Jeff is going to get us thrown in prison

First let me catch you up on the past few days. We've been traveling with these great Canadian girls. Of of them is doing missionary work in northern Thailand and had to go out to a little village to do her training, so we went with her. It was a few hours outside Bangkok, but it was far enough to get out of the tourist industry which was really nice. We stayed the night at the university, which was so cheap and so nice. The next day we all got up and went to the zoo. The zoo in Thailand is a much more hands-on experience. Jeff paid a dollar to dangle a whole chicken on a string over a large pool of crocodiles. Eventually one lept out of the water and snapped the chicken into pieces, almost taking Jeff with it. We held an orangutan, a kangaroo, a bunny...it was really fun and sort of scary. Jeff and I bought a bunch of bananas and fed some elephants too. Big elephants that weren't behind a fence. Huge elephants standing around, hungry, waiting for tourists with bananas to feed them. You could even have the elephants walk over you and tap you on the butt. You've got to know that its only a matter of time until someone gets hurt. There were shows with people putting their heads inside crocs mouths, and pig racing, and tigers jumping through flaming hoops. There were even stands selling deep fried crocodile on a stick. Crocs that didn't do well in the show I suppose.

I'll be honest, the past two days have been kind of hard. Yesterday moning we got up at 6 and caught a rickshaw to the bus station, a bus to Bangkok, a boat up the river, walked to the wrong train station, took a tuk-tuk to the right train station, and hopped on our train to Aranya Prathet at the border of Cambodia just before it pulled away from station. We were too late to get seats on the train, so we were looking forward to 6 hours of standing on a train with no air conditioning. Luckily, we fell upon some seats early in the trip and claimed them until we arrived. The train was hot, muggy, and full of strange smelling food. We bought a bamboo stick filled with sticky rice finally because we were starving. Our train was two hours late and by the time we got to Aranya Prathet at the border of Thailand, the border was closed, so we found a place to stay for the night. We stayed in a cement building above a garage, on the fourth floor. Its wasn't a bad room for $4. We had our own bathroom with a squatter and sink and a ceiling fan (a major plus.)

This morning we got up early (again) to head over to the border crossing before the lines started. We made it to the border at around 7 and started the ugly process of getting out of Thailand and then into Cambodia. When we finally got everyone on the Thailand side happy, we crossed the big bridge into Cambodia. Now, we had heard that Cambodian immigration officers are a pain to work with, but come on. Jeff had got himself all worked up to stand his ground about how much he would pay for a visa, so we walked up to the counter ready to argue if necessary. After only a few moments Jeff and the officer behind the counter were in a heated argument. The officer wanted Baht only which we didn't have enough of and so we were being told that we had to go back to Thailand, exchange money, and then try to immigrate again. Caboom. I'm not quite sure when Jeff got used to being a traveler, but he definately is now. The argument was in full swing at this point with me standing in the middle. Finally the officer offered $25 for each visa, only $5 over what the sign right above his head was asking for. I threw the money and passports down and pulled Jeff away from the counter.

Today we had our first taste of Angkor Wat. I've been dying to visit this place since I was living in China. Its the largest religious builing in the world and was built between 800-1100 A.D. There are hundreds of temples in the area as it was one of the largest empires of the time. The population was over a million at the time when London only had about 50,000. The temples were in poor shape until the early 1900's when a team from France started to restore them. They managed to stop the jungle from breaking some of the temples apart when the civil war stopped their efforts. So now its like an Indiana Jones playland, but for real. We paid a tuk-tuk driver about $8 to drive us around for the day. Jeff is planning a blog to talk more about the temples, so I'll leave that and the pictures to him.

This is my last plea to email us. Its nice to hear from home.