Day 4 – Angkor in Pictures
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Well, where do I begin? We are a week into our holiday now and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to update!!!
I will start, of course, with the whole reason for our trip, Anton and Nuri’s wedding. WOW!!! I have never experienced anything quite like it.
The ceremony was in a local church close to Anton’s families house. It was a beautiful Catholic ceremony, all in Indonesian (of course). Lucky for us Anton had arranged for a friend to show us around the day before. Tati was brilliant! The nicest person you could ever hope to meet. She gave up her time for us all day on the Friday to show us a little bit of Jakarta and then arranged for us to be picked up and looked after for the wedding. Her whole fam
ily got involved in “looking after” us. Just wonderful people, one and all.
Anyway, back on topic, apparently it is customary for only close family and friends to go to the church, so it was a priviledge to be able to go. After the ceremony there was a gathering with food and drink (water, it was a “dry” wedding) with everyone who went to the church. We spent around an hour there before heading back to the hotel. The car that picked us up was the same one that Tati had hired (yes, even though she is native to Jakarta even she wouldn’t drive in the traffic) for the day on Friday. This was complete with Tati’s parents, who were going to the reception as well. Her whole family became our welcoming committee. She even had her sister waiting for us at the reception place so we wouldn’t feel out of place.
At 7pm we arrived at the reception hall to be greeted with this:
I have to say I have never seen anything quite like it. The room was stunning. Jo, Greg and I were speachless! Not only that but WE got a present when we walked in as well.
About 15 minutes after we arrived we found Anton and Nuri upstairs in a sort of waiting area. They looked like royalty.
After a little while we were treated to the wedding proccession. This consisted of Anton and Nuri at the front and then a lot of people following them. I know that some of the people were parents, but I’m not sure about the rest. The proccession walked along up to a stage where Anton and Nuri were seated for the rest of the night while they were congratulated by all of the guests. This consisted of somewhere around 500 – 800 (I think) people throughout the night while everyone else got to enjoy the food. The massive amount of very very tasty food!!! Water was in plentiful supply as well, which was good for us Melbournians as humidity was killing us by this stage. We ate all that we could and then made pests of ourselves taking photos where ever we could. We ended up being amongst the last to leave (very Australian of us).
I am truely greatful to both Anton and Nuri for inviting me. Not only was this the catalyst for my holiday, but it was truly an experience I will never forget. To Anton and Nuri, Adam and I both wish you the best of everything for the rest of your lives together!!!!
AKA: AirAsia Ouch!
Flight from Melbourne to KL on AirAsia X was not nearly as horrible as I feared but no better than I expected. Check-in was again a breeze. Flight left twenty minutes late, but landed twenty minutes early. Seats cramped, but a bigger issue I found was the lack of legroom meant I couldn’t stow my bag below the seat in front. Overhead compartments seemed small and I had trouble fitting my (reasonably small) carry on inside. I annoyed everyone around me constantly getting up and down to access it that in the end I gave up, stowed it as best I could in front of me and tried to wrap my legs around it. This was uncomfortable even for someone with my short legs so I would definitely recommend bringing a second small carry-on with the items you are likely to need on board.
Read the rest of this entry »
Well, as per Adam’s previous post, we started out about half an hour late. No too bad. Being excited to be finally leaving we were not too worried about this, however also being way past our bed time we were getting very very sleepy as well.
I must say that the AirAsia staff have been unbelievably good. The customer service is excellent. The seats on the plane on the other hand……….think domestic flight Melbourne to Sydney only for 8 or so hours. What’s that old Mitsubishi ad…..Not So Squeezy!!!!!!! Oh well, for what we paid for the flights I can put up for a bit (a lot) of discomfort 
.
Anyway, here we are in very very humid Kuala Lumpur for the better part of the day waiting for our next flight. Not much else to add at the moment other than the fact that I now have THREE, count ‘em THREE stamps in my passport. Very tired, very red eyes and in need of lots and lots of coffee.
Next update coming soon………………………………….
Update: Ally is now happily ensconced in her Jakarta hotel.
Here is an intial list of some of the best planning resources we’ve found for planning a trip to explore the Khmer monuments around Angkor.
Travelfish – Best resources for budget travel or backpacking in Southeast Aisa. Period.
Canby Publications – An excellent Resources for all things Cambodian; their Angkor guide and maps are exhaustive.
Apsara Authority – The authority responsible for conserving the temples of Angkor.
Siem Reap Insider – On the ground blog from the Phnom Penh Post about happenings in and around the Angkor complex.
Tales of Asia – Lots of information but not the easiest site to navigate. Forum contains an up-to-date guide to Pub Street.
The crowds awaiting sunset at Phnom Bakang (fortes)
Sala Bai Hotel and Restaurant School – A hotel school in Siem Reap which trains 100 young disadvantaged Cambodians for free each year as waiters/waitresses, cooks, receptionists & housekeeping attendants. Bargain rooms for a great cause!
Paul Dubrule Ecole d’Hôtellerie et de Tourisme – Another hotel school in Siem Reap, founded by the co-founder of the Accor Hotel Group.
National Geographic – 2009 feature on Angkor including a photo gallery, and plenty of interesting detail about the temples.
The Monuments of the Angkor Group (Maurice Glaize, 1944) – Free translation of one of the most comprehensive guides to the Angkor group.
Ancient Angkor Guide – Good for brief introductions to the major temples and sites.
Angkor: The Tour (Nick Ray, The Sunday Times 2004) – Four day Angkor itinerary.
36 Hours in Siem Reap (Naomi Lindt, New York Times, 2008) – Contains some interesting suggestions.
Finding The Best Tour Guide (New York Times Intransit Blog (March, 2009)
Holiday in Angkor Wat – Quite a lot of very useful practical information.
Cambodia Pocket Guide – Free magazines for visitors to Siem Reap available online. Occaisional article of interest.
Phenomenon – Blog about Cambodian cuisine.
An amazing five minute time lapse video of a trip from Denver to Singapore.
Wowzers Batman! And if you like that have a look at this older, but equally gobsmackingly good, time lapse video of a drive from LA to New York.
While booking accommodation for our trip Ally and I have relied extensively on hotel reviews from TripAdvisor; many, if not most, of our accommodation decisions are made with at least some reference to the site.
Tripadvisor, if you are not familiar with the site, allows guests to rate and review hotels in which they have stayed, and these reviews and rankings are one of the easiest ways to compare accommodation options in any particular city. VirtualTourist is a similar site, and many hotel booking sites (such as AsiaRooms and Expedia) have integrated user reviews into their booking engines.
These types of user-generated reviews are incredibly useful because the volume of reviews give a broad sample of experiences of all aspects of the hotel and they are written by ordinary, paying guests. Hoteliers appear to be well aware of the increasing reliance travelers are placing on TripAdvisor reviews, as is clear by the many hotels which take the opportunity offered by TripAdvisor respond to complaints or criticisms.
How TripAdvisor deals with reviews is crucial to its credibility. The blog Elliot suggests a critical review of a hotel in Minneapolis has simply, well, disappeared. You can read the full details over at Elliot, but the facts as they are portrayed by there are that a negative review, mostly concerning a restaurant connected to a hotel in Minneapolis, was posted to TripAdvisor, the hotel responded to the reviewer fully and explained its position and asked the reviewer to consider reviewing or deleting her review. The reviewer considered doing so, but later found that all traces the controversial review had vanished, as if it had never been posted. Every hotel has the ability to respond to reviews on TripAdvisor – it is unclear whether this hotel sought to do so.
Similarly, it is not clear whether the hotel ever contacted TripAdvisor, or that TripAdvisor was in any way responsible for removing the review at issue. I hope TripAdvisor make some sort of response about the alleged disappearance. It would be disturbing for a review to simply disappear (unless where there appears no good reason to think it was fabricated or malicious. Whether or not anything untoward has happened here, the transparency of sites like TripAdvisor is sure to become a talking point in the future, as all such sites walk a fine line between the basically anonymous (and generally unsubstantiated) praise and gripes of reviews and the hotel industry who the buy the advertisements (or pay the commissions).
Read the rest of this entry »
Often the most stressful part of a flight is what happens after you have disembarked the aircraft – the twin thrill and terror of the scrum of the unfamiliar, and sometimes unpleasant, airport after (if it is long-haul) the almost inevitably unpleasant flight. IHateTaxis has a simple premise – to give concise and simple advice for avoiding as much of the hassel between leaving customs and arriving at your hotel as possible.
Apart from basic airport information – such as whether ATMs or money exchange is available – the beauty of the site is in the detailed information about what modes of transport are available, precisely how to connect with them, cost, length of journey and advice about avoiding common scams. This information may be available elsewhere on the interwebs but IHateTaxis is well-designed, easy to navigate and comprehensive.
Travelling overseas with anything electrical is a pain. We’re going to be taking far more electrical gadgets than we initally planned – we have at least 6 items that require charging, from mobile phones to battery chargers and torches and that just means hassels.
Of course the plug in every country is different: Indonesia uses the European socket with two round pins; Malaysia, as a former British colony, uses the (current) British standard; Thailand has outlets which try to accommodate as many plugs as possible and in Cambodia and Laos, where there effectively is no standard, what we will meet is any body’s guess! This, of course, is to say nothing of voltage or frequency! What for us will be a minor annoyance is (presumably) for Cambodians and Laotians a regular annoyance, at least for those who are lucky enough to enjoy a dependable supply of electricity.
Read the rest of this entry »
Booko.com.au searches for the cheapest online price for books in Australia and is great for travel guides and maps. Book Depository in particular comes highly recommended – we recieved a Jakarta map and Footprints Laos guide in around two weeks for about a third of what we would have paid locally (also check Retailmenot for additional discount codes).
AUD/USD Last 12 Months
I could marry the Australian dollar at the moment and to get an idea of historical exchange rates between a currency pair Yahoo Finance’s graphs are great, you can view currency charts for the last week, the last five years or many periods in-between.
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