The longest Friday.
I left Malaysia on 5th May and after more than 21 hours of flight I arrived in Los Angeles… on the same day!
I took Cathay Pacific and transited via Hong Kong.
Because I miscalculated the dates, we arrived a day earlier than intended before heading to Las Vegas.
Good thing Isabel and Adrian booked a hotel in downtown Santa Monica for the night! My bad.
This was just the beginning of the 3 week long US trip for me this round!
After spending two days in Siam Reap, I took a 30 minute flight to Phnom Penh to meet Kelly Ch’ng. Kelly has been working here for the last 7 months, and seeing a familiar face here is a relief for me.
As said earlier, I am a terrible negotiator so following her around helped me save a bit as she’s terrific at bargaining with the locals!
I spent a full day in PP before going back the next afternoon but we covered many places – the Cambodian Museum, Killing Fields, did a full body massage, and hopped a few bars including FCC (Foreign Correspondence Club).
Vibes here are totally different from Siam Reap – whereas in SR life is a slower and places seem to be quite apart, here in PP it’s livelier, there are more variety of cars on the streets, and more hip and urban.
We wrapped up the PP trip with a visit to the Central Market to buy some souvenirs back home.
It was a good weekend getaway overall and that’s Country #21 visited for me!
I had always wanted to visit Cambodia chiefly for its main attraction, the historically famed Angkor Wat. After putting this off for a couple of years hoping I could find someone or a group of people to join me, I decided I waited enough… and just flew over on my own!
I started the tour at 5:00 in the morning to catch sunrise at the temple. And for the next five hours, not only did I cover Angkor Wat, I had also toured six other surrounding temples. One of the temple sites, Ta Phrom, was used to filmed the 2001 movie Tomb Raider.
Cambodia recognizes the US Dollar currency – and things here are not exactly cheap! For example, a can of coke goes for $1.50 – $2.00 here. I hired the same taxi driver from the airport to do both the small and big tour for $80 – the tuk-tuk tour would’ve been half that price. And left on my own, I am a shitty negotiator. Haha!
Cambodia trip continues in Phnom Penh…
After DBA Jakarta, we extended our stay here for another two days. Sovi and Jen took time off to bring us around including: Pantai Indah Kapok, Mangrove, Time Machine (my most favorite and highlight of the trip!), Korean BBQ, LemonGrass Bogor, and Little Venice @ Puncak.
Gotta admit, it was a bit of a guilty pleasure as I have a launch coming soon with Kate (this being her first) and I barely got anything done in the past several days.
Great trip overall to wrap up our visit to Jakarta!
