My Protanopic Life

After the first day at Angkor Wat, Taka went to a nearby travel agency to square away his plans to go to Phuket. While I was waiting outside for him I saw a motorcycle with a food stand sidecar drive by.

We went and got dinner at some dead lounge nearby. It was pretty cool and would've been popular if it wasn't in a dead part of town. Taka was telling me about his couch surfing experiences. One of his hosts failed to mention that he was a nudist, was bisexual and had 3 gay room mates.

We decided to go see the temples again the next day, not bothering with sunrise, and would head straight to the last place we'd gone and didn't have time to explore, Preah Kahn. There was a little market area across the street from the gate so we decided to have breakfast and coffee. We sat there by the temple entry and talked about airport security and motorcycles. Because it was so early the vendors weren't in full force yet so we actually managed to have an uninterrupted conversation.

Preah Kahn ended up being my favorite of the temples we saw. Much of it was in ruins with huge stone blocks toppled over like toys and covered with moss. It was moderately overgrown and mostly looked untouched, though I'm sure they worked to make it look that way because I saw some workers around the outskirts doing work on the surroundings.

We saw a few more temples that we didn't have time to see the previous day, then headed off to a more remote location that was 14km away, the Roluos group. This ended up being mostly disappointing though there was one that was good, Bakong, and since it was remote almost nobody was there. It was beautiful and was almost worth the drive, but our tuk tuk driver told us that he couldn't take us to the other temples down there because of bad roads or because there was nothing to see or whatever. It was hot and we got lost looking for a temple and ended up just going home in the early afternoon.

When I got back to my hotel, the Naga Guesthouse, I checked out because it was the third day that the internet would be fixed the following day. I went and checked into The Shadow of Angkor II, which is a new hotel a block away from the river in an also not busy part of town. It's brand new though and it's really nice, probably the nicest quality hotel I've stayed in so far. Smooth wooden bannisters, some electric water heater with a super duper massaging shower head in a circular shower, and broken wifi. They said it would be fixed the next day. It was only partly broken though, and after hacking around on their network and unplugging the power on one of their APs I managed to get weak wifi in my room.

I took a nap and then did some internet stuff and then Taka and I went to get dinner. Taka got us slightly lost but only by a few blocks and we ended up where we had intended to go, Pub Street. It was loud and busy with bars and restaurants and people filling the street and local girls dressed up too nice walking around alone.

Nothing looked like our fancy but we found a place that served a variety of ethnic foods and sat down. I decided to get pasta since I was a little tired of always eating Asian food, as good as it is. As I was reading the menu I saw the following entry: "Macaroni with harm and rice." This reminded me of some engrish I'd seen at lunch: "all the food serve with rice. the foods not use msg." Engrish is cute in an endearing way.

After dinner we felt like having a few drinks, it was Taka's last night in town after all, so we went down to some bar that was pretty cool and not too loud that was playing American music and had a witty menu that sounded like it was written by somebody from San Francisco. While we were there the power to the entire place went out, but a man with a flashlight quickly found the breaker and turned it all back on. Nobody seemed to care, I guess that kind of thing is normal.

Taka and I headed back to the hotel and caught up on some more online stuff and then parted ways as he went to his room to get some sleep before waking up early to head to the airport and off to Phuket. I had decided to stay here in town for another day or so, then head to Bangkok.