Hooray for sketchy overland border crossings!

Mom, Mitch and Matt departed at 1:00am on the 9th of January. Just to make sure that they would not be inclined to worry too much about me as I proceeded to travel Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam by myself for the next 5 weeks, I chose the 8th as the day to ingest something... unagreeable. Suffice to say I spent the entire day, um, out of commission. I really boosted my family's confidence in my travel-wariness with that move.

So my trip to Cambodia was put off a day.

On the 10th I roused myself and my still somewhat shaky stomach at 6:30 in the morning (quite impressed with myself) to take the skytrain (part of the Bangkok Rapid Transit system... haha) to the general area where I believed the bus terminal was. After a solid 45 minutes of wandering and asking people who didn't understand me for directions which I could not understand, I arrived at the bus terminal. At 9:30 my trip to the border was officially underway. I planned on getting my Cambodian visa at the border (which I had been informed was doable). Not trusting my individual ability to navigate border crossings with no knowledge of the language or procedure, I decided it would be wise to befriend an Englishwoman who shared my inexperience. We hired a tuk tuk to take us to the border, and both were promptly sketched out when he instead took us to a travel agency near the border. Apparently (we still can't figure out why), one must go through a travel agency to acquire a visa. We must have looked even more skeptical and suspicious than we were, because they repeated the phrase "don't worry, it's ok" more than I think anything else.
Because I'm being long-winded, I'll try to brief it up: shockingly, we got our visas. Shockingly, they proved to be actually legitimate. Shockingly, we were not hassled at the border. Shockingly, we paid no more than anyone else. And, shockingly, we wound up hiring a car for the 3 hour journey from the border to Siem Reap (the town near the temples of Angkor Wat) with a family of 3 Belgians for $12/person, as opposed to the $10/person 4.5-hour bus alternative.

It only took 10 hours, but I ACTUALLY made it to my destination in pretty much the fashion I had hoped!

That was yesterday.

Today, the Englishwoman (heretofore to be referred to as Louise) and I hired a tuk tuk (driven by a nice gentleman named Lak we met the night before) to take us out to some of the more far-flung temples of the huge complex around Angkor Wat.

Wow.

I'm sure everyone has seen pictures of the great, majestic ruins of temples covered by vines and beautiful millennium-old carvings and figured they just can't look nearly that iconographic in real life. They do. And I haven't even seen the largest of them (Angkor Wat itself and the ancient capital at Angkor Thom) yet!
Which is why I'm excited for tomorrow's plan: out the door at 5:00am to meet Angkor Wat at sunrise, Angkor Thom in the later morning, probably back to town (or a shady corner of grass) to siesta, back to some more temples in the afternoon and finally sunset at the top of the tallest temple.

That's that for the moment. Haven't gotten to use my Portuguese at all yet, but I'm eternally hopeful. Next time I'll try to remember to bring my camera and include a few photos!