This journey was my “Anniversary trip”. After all, you are Fifty only once in a lifetime and somehow this particular date doesn’t feel like a standard birthday. At least it didn’t – for me. Besides, I had another very good reason to celebrate – it happened so that after almost 5 years of hard work to upgrade my house to the status of a “home”, I finally could say it’s done and I’m proud of it. So I thought, I deserved a little reward for all my efforts. So I pulled out and dusted off my Bucket List and looked through it to see what might inspire. It didn’t take to look too long!
So…why – Cambodia?. Firstly, I’ve never been to that part of the World yet. I’ve also never experienced a Buddhist culture and this was something I always wanted to explore. And, finally, the fame of Angkor Wat pulled me like a magnet even since I’ve heard of it first time many years ago. I think, all these reasons were good enough to justify the journey.
Until this time, my longest flight was 5.5 hours from The Little Island to Big Apple. It took some time to figure out how I want to get to the place so much further away. After some research of the options, I decided to split a long haul 12 hours into few short legs and use the stop overs wisely to have a taster tour of the places I might never visit otherwise. So we flew with Emirates through Dubai and Bangkok. Two totally different worlds, different cultures, different mind-sets, different impressions, I will add travel tales of each at the end, they both well worth it.
The outbound flights were pretty much straight forward – I was determined to get there and to get there in time – our scheduled arrival to Siem Reap in Cambodia was at 2pm on 31st of December! And you do not want to miss out on New Year’s celebrations, don’t you?!
We did make it without delay. Well, almost. The first two legs of the journey were exactly on time and without any problems. Then in Bangkok airport we heard the announcement of our last flight being delayed…Boo hoo…But just as I started playing out different scenarios of alternative New Year’s celebrations, we’ve been invited to the boarding gates. Why do I want to talk about this short hiccup on a journey? Simply because this was a flight like no other I ever experienced in my life before! They seemed to send in the pilot who obviously has been trained as a New York’s taxi driver before! Or, perhaps, he used to be a military pilot in the Khmer Rouge times or something. It is a good one hour flight from Bangkok to Siem Reap. We did it in…30 minutes! I kid you not. We cruised through every single turbulence wave that was there in the air between Thailand and Cambodia, we literally swoop down at almost 90 degree when it came for a landing. And they managed to serve lunch to the passengers as well!!! I didn’t know if to scream or to laugh, thought, we’d never make it in one piece. There were few others too who shrieked as we were going down. But of course, we made it, enriched with the new thrilling experience and acute will to live.