The Day we accidentally biked to the Siem Reap Airport.

So I knew we were close to Siem Reap. But I didn’t realize we were THAT close.

Will and I had been studying the maps a little bit (and google earth- which if you haven’t discovered Google Earth, it is this AMAZING program in a scary way. Google, google earth, download it and you can get satellite images of MANY places in the world and zoom in pretty close. i.e. I have found the house we’re currently staying in along w/ exact latitude and longitude via google earth. Anyway….) and noticed that we’re not that far away from a large body of water called: Western Baray. It is a large rectangular man-made lake built by the Khmer Empire back in the 12th century. It was built for irrigation. It’s unbelievable how big it is and to think it was all built by people shoveling dirt around this area that they knew collected a lot of water during the rainy season.

It was nice to be out biking around, especially along some water. I do miss being by water. Going by it really made me want to go canoeing or water skiing, because I’ve spent many a summer doing those types of activities. We continued to follow the dirt road east for a ways just enjoying the exercise and the views and Saturday morning in general; when all of a sudden to the right we saw a huge airplane.

I kind of surprised myself, I didn’t think we had gone that far, but sure enough there was the airport plain as day. It’s not quite in Siem Reap but it’s close.

I guess there are a few things that always catch me off guard in this whole Peace Corps experience. I guess there is also a lot that WE are experiencing simply because of our location. We Aren’t in the most rural area and definitely aren’t roughing it as hard as some of our other comrades. (i.e. we have 24 hour electricity in our town, and oh yea- we’re only 16k from Siem Reap that has everything you could possibly want). There are Several people without electricity and several people who would kill to be able to buy ice cream and Pringles (both of which I can buy at our market). Anyway….

It’s just nice to know that biking to town won’t be a problem. We can save some money because our Peace Corps budget doesn’t quite match that of what you can spend in the touristy town of Siem Reap. So if we want to splurge on some pizza, frozen yoghurt or burgers perhaps biking to town is the way to go - simply because taking a tuk tuk costs the same as what we’d spend on pizza; plus you have to factor in taking a tuk tuk TO the pizza place from wherever you were, along with the want to buy a beer and well let’s just say it all adds up. One could easily spend our entire month’s stipend in a long weekend at Siem Reap if they weren’t careful. It’s a good thing we can speak a little bit of the language and are able to find the True Khmer restaurants and also pay the Khmer price.

Anyway- it was just kind of fun to accidently stumble upon the SR airport, on our leisurely Saturday morning bike ride.