Partial Haitus... thing

Soooo, in-between taking pics, literally from one picture to the next, my camera's SD card died. At the Cheesecake Factory of all places! (in my defense, their decor really looked like the Eye of Sauron was watching us eat...)

I take pictures of eeeeeverything, I have such a terrible memory I feel like I have to! So this is kind of a big a deal (and an excellent reminder to me to back up any pictures once a week going forward).

Before I descend into despondency I need to exhaust all my options for recovery, and sadly I don't really have time for that at the moment.

I am 90% sure I backed up all my travel photos, it's just with my moving I need to find the harddrive, and which harddrive, etc etc.
So we'll see.

Thailand Day 12

So! Chiang Mai!
Between all the other planning, and our planned hiking tour, we decided to just leave some Chiang Mai days free to take it easy.
So the evening before, when we were just relaxing in our room, we looked up some things to do.
#2 on Tripadvisor at the time was a cat cafe called Catmosphere. Neither E nor I have been to a Cat Cafe before, we thought that sounded fun. And it was about a 45 min walk from the hostel (which I remembered was called Aoi Garden Home btw) so we thought great, we'll just wander that way and see what we see. And depending on what time it is we can use the cafe wifi to see what next to do.

Armed with our plan of action, we first decided to ramble and see what snackish thing we could find to eat while we walked.



Not chickens.

Thailand Day 11/Cambodia Day 4

Ah leaving Cambodia day.
This was sad, because when we came I was really feeling ambivalent about our choice to come here. But by the time we left I wished we had more time.

Some parting shots of our room at Gloria Angkor:



(love that mini fridge!)

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Seven

Part the last!
I got super distracted, but I'm still determined to get all these photos up, for my own benefit at least.

After we left the lovely overgrown temple we had one last stop.
Okay no, actually we had two. We stopped at Sras Srang Complex, and it was basically the pretty uninteresting foundation of a temple, with a lake by it. I did take a picture, but it wasn't very picturesque. So moving on.
The last stop!
Phnom Bakeng.

It's built on top of a hill, there's three ways to go up. The elephant path, which starts slopey then has a series of switchbacks, the pedestrian path, which just goes around and around the hill until the top, and the "dangerous path" which goes straight up. That one is closed XD



We took the pedestrian path.

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Six

And onto Banteay Kdei!

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Five

Next we went to Ta Keo.

At first glance from the road it’s a fairly unassuming temple.

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Four

Next up we went to twin temples Thommanon and Chau Say Tevoda, which are right across the street from each other.

The road that separates them was there at their creation and originated from the royal palace.

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Three

When I remembered to, I took pictures of the signs so I’d know where we were!
This next temple was a complex called Angkor Thom.
Well, kind of. Prasat Bayon is actually in that complex. So this is the rest of it!



It looks big, but it wasn’t nearly as large as Angkor Wat!

More after the break

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part Two

Back to posting 8D

I really don’t know how anyone does this actually ON the road. I’d say maybe I take too many pictures but, I’ve seen blogs w/ lots of pictures? So it must just be me.

But speaking of pictures…

Even though this day was non-stop temples, like we went to over 20 (actually Is stopped counting after 15, but something about 21 sticks in my mind)... my camera ran out of batteries. And my sister’s camera wasn’t charging for unknown reasons. I did take more photos on the phone I was using at the time, but since moving I’m not 100% sure where it and the card adapter are.

Anyway, I still managed to take pics, and maybe it’s a blessing in disguise as it won’t take 20 posts to get through one day, but sadly there were loads of things I wasn’t able to take pics of that I would have loved to.

But focusing on the good! Now to post pics I *did* take!

So Angkor Wat was beautiful, it was huge and iconic and sunrise was amazing, but this next one was one of my very favourites. This and one we went to later this day I could have spent the entire time in.

Doesn’t look like much with the restoration going on...

But..

Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3 - Part One

This day @.@ It was a GREAT day. But reeeeeally exhausting.

We did the sunrise at Angkor Wat thing.

I can’t remember if I mentioned, but I let E plan this leg of the trip because this whole trip was a little last minute (more so than I’m used to planning anyway) and I was overwhelmed with some other life things. Anyway, the point being, I knew NOTHING about Cambodia when we went, or the places we’d be going.

So yes, I didn’t really know what was involved.

Apparently Sunrise At Angkor Wat is a bit Thing To Do.

So we arranged with the front desk and up we got at 4 and met our driver for the day. It took 45-60 minutes to get there, E went right back to sleep but I couldn’t. Tuktuks aren’t the most comfortable for sleeping in.

We got there and it was pitch black, and we had noooo idea where we were going. A flashlight would have been really useful, but… we didn’t think of that (and of course, I had one back at the hotel). We managed though! I’m surprised we didn’t trip and die. Then as we were more into the complex we were just looking around, totally unsure where we were supposed to *go* for this sunrise view. We didn’t even know which way to face!

But we saw some lights and joined a small gathering of 5 or so people at the edge of a small lake and thought “Welp, I hope this is the right spot!”

Thankfully, it was!

I wasn’t sure how it would go so I just kept snapping photos, there’s more of a progression in my flickr album.