This segment’s highlight was certainly our visit of the Angkor Archaeological Park. Our travel guide book described it very well as:

Angkor is one of the world’s foremost ancient sites, with epic proportions of the Great Wall of China, the detail and intricacy of the Taj Mahal, and the symbolism and symmetry of the pyramids, all rolled into one”.

We could not agree more.

2023.02.27 – Battambang – Siem Reap (Cambodia)

We had to order breakfast à la carte again this morning. We had a strange feeling that we were the only ones staying in this hotel of 70+ rooms – most likely serving the city’s main business hotel. Hence it was really easy to get a late check out just in time to catch our 1:30pm bus to Siem Reap. After reaching the bus station in town, we ordered a tuk-tuk with our PassApp who brought us to our hotel. After settling into our room, we had dinner at a nearby restaurant. We quickly noticed that Siem Reap was quite a different town. It had large pedestrian sidewalks, cycling paths, cross-walks and an official Pub Street. The town was certainly the heartland of Cambodia’s tourist industry. The downtown area was very lively with tons of restaurants catering the tourists from all over the world. Late in the evening, we discovered that we could buy our Angkor World Heritage passes online . This was significant time-saving option introduced during Covid that allowed us to skip the ticket office lineup of one hour or more. As one could purchase a 1-day, 3-day or 7-day pass, I opted to order a 3-day pass for $62USD as I was hoping to try out an e-bike to start my visit of some remote temples.

2023.02.28 – Siem Reap – Siem Reap (Cambodia)

After our hotel’s breakfast, Jenny accompanied me to the e-bike rental shop. After reviewing the different rental options, I opted for an e-bike offering a range of 40kms. As I explained my proposed temple visit itinerary, the shop technician recommended that I returned to the shop after my visit of the remote temples in order to change the battery as he believed I would not be able to complete the visit of my other proposed temples. The worst part of riding the e-bike was leaving the city center. The riding on the main roads or within the Angkor Archaeological Park was quite stress-free. As much as I tried to convince Jenny to join me, she was adamant about not feeling comfortable riding on the local roads. I left the rental office at 9:30am and returned the e-bike at 4:00pm without returning for a battery replacement. It was a nice introduction to the many temples (Bakong, Preah Ko, Lolei, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan) the Angkor area. In the evening, we had dinner at a restaurant highlighted in our Lonely Planet travel guide.

2023.03.01 – Siem Reap – Siem Reap (Cambodia)

For some reasons (most likely a problem with end of month/new month issue), the Angkor online application did not allow me to purchase ticket for Jenny last night. Thankfully it worked correctly this morning. After our breakfast, we stepped outside our hotel and chatted with the first remok-motos (motorcycle with hooded carriage behind – aka tuk-tuk) driver we encountered in order to assess his English fluency. After agreeing to our temple visit itinerary and the price of $15USD (five dollars less than going through our hotel), we set out on his rather rickety (but very comfortable) tuk-tuk. We had not yet covered one km when his motorcycle stopped abruptly. He had ran out of gasoline. He emptied one of his water bottle and started to run towards the street we had just come down from. As we were just about to find another tuk-tuk, our driver quickly showed up in another tuk tuk with a bottle filled with gasoline. We were back on the road for our temple visit. The visits of the Angkor Archaeological Park had been somewhat standardized and offered as two different circuits covering different temples and named: Grand Tour circuit and the Small Tour circuit. We had opted for the Grand Tour – actually the term Grand or Small were somewhat of a misnomer. Access to the temples were heavily controlled for proper ticket validation. We had to show our e-tickets which had our photo id at every temple and/or main access road. We left our hotel at 9am and returned at 1:30pm after visiting all the temples on our Grand Tour circuit: Preah Khan, Preah Neak Pean, Ta Som, Eastern Mebon and Pre Rup. Our tuk-tuk driver brought us to each temple – often dropped us off at one entrance and picked us up from another entrance – while he was patiently waiting for us to complete our temple visit. Somewhat exhausted from our sightseeing day, we had dinner at a restaurant in our neighborhood.

2023.03.02 – Siem Reap – Siem Reap (Cambodia)

Although a popular tourist attraction in Angkor was to see the sunrise with some temple in the forefront, we preferred to enjoy a few more hours of sleep and relax while savoring our breakfast buffet. Once ready for our 2nd day of temple visit, we walked out of our hotel and were greeted by our smiling tuk-tuk driver who was very happy to have us join him again today for the Small Circuit tour. We requested to visit the temples in the reverse order normally done on the tour as to finish our Angkor Archaeological Park visit with its crown jewel temple: the Angkor Wat temple. Several temples from the Small Circuit were overwhelmed by tour buses. Nonetheless, our strategy to finish our sightseeing day with Angkor Wat at lunch time paid off quite well as there were reasonably few people visiting the temple – hence we had some nice photo ops. We returned to our hotel at 2:00pm after visiting the following temples: Prasat Kravan, Banteay Kdei, Ta Prohm, Ta Nei, Ta Keo, Chao Say Tevoda, Thommanon, Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat. We celebrated the completion of our sightseeing journey with a delightful seafood BBQ buffet for a mere $7.50cdn/pp. Earlier in the day, we finally received an email confirmed our e-visa approval for our upcoming Vietnam visit.

2023.03.03 – Siem Reap – Siem Reap (Cambodia)

We had originally planned to do a day trip out of Siem Reap to visit additional remote temples but we were simply “templed out”. We would have needed to hire a driver and purchase additional tickets for that day trip. Instead, after a relaxing breakfast, we walked over to the Angkor National Museum for an enjoyable visit. From there, we took a tuk-tuk to the Pub Street area where we pampered our feet with a Fish Feet Spa for an hour or so. Back to our hotel, we relaxed for a few hours before heading out for our last dinner in Siem Reap.

2023.03.04 – Siem Reap – Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)

After an early breakfast, we took a tuk-tuk from our hotel to the airport for our 10:30am flight to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). During our early trip itinerary planning, I kept on looking for Saigon until I discovered the city was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City in 1976. At the airline check-in counter, we had a stressful moment when the agent detected a discrepancy in Jenny’s e-visa and her passport. For a moment, we thought we would have to cancel our flight to HCMC but another senior counter agent indicated that a reversal of the day/month fields on the e-visa was not a big issue – as long as the passport was not expired. The one hour flight to HCMC was uneventful. At the HCMC airport, we opted to buy (an expensive) one-month sim card in order to get us going again with our Grab rides. Our first impression of HCMC was one of huge scooter chaos on the streets and sidewalks. Unlike other large SEA cities, HCMC had no mass transport infrastructure (e.g. lrt, mrt) – hence the scooters flooded the roads and sidewalks. We dearly missed the relatively calmness of Siem Reap’s streets. To our surprise, we also realized that most websites in Vietnam were unilingual and did not offer any English interface. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to a hectic money exchange office disguised as a jewelry store. Unlike all the previous money exchange offices came across to-date, this place was hectic with a line-up of people and offered no indication of exchange rates until you reached the counter. Thankfully, we managed to get a reasonable exchange rate on our $200cdn. The sidewalks were hugely difficult to navigate as the scooters were parked all over the places. Thankfully, in the evening we had a nice dinner but at a significantly higher price than our previous meals in Cambodia and Thailand.

2023.03.05 – Ho Chi Minh City – Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)

We both had a deep sleep on our first night in HCMC. After enjoying our leisure breakfast, we spent the rest of the morning reviewing hotel options for our upcoming visit to the island of Phú Quốc – an unplanned itinerary addition. We also spent some time trying to identify and group together some of HCMC’s top sight highlights. In the afternoon we visited the very busy War Remnants Museum. The museum photographic artifacts highlighted to the visitors many atrocities and devastating impacts on the Vietnamese population as a result of the war with the USA. Later, we had a glimpse of the Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon undergoing a large scale of renovation. We noticed that the vehicular traffic, namely the number of scooters on the road appeared much less today – possibly due to it being a Sunday. Nonetheless, we had been struggling, since our arrival in town yesterday, to try to like HCMC but it had not been working for us. It seemed like the city had little to offer the tourists yet we came across a constant flow of foreigners on the streets. We had a delicious and somewhat unusual (for us) dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant on the rooftop. To-date, we had found that few locals seemed to speak any English while most (if not all) of the country’s websites were being offered only in Vietnamese. We hope a good night sleep will bring us enlightenment to uplift our view of HCMC.