Rant while I wait

I'm trying to upload some photos in our hotel's lobby but it's taking really long for some reason. We have a really great connection here but I think I fucked this terminal up by trying to do too much at once. It's 40 baht an hour and as that's about a buck, you can see why I'm rushing. HELLO!?

So to bring everyone up to speed. I was in Hoi An, a beach in central Viet Nam like two days ago or something. I stayed there for two nights and then caught a bus to Nha Trang. In Nha Trang I saw a few things but mostly stayed on the beach. I got a really weird looking burn on my back because I sat down on my beach chair and most of my sunblock came off on the towel.

I got to Sai Gon on the 27th and met Starr and Raquel at their hotel. I was originally going to stay there for a few days but I got lonely and wanted to tag along with them. We paid $12 to board a bus bound for Phnom Penh. I only had an hour to kill in Sai Gon after I got off my bus, so I grabbed some breakfast. Now, in Viet Nam and Cambodia you can find 8-year-olds selling bootleg copies of Lonely Planet guides, so I bought the Cambodian one for $3 while I had breakfast. The woman selling it to me looked like she was in rough shape and instead of trying to barter with me just begged me to give her more money. It was a pretty depressing thing to go with breakfast.

The three of us boarded the same bus and got to Phnom Penh by mid-afternoon. Starr and I, once again, were getting on each other's nerves trying to find a hotel and I felt bad that Raquel had to witness it on our first destination as a group. Starr led us to a luxury hostel, and we had the penthouse. More than I wanted to spend, given my budget, but in retrospect it was a pretty great place. If only I had stolen their Lonely Planet: Thailand. Regrets.

We walked around that day and wound up by the river for drinks at night. The next day we started out early and did all the sightseeing a person would want to do in Phnom Penh. Raquel wasn't feeling so hot and wound up going back to the hotel twice to take a break.

In Phnom Penh the tuk-tuk was our preferred means of travel. It's a motorcycle pulling a trailer and the trailer has a canopy with two benches. To get from our hotel to almost anywhere in the city was $2, so divide that by three. That night Starr reserved bus tickets to Siem Reap and I feel like I wasn't informed that that decision was made. In Phnom Penh and in Siem Reap I was told and not asked we were leaving.

It was only 6 hours or so to Siem Reap and we went there to see the temples of Angkor Wat. We got day passes ($20) and biked 10 km. out to the main temple to see the sunrise. Raquel and Starr left at noon to go back to the hotel and I stayed until just before sunset. That day Starr had her camera stolen out of our hotel room. While I was biking around, Raquel and Starr got home, dropped off their stuff (including Starr's camera), and then took a 20 minute dip in the pool. When they got back to our room, the camera was gone and the key could no longer be accounted for (whenever we left our room we left the key at the front desk). Starr screamed, cried, and tried to threaten the guy at the desk in order to get it back. I later found out that she told him 'If I close my eyes and my camera shows back up, I'll just walk away and I won't care at all.' She said he looked like he thought about it for a minute and then told her he had no idea what happened to it. When I finally got back home they told me to pack my shit up and we were leaving, sans paying the bill. Now this, naturally, struck me as a bad decision in a foreign country. I did not however voice this concern and instead just packed up my shit, seeing how upset Starr was. When we got to the lobby the clerk guy tried to stop us and Starr just, very petulantly, told him we were leaving and if he wanted his money he could take it out of the profit from selling her camera. He called the police and we just walked down the alley and around the corner to our next hotel, which the two of them booked earlier that day. We practically ran down the hall and hid in our next hotel room. Raquel and I were nervous and Starr explained to us how we were immune beacuse we were Americans and some other stuff that all made an enormous amount of sense. Raquel and I remained nervous.

The police showed up about 20 minutes later and I was in the room while Starr and Raquel talked to them. Starr paid them the $20 we owed them (with the bike rentals however we owed them a bit more) and they just went away. The next day we were on a bus for Bangkok and here we are.

I just walked up and down the strip and had a beer on the curb with two British girls. Starr and Raquel met these two Canadian guys earlier today on the bus, and I saw them all walking around together. That the three of us split up and explore on our own has become more regular. I'm debating whether to stay behind in Bangkok and let them go south together, or go with them to the islands. I'm leaning towards breaking our unit up and doing the next month on my own.