Sihanoukville & Sen Monorom - F1!

After our fun ride to Kampot & Kep down on the coast, we did some easy riding up the coast to the slightly larger beach town of Sihanoukville for a couple of days. This was a great vacation from our vacation where we pretty much chilled out on the white sand beach for three days and ate bar-b-qued fish (literally, whole ones) and frequented the beach bars.

The trip back to Phnom Penn by dirtbike was really uneventful, mostly paved surprisingly, with much less dust inhalation. We did the trip early in the morning to avoid hot weather and get the bike back the rental place by noon. We had a quick night's turnaround and then we traveled northeast to Sen Monorom by "mini-bus." Nothing short of a 9 hour journey in a 90's toyota minivan with 15 people (meant to hold 11) and cases and bags of food, oh yeah, and the road was at best 50% paved. Much of it was "just being built," we have better logging roads in the states.

Sen Monorom was a great quiet (relative to tourists we'd been around) place in the countryside of Cambodia. We rented a scooter and did some extreme off-road scooting through the villages and hills of that area to some waterfalls. We also found one of our favorite viewpoints on a hill where you could see for many many miles (partially into Vietnam) and it was all just green lush emerald jungle that we caught at sunset. I would post some pictures but it appears that our memory card has caught a virus from these internet cafes and this particular one will not remove the virus without deleting all of our pics. We are optimistic that we haven't lost a couple of weeks worth of pictures but we are switching cards just to be sure we don't continue with this issue. The joys of traveling...

Anyway, our journey back to Phnom Penn was far more memorable than our trip out (if you can believe that). There were no "mini-vans" going back to town so we were put on a "truck." This was lifted early 90's extended cab Toyota that they fit 4 people in the front seat, 5 people in the rear seat (including us), filled the bed with huge ginger root & curry sacks, throw everyones bags on top of that, and then pile about 12 people on to hold everything in. This was truely "interesting" to us and it only lasted for 9 hours.

We are now soaking up the more modern city of Kuala Lumpur where we were excited to eat Pizza Hut this evening =) after the F1 qualifying today. It looks like we may get some rain during the race as we've had thunderstorms the last two days at the time that the race will be tomorrow. Also, the cars are very tightly matched and because of the new rules, it seams that the field has been quite mixed from the last couple of seasons (McLaren, Renault, & Ferrari not looking so good). Should be a great race!

Dirtbiking through south Cambodia...

Rabbit Island, a some prime beach spot - rare for Cambodia which is primarily occupied by rocky shores. We had a nice day relaxing and swimming in a somewhat cool ocean. We took a short hike to the top of the island which had fantastic views at the old Khmer Rouge look-out point.
Kep (just outside Kampot) used to be a thriving colonial town occupied by the french back in the 1700s ( i think) and a favorite of the Cambodian King. Its apparent this once quaint beach town was hit hard during the reign of the Khmer Rouge... this building has bullet holes in the walls. Most of the gated plots don't have any buildings remaining. Those that do are now occupied by squatters (these squatters have apparently taken good care of the lawn??) . It's pretty eerie to drive through, and many natives still believe these places are haunted.

Brandon doesn't have a mustache - it just looks that way because he's coated in dirt from our trip from Phnom Penh to Kampot (148km) on a loaded XL 250. The roads are paved but very narrow and under construction so you're on the dirt nearly as much as the paved road...

Angkor What?

Floating Village outside of Seim Reap. Actually pretty cool. These fisherman live on the lake as the water rises and lowers through the season. However I don't recommend drinking the water. 12% of children here don't make it past 5 due to poor sanitary conditions among other things I'm sure.

Akiko buying food at a local Khmer market, so unlike her : )
The sellers sat up on the tables with their food to sell, pretty cool. And super cheap food.

Listening to a Khmer cover band at a bar in Seim Reap with Dave's friend Adam,

he was very helpful and he spoke really good english ; )

We meet a traveler who was teaching at an orphanage in Seim Reap so we decided bring the kids some balls to play with and spend some time with them. They LOVED us! and the adults thought we were volunteers (they didn't speak any english) ... we ended up playing with the kids all morning and were asked to teach english in the afternoon class. Akiko taught the younger kids while Brandon and I took charge of the "older" kids. While most kids we had encountered were begging and obnoxious, these kids were so sweet and pure of heart... it's was one of the best experiences we had. Too bad it's now illegal to adopt children in Cambodia (they were being sold into slavery in Thailand) or I would have come home with a couple.

We spent three days exploring the temples of Anchor by bicycle (very hot but avoids the high cost and annoyance of the tuk tuk drivers). Our friend Akiko joined us for a week It was nice to have a familiar face on the trip : )

First stop in Cambodia after our horrific boarder crossing was Seim Reap - home of the SE Asia Empire back in the day... now it is Cambodia's pride and joy, and the envy of Thailand.

Ko Chang & to Cambodia

After the Elephant Conservation, we had a couple of days to kill before heading over to Cambodia to meet Akiko, so we decided we were in the mood for some beaches. We caught an overnight train from Lompang to Bangkok (12 hours) and then a bus (8 hours) to Ko Chang, an island on the southeast portion of Thailand. Very chill island with warm waters and beach bungalows. We did some kayaking one day and rented a scooter for a trip around the island the second day, a great mix of bars, jungle adventure, and fishing industry.

Ko Chang was a great last taste of Thailand... until we attempted to cross the border to Cambodia. The bus tickets that we bought to take us from Ko Chang to Siem Reap apparently ended at a transfer station in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia after refusing to pay the bus company double for the Cambodian Visas. We had heard about this scam and knew what to expect but didn't expect the Thais to attempt to sweat us out at the border so that we would miss our bus to Siem Reap. Luckily we weren't the only ones this happened to and the four of us bartered for a taxi and ended up making our way into Siem Reap in only 12 hours. After polling a bunch of the travelers here apparently this occurance is frequent.

Mahout Fisher & Mahout Price!

A 4 month old elephant at the nursery... so cute!

Leah and Kao : ) Picking up the stick for me


Leah squirting water on Brandon and his Mahout... while bathing the elephants.



"Tag Long" Thai for getting off and on from the front of the elephant.
Nice jump Brandon.



Us in our Mahout outfit with our Elephants : )

Brandon and his Elephant (20 months pregnant)

Brandon and I stayed at the Thailand Conservation for 2 days as "Mahouts" or "Elephant trainers" (but let's be honest they were training us ; ) ) Of course this was after being sick for 24 hours with food poisoning - both sick because we're always sharing food... Anyhow we recovered just in time to play with the elephants. We met a great English couple along the way and that always adds to the fun... Above are some pics of us and our elephants!

PAI... The Best Place Ever!

Leah in the Lod Cave entrance

This is the summit between Pai and the Lod Caves... the roads over here aren't necessarily built to any standards, so the moped that we rented barely made it up some of the switchbacks with us "Fat Americans" on board.

Sunset over Pai... Always beautiful!

Updated with a few pics from Pai... Sorry, the Captain Jack Sparrow pics were on another drive that we forgot to bring.

Chang Mai began a new era of our trip. We were finally able to relax and have fun, let our guards down some and didn't feel like such tourists but more like we were here to have fun and learn some culture. The people are really kind in the north and it was just what we needed after the Bangkok rat race. We also ran into some Aussie friends that we met when we were over in Kanchanaburi and were able to hang out with them at night. As a side note, there are so many travelers over here that we continue to meet new people and run into them as we travel to new areas, makes traveling even more fun and you can also exchange information about things to see and transportation methods. Our trek guide (Ping Pong) showed us a great reggae bar (Thai reggae bands of course, entertaining) with live music every night. Across the gravel alley was a rock bar where a live rock band played "American Rock." Also a sight to see Thai guys who don't even speak english sing Kings of Leon and Green Day and the mixture of crown going crazy to the songs. This whole bar scene was almost out of a movie really, it was off the beaten path on a gravel alley intersection that everyone seemend to find and party at. Also the bouncer of the reggae bar was a famous martial artist who looked familiar but he was very modest and more interested in the girls having a good time (giving them shots) than revealing his identity. We found out by a couple of different sources that he was one of Jet Li's trainers and also in a couple of movies. Another character that we keep running into is a Spaniard always dressed up like Captain Jack Sparrow and really looks the part! We've seen him in three different cities now and he always makes us laugh! I finally caught a sneaky pic that I'll post in a few. After our fun adventures in and around Chang Mai, we headed a few hours north to a small hippie town called Pie. (Captain Jack showed up there also, in case you are windering).

Pie was a super laid back, Thai town that you could walk from corner to corner in 15 min. The town is all shops, botiques, massage parlors, restaraunts, resorts, and of course bars with the other necessary tourist ammenities but we were there for three days and never had anyone approach us to buy something like we were accustomed to from other areas of Thailand. Close to town were a bunch of hot springs (which we rode bikes to but were too hot to want to go in after sweating for an hour to get there), waterfalls, wats of course, and the usual elephant riding, bamboo rafting, etc. which we didn't feel necessary to do because we'd done already. There is also a bunch of motorcycling out of Pai including a track. We stayed away from that only because we plan to ride a bunch in Cambodia (although it was tough to). Instead we rented a scooter for $4 a day and rode about 50k to the Lod Cave out of Sapong. The cool cave air was probably the best thing about the trip but the caverns, stalagtites, stalagmites, and formed crystal structures were really interesting as well. The nightlife in Pie was really laid back with all of the bars having a guy or two that played guitar and sang classic tunes; the club in town "Ting Tong" was a bunch of bamboo platforms around firepits. They also always had fire shows going on (a guy spinning a fire stick and throwing it up in the air and such). Fun to watch and where most of the travelers our age went after starting at a street bar or drink cart. The streets of Pai were always changing with the busses dropping off a new group of travelers every hour, street vendors changing, drink carts moving, but always lively, no patter what time of day, night, or morning. We stayed in a nice little teak bungalow by the river, our nicest accomodation so far. Overall a great little active town, the best so far.

Today we came back down to Lampang which is right by the Elephant Conservatory where we will go tomorrow for the elephant camp. We are really looking forward to this and hoping that we will be around the river most of the time as it is HOT down here. That's all for now, we'll post another batch of pics when we return from the camp.

Brandon

Arrival in Chang Mai!

We made it 16k to a Wat on the hill overlooking the city (These were the stairs we had to walk up to the temple) too bad the pollution/rice burning is so bad right now there isn't much to see.

Today we rented a scooter for the day and battled the traffic in Chang Mai...

The trip concluded with some bamboo rafting,

Brandon did a good job stearing us through some tough rapids...

after running us into a few rocks first that is.

Last day of the trek... the guy behind brandon was our second guide, super nice but didn't speak much english - I think "waterfalls", "hello", and "bit further" were then only things we got out of him after hiking 4 hours the second day... we just followed like good americans. : )

Our accomodations that night. If you can believe it,

this is nicer than where the villagers sleep which

is in bamboo huts on the floor near a fire (to keep mosquitos away)...

Drinking with locals on our second night of treking, much different than the first night but pretty freaking cool... we were the only two and Ping Pong took us to the neighboring village where we sat and took a shot with some old-time Thai people... I'm talking the ones who smoke tabacco out of bannana leaves and make chewing gum with bananna leaf, tree bark, a splash of tabacco, oh and lime stone to top it off... seriously. Needless to say we didn't try that one. Great people and very friendly.

Our treking leader - "Ping Pong",

He not only showed us the sights but also introduced us to

"moonshine" (rice wiskey) mmmmm....

The treking group for night 1... good mix of French, German, English, and American

We played some fun multi-cultural games around the campfire that night.

We passed through a lot of fields, the villagers grow rice (of course), corn, soy beans, basil, mixed with water buffalo, pigs, chickens, and cows...

All up hill the first day - that smile is JUST for the picture...

Brandon's face is more reflective of the reality of this situation.

More waterfalls, but always appreciated... especially when hiking.

Brandon leading the way - sketchy...

We went on a three day trek which started with elephant riding!

We love Chang Mai, people are nicer, nature is more beautiful, there is some culture, and the weather is a bit cooler. Finally what we came to Thailand for....