Relics and Ruins

We arrived in Cambodia by plane in the late afternoon met our guide Kong who was adorable and stopped at the hospital on the way to our hotel. Paul needed to check on his ankle because it seemed infected from when he fell in the manhole. The doctor told him he was lucky to have come in when he did because he was a week away from amputation! He had to go on heavy antibiotics immediately. We still can't believe it. After getting that problem solved we continued on to the hotel.

After a short break exploring a little of the hotel and changing into cooler clothes, we went out for an afternoon tour of the first few temples. We transferred to two smaller vans from the bus at the site because most of the gates had been made for the width of an elephant in ancient times.
The ruins were gorgeous. There were statues of men holding a huge snake with seven heads which doubled as railings over the river bridges into the temples. Trees grew out of the ruins almost looking as if they were taking back the materials that were borrowed from them.

After returning to the hotel, Nick, Kathleen, and I went out to find some dinner and do some shopping at the night market. We found so many neat things at the market and because of Cambodias economy the American dollar is worth a lot to them. We were able to find a delicious dinner of rice eggs meat and veggies for them and yellow curry and vegetables with rice for me as well as three beers all for 9$ total. That night we went back worked a little more before going to bed.

The next day we woke up and began a trip back to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom to see more of the ruins. Outside of the ruins children ran around trying to sell bracelets and postcards only asking one dollar for them. It was heartbreaking to see but we knew we couldn't help them. We went into the largest temple first where there was a huge reflection pool outside. It was neat to see all of the ancient worship spaces and all of the people visiting the famous site.

We continued on to Angkor Thom where there were giant sculptures of faces covering the temple. As I was walking through a woman reached out of a small window to hand me incense sticks and gestured for me to come inside. There was a Buddha sculpture with the seven headed snake in the center. She pointed to where I should place the sticks and as I did she held my hand gently praying and bowing and wishing me peace and happiness. I don't know what it was but there was something in the way she looked at me that you could feel her blessings and see how genuine they were.

After some quick sketches we headed to see more of the temples. The last temple we visited had steep sides with small treaded stairs. They had built a small single person wooden staircase up the side. As we waited for the group to head up and then for people to come down a few of us decided to climb up the original stone treads. It was slightly scary but worth it once we were at the top. That night we returned to the hotel where we went back out to dinner and to the market for our last night.

Our flight was delayed six hours the next day so were given a free day to do what we wanted. A group of us woke up early to meet at seven and ride a tick tick to the place where we could ride elephants. A tick tick is a small carriage pulled by a small motorcycle. We got there just in time after a misunderstanding with our tick tick driver. We got into groups of three and loaded the elephants and began a walk to the ruins. It was so much fun. After taking lots of pictures we returned to the hotel where we had until three to pack, work, eat, swim, and layout until we left for the airport. Saying goodbye to our guide Kong was one of the hardest goodbyes we'd had yet but it was time to continue on to Vietnam.

Malaysian Manholes, Massages, and Monkeys

We left Singapore early in the morning to drive to Kuala Lumpur. Before crossing the strait we had to go through departure customs. Then after driving across the bridge we had to leave the bus and go through arrivals customs for Malaysia which all felt a little redundant but went pretty quickly. We drove a few hours before arriving in Melaka to tour for a while.

Melaka was crazy, people were driving all different ways in the streets with pedestrians weaving between cars and motorcycles. We got to see a few of the squares and a temple or two before heading for lunch at a local restaurant. We were all terrified to drink the water so we waited until we got hot water to drink it with our meal.

The next two hours most of us slept until reaching the downtown of Kuala Lumpur. Our hotel seemed pretty sanitary so we got our laundry washed and then found out about a massage spa in our hotel that was relatively cheap. A bunch of girls all made appointments for body massages that night and then headed out to a mall a block away from our hotel to do a little shopping and have a few drinks.

Before getting my massage a group member of ours came back to the hotel with a scraped up leg from falling into a manhole on the sidewalk that was missing its cover. He washed it up and dressed it as best we could and hoped for the best. The massage felt very good and was probably extremely good for my muscles after having been carrying around a small child on my back for the past month and a half. We got up the next day ready to tour the city.

We began our day by visiting the KL tower which was pretty relaxed and we got to see one of the most expensive trees in Malaysia because they had spent so much money during construction trying to save it from being cut down. After the tower it started to rain and we continued to walk around in the pouring rain which wasn't much fun but wasn't horrible because it was still pretty warm.

We saw a war memorial park quickly before heading to the Batu Caves. The Batu caves are a ancient religious site. Walking up, there is a huge Gold Buddha overlooking the entrance. Looking up the mountain, there are over 300 stairs you have to climb before reaching the cavern. As we began to climb we were dreading it until we came across our first monkey. It was sitting on the stairs eating a coconut looking for something else to eat. I then looked up and realized there were more monkey up the stairs and on the lamp posts. It made the climb go a lot faster. The caves were huge and had spots of light and dark making neat positive and negative spaces. There were more and more monkeys the deeper we got into the caves. They were so fun to watch and people were feeding them coconuts off of the ground and watching them run around as well as the roosters that were just walking around the ground.

We were laughing at all of them and taking pictures when we began to realize that they were not as afraid of us as we were of them. We started to get out our sketchbooks from our backpacks to sketch the caves until we realized the monkeys assumed we were getting out gifts for them. They started chasing us and one even put a hand on Hillary's leg in an attempt to reach up to her book bag. After that... we weren't very amused by the monkeys. Haha It all went sour very quickly so we started to make our way down the temple stairs down to the bus.

Our last stop before being setting free for the night was the Petronus Towers. They were really pretty on the inside and the park surrounding the towers were even prettier with fountains as well as fountains that switched into a swimming area. We started to walk back to the hotel when it began pouring rain. We ran for some of it but then got close to the hotel and decided to eat at a restaurant nearby for lunch. We had a small lunch where the girls planned out our night festivities since it was Valentines Day and we all paired up with a friend for the night. We ended up heading out to the outdoor mall near the hotel where there was two women and a man singing famous pop and rock songs live for the whole mall and the restaurants around. As we picked the restaurant we realized the guys were already sitting at a table inside. The two women announced that they were looking for people to do karaoke. Nobody was volunteering until the members of my group started yelling my name and pointing at me. It was soooooo embarrassing after the women saw me and started calling me up I asked for someone to go with me and Sarah was excited to go. We sang Someone Like You by Adele and after finishing the ladies made us sing a second before sitting down so we sang Take a Bow by Rihanna. We then volunteered Jacob and Nick for the next group when the girls asked us to find some boys in the crowd to sing. They were dreading going up but they did great! They started by singing We are Young by F.U.N. which everyone joined in on and then ended with Hotel California.

When we had eaten and were ready to pay a few people were hoping to pay with cards when the waiters said they needed a special chip on the card to do that. The rest of us didn't have enough cash to pay for all of us so a small group set out to go to the ATM. A while later they returned upset because two of them had lost their cards to the ATM machines and were not going to be able to get them back before leaving Kuala Lumpur in the morning. Luckily one of the group members cards worked and they were able to pay the bill before returning to the hotel.

That night we had a crazy time trying to get our laundry back from the hotel staff that had not followed through in the time frame they told us for laundry and we had to pack quickly in order to get a few hours sleep. We woke up the next day ready to head to Siem Reap, Cambodia!

Sunshine and Rain help the Flowers Grow

We left the hotel in Abu Dhabi late at night to fly overnight. We boarded around 11:30 and flew to New Delhi in 3 hours where it was 6 in the morning. Our layover was supposed to be 3 hours but due to a slow security line and many locals sharing the line with us we only sat at the gate for about twenty minutes before it was time to board.

We arrived in Singapore a few hours later around dinner time. It was so warm and humid walking out of the airport and was slightly rainy. There were plants everywhere that were bright and tropical. We loaded the coach and rode to our hotel where we were given the night off. A group of us decided to try to go to a suit store with Rod that he has gone to the last few times on the trips of the past. We walked about 10 blocks or so into Chinatown that was covered in snake decorations for the Chinese New Year which was the day before. We searched for ten minutes but the store had moved so we decided to get dinner in Chinatown before going back to the hotel.

We went to bed and woke up early to leave with our guide for our day. She first took us to the Gardens by the Bay. It was the prettiest gardens I've ever seen. There were so many colors and shapes and sizes of flowers. The sky garden was also a neat garden with even more tropical plants. After leaving the gardens we decided to sketch the exterior spaces by the gardens and then headed to a plaza in the downtown.

Of course it started to rain when we got off of the bus so most took shelter under a nearby bridge before we went to our next stop to see the temples. The temples were Hindu and Buddhist. They were covered in statues and altars for prayer and dedication. We left the temples hungry and ready for a good lunch in little India.

Kathleen, Hillary, Jen, and I found an all vegetarian restaurant down the street that we sat down to eat. We shared three dishes that were all very good and extremely filling. After lunch we were all taken back to the hotel to do what we wanted until the night safari at the zoo.

Some of us decided to head to a nearby market that we had seen on our way in. Before the market, we got distracted by a mall that had all sorts of clothes we had been missing in our extremely limited wardrobes recently. After a long stop we headed to the market where we found the most amazing deals on earrings and clothes. I got to spend all of the extra Singapore money I had withdrawn before heading out to the night safari.

The guide warned us that the night safari was a popular attraction and there would be a lot of people but I wasn't prepared for all of the shoving. People were relentless! There was no stopping them! After getting pushed all the way into the lines to board the cars we finally loaded our car ready to head out into the zoo.

We got to see Rhinos, Lions, Wildebeest, and elephants which was neat but I was definitely hoping to see a tiger but no such luck. The people there were the most wild we saw in our safari. After returning from the wild Rod took a group of us out to try Singapore's traditional drink a Singapore Sling at the restaurant that invented them. There were very expensive but were very delicious as well. We returned late to the hotel and packed for our departure to Malaysia the next day, reluctant to leave the gorgeous country of Singapore.