Feb. 7th - Good Morning Chaing Mai & Good Bye! HELLO Cambodia

I don't know what it was about either the bed at this cozy little hotel in Chaing Mai, or complete exhaustiveness but both Tony & I got the best rest since we've been in Thailand.  We did get up at 6:30 am though, but we wanted to get an early start because we had to leave for the airport by 11:30 am.  We call my parents, just because I was a little behind on blogging and didn't want my mom to think I got swallowed up by the jungle.  She was very happy that we were safe and sound back in our hotel.

We got ready and had breakfast down stairs at our hotel. We really wished we had at least one more day in Chaing Mai, it just is such a great town and there looks to be so much to do (shop, eat, cooking classes, massages, elephant camps, etc.), but we only get a certain time off.

For breakfast, I got the ham & scrambled eggs with toast (I made an egg sandwich) and Tony got bacon & toast.


We both got coffees and fresh squeezed orange juice.  Now when I say fresh squeezed, this was seriously taking a bite of an orange in a glass, there were still seeds in it.  It was so good!!

Amazing fresh squeezed orange juiced

Where we sat for breakfast

Tony relaxing in hammock at our hotel

Then we started our walk around Chaing Mai.  A lot of shops were closed, because it was 9:30 am, but we loved seeing all the streets with the shops & restaurants.  We did get to go in some though, and bought myself a necklace for like $3 & a pair of comfy Capri pants.

Where I bought my capri's and necklaces

We saw lots of different Wats again walking the streets of Chaing Mai and it’s just incredible the detail that they put into these buildings.

This was right by our hotel

Another Wat near our Hotel

A view from walking the streets of Chaing Mai

Center of Chaing Mai

We also noticed lots of these lanterns hanging from peoples places, I guess this is a tradition in Chaing Mai.  We made our way back towards our hotel.

Woman crossing the street carrying things to sell

Door Entrance to a Wat on our way back to hotel

Middle of the main road ways in Chaing Mai

We still had a little time to kill and I was thinking I really wanted a foot massage.  There were seriously one massage place after another.  I decided to get a 30 minute (that’s all I had time for) foot massage for 100 baht (~$3).  Now, I haven’t explained yet, how sore Tony & I are from the trekking.  We are walking like 2 old people and down the stairs is the hardest hahaha So a whole body massage would have bee wonderful, but I really only had time for a 30 minute one and I wanted to try the foot massage because I saw this everywhere.

The entrance to the massage place

They gave me warm tea when I was done

When I walked into the place, I had to leave my shoes at the door and she walked me to the back room.  Here I sat down and they cleaned my feet with cut limes and a foot scrub, it smelled so nice.  Then they sat me in a really comfortable reclining chair where she covered me with a towel.  She then began to stretch my feet out - putting my feet in a cross position and then pushing down on them in all directions.  After that, the woman started rubbing my feet really fast which created heat and pushed on the soles of my feet.  She then worked each one of my toes, moving down the all sides of the foot.  Next she moved up to my calf and shine part of my legs, which felt incredible because how sore they were from hiking.  After she did the same thing to both feet, she pounded on the calves with her fists and wiped my legs and feet down with a towel.  I felt amazing after this foot massage, I could only image what an hour would have been.  But maybe I’ll get another one at some point J

When I walked out, it was perfect timing, Tony was putting the bags in the taxi, and we headed to the airport.  Now, the man at our hotel told us it takes 30 minutes to get there and we should be there 2 hours before.  Well, it ended up taking us only 15 minutes to get to the airport, 5 seconds to go through security, 7 minutes to get our tickets, 2 minutes to go through immigration (we had to do this because we were leaving the country, heading to Cambodia), and 3 minutes to find our gate.  We were the ONLY, and I’m not exaggerating on this, the ONLY ones in the international section of the Chaing Mai airport.  We were however, 2 hours early hahaha so I worked on the blog and Tony drank some beers and ate lobster flavored chips (they were sick but Tony didn’t think so).

We had to wear these stickers so they know we were good to pass through security

We boarded our flight back to Bangkok, then had an hour and a half lay over, where we found a place to grab some food & drinks. There was a sign there that said 5 Chang beers and you get a free t-shirt, the guy told us since we order 2 big ones, if we got 2 small ones after those, he’d give us the free t-shirt.  We said, OK, let’s do it haha - the t-shirt ended up fitting really weird and tight on Tony.  For lunch though, I had a rice noodle & duck soup, while Tony had a duck curry.  Tony’s was better than mine, but mine was ok.

Sign for the free t-shirt

Debi's Duck Noodle Soup

Tony's Duck Curry

We boarded our next flight, flying us straight to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Boarding our flight to Siem Reap

We arrived there at 7pm and since we already printed our Visa’s out online, we got to skip the line and go straight through immigration.  This was kind of crazy, but we had to get finger printed, ALL 10 fingers, and then our photo.  Our bags came right away, so we decided to take out some Cambodian currency, and then look for our hotel guy who said he’d be picking us up.  We couldn’t find him, so we got a taxi that cost $7 US dollars.  Little did we know, but all of Cambodia excepts US money.  We just took out $100 in Cambodian money, so we are hoping we can use that in certain places as well.

Arrived in Siem Reap - walking from plane to airport

Our driver was so nice!!!  He’s asking what we want to do, if we’re going to see the Angkor Wat, etc., and we’re like, we have no idea what we are wanting to do yet/.  He said his brother has a tuk tuk and could take us from 8 am - sun set for $20.  We actually thought that would be great, then we wouldn’t have to worry about finding something later and this guy knw where our hotel would be.  So he called up his brother, but he ended up being busy.  He had a friend, Mr. Mark, who had a tuk tuk and would take us.  So our driver said, in Cambodia, when we say we are going to do something, we will stick to our word, so you don’t have to worry, we will be there to pick you up.  I was like OK, we didn’t give him any money before, so I was fine.  He was really nice too!!

When we arrived at our hotel, Shadow of Angkor 1 for $20 a night, the guy said, Oh Tony, and held up a sign with his name on it.  He says, I waited for you at airport for hour and a half, and you were there, at 10:45 am.  We said, OH our flight has always been 7pm.  Then he tells us we don’t have a room.  He says, we gave your room away.  I’m like, you don’t have any room available??  He said, yes, one with 3 beds, but only for tonight.  Then they tell us for the next 2 days we’ll have to move to the Shadow of Angkor 2, but that is $25 a night.  I was like, that’s fine, as long as we have somewhere to sleep.  It was our misunderstanding about the time of the flight.  I guess for some reason Tony wrote yes to picking us up at 10:45 am, but everything worked out ok!

We got to our room for the night and I was not too thrilled.  It just seemed dirty, the bathroom was gross, and the smells weren’t to good.  We dropped our bags off and just went straight down to the restaurant.

Tony just happy we had a place to stay for the night

Bathroom and yes, that's our shower over there

I needed some different food, like bread, pizza, something.  Luckily, they had pizza (you actually see pizza a lot over here, but we haven’t tried it yet).  I ordered a pesto pizza, and Tony got the spicy pizza.

Debi's on the left & Tony's on the right

We both got Angkor beers - pretty good.

Delicious

When Tony took a bite of his pizza, he’s like, WOW this is REALLY spicy, he actually couldn’t finish eating it.  I tried scrapping off the chilies for him and our waitress comes over and is like, Oh too hot hahaha it was pretty funny.  We just sat there for a bit, had some beers and I blogged. Then we went back up to our gross room and went to sleep for the night.  I set the alarm for 6:45 am so we could get ready and have breakfast.  However, I was up every other hour because how uncomfortable the bed was and I thought the fan was going to fall from the ceiling.  We had it going full speed and the amount of noise coming from this thing was incredible.  Tony & I just laid there laughing so hard at how loud it was.  At one point Tony got up just to check which direction the fan would fly, IF it did in fact fall from the ceiling. Thank goodness it never fell.