Thailand and Cambodia

I have around 1500 pictures from the past month's travels (though approximately 95% of them are photos of Cambodia's temples) - I've randomly selected carefully deliberated over the matter and chosen a few to share... We stayed for the first few days on Koh Samet, where we had arranged to meet Alicia. She'd been planning to come with us and then go on to Ghana to do some voluntary work for a month, but due to massive incompetency at the Ghanaian embassy in Seoul as she was trying to sort out her Visa, she never made it. After learning that Alicia wouldn't be joining us until Cambodia (a best-case scenario), we left Koh Samet (and the most beautiful sand I've ever set foot on) for Ayuthaya. We there only for one whole day, and it was a scorcher. We hired bikes for the day, and explored the ruins there. Interesting as they were, they pale into comparison against Cambodia's wats, hence no picture. A ferry, a train, a bus, a ship and a short taxi later, and we reach Koh Pha Ngan. I miss living on the beach. I cut my knee on the coral while snorkeling; still waiting to see if it's gonna scar or not. And I forgot to put in my contacts before the dive so I couldn't see a damn thing anyway. Oh, so this is the longboat we hired for the day when we went snorkeling. We went a saw a waterfall too, but for most of the time we lazed on the beach, read a little, and swam. Oh, and was around this time that we were playing Rummy obsessively. You can't really tell here, but these crazy fire twirlers are children! I swear one of them was no older than six or seven, and non of them can have been more than 12. They were amazing, but it was bizarre to see thre parents just sit back and watch them do it. They were foreign kids by the way, not Thai. Kd's crazy hair on the windswept boat trip from Koh Pha Ngan to Koh Tao (Koh means island). Drunken crazy golf. Don't let the picture fool you, this was the only exciting whole they had. Kd cheated. Afterwards we played old-school 10 pin bowling; there was a guy at the bottom picking up the pins and throwing the bowl back down to our end. Kayaking near Krabi. We were taken through the mangroves where we boarded by a troupe of monkeys in search of food. We also saw what Kd at first took to be alligators, but were in fact monitor lizards. I'll put some more pictures up of all the wildlife we saw later. The only time we really got rained on the entire time - not bad considering we supposedly went in the middle of monsoon season. We're on an elephant ride here. I think. Another rather aggressive gang of monkeys we met on the beach. At the mere mention of bananas they went straight for Kd's bag, and she was in no mood to argue. One of them stole a tube of Pringles from a tourist and sat up in the tree munching his way through them. While the crowd was watching this, a rogue monkey made his way along the beach, searching everyone's abandoned bags. Still a fair bit of tsunami damage around. Koh Phi Phi in particular has lots of building work going on. More snorkelling at koh Phi Phi, and I still look pretty pasty here. I don't know exactly when my tan finally kicked in, but I guess it hadn't yet. Koh Phi Phi again, this is The Beach beach, as in, the Leo Dicaprio movie. You can see why they picked it (although it could do with somebody picking all the trash out of the water). The view from our bungalow on Phi Phi wasn't bad. I must've taken a hundred pictures of this one sunrise. Never seen anything like it. Just stunning. And then on to Cambodia. I have whole memory cards with nothing but photos of the temples in Seim Reap. We bought the three-day pass, so we saw a lot. this here is the famous one, Angkor Wat, built in the early 12th century. It's huge, and very well preserved. We split up soon after getting there, and had failed to make a plan for meeting up again. It took us hours to find each other again. By the time we got to Cambodia we'd been joined by Alicia, finally, and Kd's friend Gema, also a teacher in Korea. I've forgotten the names of most of the wats we visited already. I call this one 'the one you go up to watch the sunrise'. And this one is 'the one that has been left to the trees'. Note tiny Kd hugging the root at the bottom. There's another abandoned wat, which the guidebook says makes the one above look like somebody just forgot to mow the lawn; we really wanted to go to it, but it was just too far. Alicia! And I at 'the wat with the Greek-looking bit of architecture'. It's so sad to see kids on the streets all day desperate to get money out of tourists. Some have books or crafts to sell - the gang here finally broke Kd, she bought six scarves off them - others try to convince you to take a photo of them for money, and some just beg. I don't even know what this is. Let's say the Royal Palace. It's in Phnom Penh, the capital. Phnom Penh was not the best climax for our vacation to be honest - though it was interesting, the genocide prison/museum, and the killing fields, put together with poor Alicia getting her bagged snatched, doesn't really count as ending on a high...