Holiday in Cambodia.

We have continued our journey east from Bangkok toward Cambodia. Along the way we encountered this beautiful relic:

A 1930's Mercedes Benz in a garage in a country that never sees snow or salty roads.

Then we camped in this National forest. I forgot the name, but it doesn't matter I can't pronounce it anyways.

In the early morning a Babboon attacked our camp.

This guy got away with three packets of dried noodles before Zeb chased it off in his underwear. We don't have a picture of that, but it was terrifying. For me and the babboon.

After a couple days at the park under siege from babboons, wild deer-like animals, mosquitos, and leeches (I hate leeches, but they are not as bad as mosquitos: they don't really hurt or itch. I got bitten three times and Zeb not once)we decide to head to the Cambodian border. We rolled down route 33 and stopped at the last town before the border (I forget the name, but you can follow along on your maps). We randomly stopped at a very cheap hotel for the night. It happened to be run by a couple from Cambodia. When they heard that we were trying to cross the border with Thai motorbikes they gave us some sad news.

The taxes to cross the border with motorbikes from Thailand are too expensive for our meager budget. If the bikes had U.S. plates, then no problem, but they are licensed in Thailand and subject to the rules of the region. There is a tax to leave Thailand and another to enter Cambodia. It seems that the borders on the map actually have a width to them in the real world. So the man of the couple helped us to sell them and offered us a spot on his bus to Siem Reap, Cambodia. He even got us visas for the border. Lucky us. How much did we sell the bikes for you might ask?

1.2 Million Cambodian Riel!

With our bikes sold we are again at the mercy of mass transit. The bus to cambodia was leaving the next day, so we had dinner in their restaurant where, for no apparent reason, they had a caged squirrel. If you have never seen a squirrel in a cage, this is what they do. Well, at least this tweaky bugger.

His performance was mesmerizing! I couldn't stop watching through dinner.

The next day we crossed the Cambodian border. This took nearly 2 hours. Then we boarded a bus. By then we were glad to be done with the bikes. See there aren't exactly proper roads in Cambodia. They are often unpaved. Mud in the rainy season and hard bumpy dirt in the dry season. This would be fun on proper dirt bikes, but our little road bikes would not have handled so well.

This appears to be a common form of transportation. That would be about 20 people in the back of a pickup truck.

These are my new favourite Cambodian cigarettes. Cambo. The package mentions Virginia, London, New York, and Paris but they have nothing to do with any of those places. They are made in Cambodia.

We are now in Siem Reap. As I write this we are preparing to take a bus to Phnom Penh. Here are some of the temples we saw in Siem Reap.

These can hardly sum up the amazing old temples we saw. But we tried.

We rode there on the back of for-hire motorbikes.

The next our drivers took us to a military training base and we used their range to shoot automatic weapons. An AK-47 and a Tommy Gun. Seriously, they had a Tommy Gun!

This is what happened to our $4 a night hotel room.

We trashed it like rock stars.