before we called it a night to get some rest for our ride to Siem Reap the next morning.

Well, the buses had already left when we woke up the next morning, so we hired a car to take just the two of us on a 3+ hour drive to Siem Reap. We had heard that the bus rides take considerably longer, 5 hours or more from Battambang to Siem Reap. What they failed to tell us is that a road doesn't really exist on the way there. After a nice Khmer meal of Lok Lak at a local eatery, picked by our driver who spoke not a word of English, we found ourselves on a violently bumpy dirt road, marked with Detour signs every five minutes that would take us onto an even more violent, bumpier path. We were gripping onto our seats the whole time, but once again, it made for an interesting ride. We passed very small villages remniscient of the villages we saw in Northern Laos on our way to the Gibbon Experience. Red clay everywhere, all over the beautiful children playing and animals grazing along the road. We soon realized, as our heads were ready to explode from all the jolting around, that maybe the 9-hour boat ride would have been a better decision.

But, alas, we made it to Siem Reap, as the sun had completely disappeared, which made for an interesting search for a guesthouse to stay in. We were exhausted from traveling, but bring on the temples.

So, the moral of the story is, when a 5-hour boat ride straight to your destination sounds easier than a roundabout way on less-traveled roads, it probably is a good decision to stick with the  direct route right on the water. Especially when you're in a slight time crunch. Especially while  traveling  through the boonies of Cambodia.