On the road to Khmer citadelles...

We were not sure what to do this week end and we decided that it was the perfect time to go to visit the ancient Khmer temples at the border with Cambodgia about 300 km east from Bangkok... Indeed you can read in all newpapers alert to huge rainfalls especially in this region and see many headlines about the revival of tensions between Cambodgia and Thailand because of a complicated issue about one of those temples lol Perfect timing ;)
I was in fact pretty stressed about this but it has rained only twice and not very much and the temple at stake was 200 km further from where we went !

The plan was: leaving on friday afternoon with Marine, Ludo, Aldrick and Typhaine, taking the bus to Nakhon Ratchasima, sleep there, rent motor bikes early on saturday morning and drive the about 100 km to the first temples, visit one or two of them, sleep there the first night, visit on sunday and then drive in the evening to Surin where I would take the bus back to Bangkok in order to be in class on Monday while the others would drive back to nakhon Ratchasima on Monday as they don't have class (200km on the highway :(, I was very happy not to do it !) and visit a few more temples in the North...

What happen: basically the same !! we were pretty good and very lucky .. because the bikes we rent were VERY crap but yet we didn't had too much problems (one of the tire get flat three times .. but every time we were lucky enough to find someone to repare it in 30 minutes for 20 to 50 Bth lol), we only had the map from Lonely Planet but we found our way pretty easily and the weather has also been perfect: cloudy enough not to get too much sun burn but it hasn't rained or at least it has always waited for us to be in the temples or in a restaurant ;)

The temples are nice but apart from one really impressive on a volcano it is not really worse so many kilometers ... however we ended up in very remote areas of Thailand and going through typical villages and driving through 80 kilometers of rice fields and countryside was really interesting !!
Here no way to speak english and we have proved very creative with body language to get food ;) What is amazing here is that even in the deepest areas we can find a much better road system than in my area in France ... the problem is that it is so good that everybody makes the most of it: on our motorbikes we met trucks, Buses (on the main roads), pick ups of course, but also bycicles, strange hybrids and of course farmers with their cows on the road side and plently of animals (dogs, cats, chicken and children lol no I am kidding children are really sweet here)
I didn't only feel geographically far from Europe but I also felt like I was doing a temporal travel back one century ago ! Appart from the fact that anywhere you go, you can find Coca Cola ... very impressive this company !!

view at the first temple from the volcano, Prasat Phanom Rung:

Aldrick & Typhaine; Marine & Ludo; Me & nobody :( lol


Perfect location for a paintball !!



Border with Cambodia at Prasat Ta Muan:


On the road: