The boonies

The bus to ratanakari took about 11 hours but we finally made it and found a decent guest house. As they were showing us the different options of rooms, we saw a mattress under the stairs and asked how much that was a night. He thought we were joking, and said $1. We were serious....

Haha just kidding. they found us a much better place.

After a good night's sleep, we took a walk outside and fortune smiled upon us. We found an old lady selling fried bananas. You might not know, but we have a strong history with this particular delicacy. It was this fruit that inspired the top charted music video Cek Cian  as missionaries.

We heard about some pretty cool things to see at this town out in the middle of nowhere. So we rented some motos again and headed off to the three waterfalls that were pretty close together. We also couldn't pass up a couple good scenery shots and moto shots. 

When we came to the first one, we saw some people leaving and they were all dry. We got a little disappointed because we wanted to swim. But we weren't too disappointed when we realized it was a 30 meter high waterfall. We also couldn't resist climbing down into it. 

Pretty big huh?

Being an idiot

trying to find my way back up

The next too waterfalls weren't nearly as cool but still worth the trip. One of them even had a cool wooden bridge to cross. Apparently most people don't swim, but we didn't care.

The Moto ride rivaled the waterfalls because the scenery was absolutely gorgeous.
Here we set the camera on a limb of a tree and took 5 quick shots. As you can see our demeanor changed quickly over those 5 seconds.

This one's my favorite. the helmet was falling over my eyes. I look like a little boy

We also couldn't help having a little fun on the motos. Ok so this video is super dumb. I didn't have time to think of anything to say so if you didn't think i was dumb before, you will now.

After the a quick lunch, we went to this pristine lake which was supposedly the result of a meteor. It was surrounded by a dense forest and these pictures do absolutely no justice. It was about 2.5km around and was very deep but was so quite and calm. Kory and I took a couple swims out to not quite half way. I wish I could explain how beautiful it was but I can't. It was sure nice to swim in though.

We had been there about a while when a group of kids showed up. They were of course surprised that we spoke khmae and then invited us to eat with them. This is when things got funny. I think every 30 seconds someone would do a toast and we would all put our cans of soda together. I lost it so many times. We could not keep straight faces. Kory especially lost it when I initiated the toast. Cambodian culture is soo funny and it makes it even funnier when you go along with it and initiate when you have another American with you who knows you're just messing around.

Afterwards we played a game of tag in the water. But it quickly became a game of counting to make sure we had the same number of people we started with. They were not the best swimmers. Most of them could only doggy paddle and would hang close to the dock. I was constantly  asking Kory "How many did you count?" "6" "ok good me too". and then proceed to play. Finally we headed back to town but got caught in the rain so we pulled of and sought refuge under a nearby tree, not wanting our bags to get wet which contained our money and passports. On the bright side though it made the next trip quite interesting, dirt+water=mud, mud+moto=fun/not fun, We somehow managed to get up and down some pretty muddy hills and came to the top of mountain with a beautiful view.

Tomorrow off to Siem Reap

Back to the City

Saturday night we headed back to Phnom Penh. Lucky for us they had a movie playing to let the time pass.

Oh wait where the heck is the TV!

Elder Meas picked us up from the bus station and took us to a guest house pretty close. I trained Elder Meas when I was in the country for a little less than 6 months. We had our differences at first and had different ways of handling situations. He has all sisters and I have all brothers..so you can imagine. But we got along really well and are really good friends now. He was super nice and let us borrow his moto for Sunday and Monday.

President asked us to model for the new plan for missionary work. Who wouldn't talk to missionaries lookin like that?

On Sunday we went to two branchs. Branch twelve where Kory served, and branch 4 where we served as companions. It was soo good to see some of the members we baptized. Danaet was there with her family. The only word that can describe this girl is angelic. She is the most christlike person I have ever met and now spends her day off from work helping the missionaries. I had no doubt she would be there.

We also met Sokahn or Mr. kahn as we refer to him. He learned super fast and was baptized within a month. He is now preparing to serve a mission!

We met President and Sister Smedely for sunday dinner which was like a taste of home. Roast and Potatoes. It was really good to talk with them and fill them in on what was going on in our lives after the mission.
We ended up sleeping at a members home. We slept on these thin mattresses with no fan. I slept ok but Kory hardly got any sleep. When I woke up he turned to me and said "I am never doing that again". I agreed. 5 dollar guest houses are a small price to pay for a good night sleep. 
Monday was time for a little bit of shopping. I went back to the tailor and tried on my suits.

Kory caught me off guard but the suit looks good

In all, I spent $280. I got, 2 suits,15 shirts, and 6 slacks. pretty dang good deal!
We hit up a couple other markets for some random stuff and visited some members.

At night we wanted to take Elder Meas to Pizza Company as a thanks for helping us out. We had made plans and then kory got a call from the members who we had borrowed the phone from. It was this girl in branch 12 who kinda have a crush on Kory. We had to give her back her phone and then she asked if she could come eat with us so we said that was fine. We got to pizza company and were about to order when she called again and asked if we would wait for her sister for another hour. We said that we couldn't because first of all we organized this for Elder Meas and they were welcome to come or not come, and we wanted to get to sleep early because we had an early bus to catch. Needless to say they came pretty quickly. And there were three of them.
The dinner had a lot of funny conversations. Two of the girls ordering more food, wanting fried chicken, calling us wierd cuz we were at a pizza place eating pizza (yeah this one still confuses me). We convinced them that  Elder Meas was from Phillipines and didn't speak any khmae, only english. The funniest of all was while two of the girls tried to give kory a guilt trip, the one in the middle kept grabbing more pieces of pizza and chowing down while making a couple comments still chewing on her food. She kinda looked like a chipmunk. We all lost it a couple times but me more than most. I was just a spectator the whole time, and was never disappointed.

The Beach

Not many things are better than living off 12 dollars a day on the beach. Honestly, I didn't take many pictures here. Everything was soo relaxing that I completely forgot. So i'll talk a little bit about our days. We would wake up in the morning in our 6 dollar a night guesthouse that was quite comfortable. We would walk about 50m to a restaurant and had fried pork and rice for 2 bucks. We would then walk another 50 meters to the beach. Swim, layout, order a fruit shake, lunch for another 2 bucks, swim, layout, a bag of mixed fruit, swim, another fruit shake, swim, layout, swim, dinner for 2 bucks, swim, layout, another fruit shake, and then all the places started turning into like night clubs and bars that were kind of sketchy so we would go back to the guesthouse, shower, and watch CSI: Miami Vice. (I never realized how bad the acting was but it was really fun to make fun of :))

 On the beach there are a million and a half kids that walk around selling bracelet and fruit. We also saw some pretty surprised faces when they heard us speak khmae. Almost everyone of them had never heard a foreigner speak khmae like us. We would cause an even bigger uproar if we busted out a cambodian song. They were fun to talk to and whenever they got tired of selling, they would come talk to us. these two were particularly cool and also really liked to make fun of us.

Remember how I said this place got sketchy, yeah well a lot of the reason was because of this guy. He would sell marijuana. Just look how sketchy he looks, especially with the shades.

Serious liability in America-Spelunking(sp?)

So yesterday we were also gonna go to this cave pretty close to town, but our khmae friends in the guesthouse said it was too dark......definitely a good decision. I'll explain in a little bit. We slept in in the morning till about 8 and then bought our tickets to kampong saom for 11. The cave is only about 15 km away so we had a quick breakfast and headed off. When we got there, some little khmae kids were there asking us if we wanted guides. We said no, thinking we would just look by ourselves. They of course didn't listen and proceded to take us through the cave. definitely a good thing. This cave would have been a serious liability in America, hence the title. It was super dark and we were climbing through holes we could barely get through and up faces of rock that we should have used a rope. We originally thought it was only gonna take like 15-30 min to go in and out, but we didn't know that we were gonna go completely through the cave and out the other side of the mountain. It was crazy but way sweet. We were super glad we went and we made it back with about 5 min to spare!

All our guides

They took us through some crazy stuff

We made it out of the cave and had to hack our way through back around to the front

Cambodia is one of the most beautiful places ever!

We made it to the bus, and we were off to the beach in kampong saom. After some more conversations with khmaes, Kory and I decided there are certain things that must be talked about within the first 30 seconds of a khmae meeting us.
us- hello
them- woah! you speak khmae really clearly
us- oh thank you
them-how long have you lived in cambodia?
us - 2 years (followed almost immediately by....)
them - you should have a cambodian wife (eventually I started telling them I already had a gf so they wouldn't pursue the subject further.
them- do you know John Cena.(they love watching WWE..to them its like 2 ripped giants fighting)

yup that about sums it up. there are other things that come up but thats what I can think of right now. Excited for the beach!!!