Today we were woken up by the sunshine in our faces. Do you know this feeling that makes your nose tickle?

Although it is early the breakfast takes long but I imagine they make it with love. It’s included in the room rate.

At 8 in the morning we are on our way to the city center to organize a tuk tuk. The base price at the hotel was USD 28 for a tour to only one temple, we manage to get a driver for the day for USD 20, including a visit to four different temples, one of them 40 km outskirts.

This Angkor temple, Banteay Srai, was nicely situated in the middle of rice fields but nothing special, compared to the other ruins we visited. The tuk tuk tour though was worth it because we got to experience a 40-minute-drive passing small villages and wonderful nature – the real and authentic Cambodia we were looking for, compared to the very touristy Siem Reap.

The only small disappointment of today’s excursion concerned the food. Like in most places I have visited around the world I we were taken to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, which was focused on visitors like us. Most likely the driver gets a commission or a free meal in case we spend some dollars there. Despite we wanted some authentic street food and have communicated that clearly this was where we ended up. Maybe it was impolite but we didn’t sit down and ordered pricy western-like meals but went a couple of yards down the road where we lunched for maybe a quarter of the price of the restaurant. By the time we got back the driver seemed to be angry about that but still was too polite to openly confront us…

The temple we liked most today was Banteay Kdei, the “Citdadel of Chambers”, where there were of course some tourists. However, it was not overly crowded.

Preah Khan, the last stop on today’s tour, was large but not restored. At the same time we arrived, two Japanese coaches did, too. Very unfortunate as the place was packed now.

All in all the day was great as you can tell by the pictures below. We’d do it again.

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