The next day, I woke up to rain. Not anything heavy or tropical, it was just steady and more than a drizzle. I had thought about going out to Angkor Wat for the sunrise, but there obviously wasn't going to be one. So I decided that I would head to Phnom Penh that morning instead of taking any more time with the temples. It meant not completing the three day pass, but I have seen these temples before, I have some photos of the things I missed at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. I hope I will be able to get the suitably digitized someday, but I figured I had had enough of Siem Reap and major changes to the area. So I bought a ticket for Phnom Penh on a bus that morning.
It was on the bus that I finally felt some of the old Cambodia that I remembered. There were some foreigners like me on the bus, but there were also a number of normal, regular Cambodians, the ones that are just living their lives. They aren't caught up in tourism in any particular way. And they are quite different in feeling. It was relaxing.
Partway down to Phnom Penh we stopped for about half an hour for a lunch stop. There were the usual sorts of people selling food and stuff from stalls by where the bus stopped. There was a restaurant across the street. I bought a grapefruit and an iced tea. The thing that set me truly at ease that I had found the Cambodia I remembered though was the girl who sold me the iced tea. I picked it out, but it had been sitting on the top of the cooler, on top of the ice. She said it wasn't cold enough. I said it was okay, but she started digging around in the cooler for another one. She found one at the bottom that was quite chilled. She didn't do it for any reason other than that she wanted me to have a better quality iced tea than the one I picked. That's what I remembered. It was nice.
There were other little surprises along the way. We passed through a town and a gas station. As we slowed and stopped to let someone off, or maybe on, I noticed some writing on one of the pillars of the gas station. It was the name of two Korean pop bands. Odd place to find that.
And the rest was just enjoying the scenery of the countryside through a somewhat blurry bus window.
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