Tuesday 19 January 2016

Elephants and Happy Pizza.


The Elephant des Terrasses hotel. Recommended.



When it comes to hotels, neither of us are too bothered. As long as the place is clean and not too noisy, and doesn't cost a fortune we're happy. It's just a place to sleep after all. After the fiasco in Langkawi, where we did book into a relatively expensive place, we decided to revert to type and get basic accomodation in fantastic Siem Reap, which is the town next to Angkor Wat. The room was fine and cheap, although somewhat dark. The main problem was that it was very difficult to charge up our large collection of electronics: 2 ipads, Millie's iphone and my two cameras.

We had a look on the internet and discovered that the five star hotel in the centre of town was offering rooms at 31$. For those of you unfamiliar with Cambodia, the official currency here is the Riel, but the American dollar is what everyone uses. The Riel has the same sort of role as little bonbons used to in Italy in the time of the Lire: (Dennis Pennis to Joan Collins, 'Joan, you look a million lira.)'

Anyway, we wandered over to the place and tried to book a room. 71$. Went through the booking site and sure enough, 31$.

The hotel has a colonial look to it. Millie pointed out that it looks like it was designed by MC Escher.

In fact the interior is amazing. Very much a themed place, each room has a huge tower from the Bayon Temple at Angkor Wat. The shower and wash basin are suspended above a lily-pool and the private terrace is huge.

Bathroom facilities.

The terrace.


 
 




We're getting to the end of our stay and fly to Bangkok this afternoon, so our last night in wonderful Siem Reap was one to remember.

Cambodia has become my favourite country in the region; it's much funkier than the others, with a sort of gloriously anarchic madness. We found a street the other day where they sell the legendary 'Happy Pizza.' Strangely enough we'd read an article about this exotic comestible in an in-flight magazine. It seems that traditionally, marijuana is considered a herb for flavouring by the Khmer. We ordered our pizza, but then decided that they couldn't possibly just be randomly serving 'spiked' pizza. One had visions of nice families suddenly going berserk. There had to be a way of asking.

We started out with: 'Is the pizza really, er happy, nudge nudge,' a strategy which was met with blank stares. In the end we went for: 'does it really have weed in it?'

'2$ extra.'

Roof terrace.

Rooftop pool.

Yes, we did have a massage and verygood it was.


 



The evening ended in a riot of colour in this already hugely colouful part of the World

 

2 comments:

  1. ended in a riot of colour

    ... but you were too stoned to photograph it? Or the colours were only apparent to pizza-eaters?

    ReplyDelete