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In between all of our temple watching we had a chance to explore the town of Siem Reap.  We were extremely lucky because the town had suffered from some serious flooding the week before we arrived.  It was bad enough that a couple of people died and there were still sand bags and lots of water about when we got there.

Flooded street - right outside our hostel!

The city and our hostel (Rosy Guest House) were drying out and recovering from all of the water.  It didn’t affect us too much though and we considered ourselves really lucky to have decent weather for temple viewing.

Siem Reap is a pretty touristy place.  There are lots of good restaurants (a good thing), but lots of people hassling you to buy stuff (and they are PUSHY here).    Honestly, it got pretty tiring constantly being shouted at to buy things.

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Well, after a bit of a story behind the Hong Kong fabric, the Thailand fabric was very straightforward.  Basically, there were lots of cute shops on Koh Tao, the island where we learned to SCUBA and one day we were walking along the street and noticed some absolutely gorgeous fabric in one.  Seriously, I think this is my favorite so far.  Totally unique and so, so beautiful.  We snatched it right up and shipped it off to my mom.

And here it is!

A little wrinkled, but you get the idea...

Close up of the flowers

And just because they are adorable, here’s another picture of the island dogs sleeping on the beach.  They have their own little sleeping spots!

Cute!

Our Wedding Map

First things first, all of the photos in this post are by Jason Fukura – he was our awesome wedding photographer and you can check out his website here.

It has taken me a long time to get to this post, but it’s a really special one!  Justin and I spent a long time dreaming about heading off on this trip.  We made lists of places we’d like to go, messed around with possible routes and looked up activities.  About six months before we left home we got married and decided that the wedding was the perfect chance to get some great travel ideas from our friends and family.  Each person who came to the wedding got a card and a little sticky arrow and we had a giant laminated map hung in the entry of the reception.  Throughout the evening people filled out the cards telling us where we should go and why and then stuck their arrow (numbered so we could match it up with the cards) to the map.  At the end of the night we had lots of great ideas and a really fun map!

So, now that we are nearing the end of the trip I wanted to post the list of locations our nearest and dearest suggested to us and to highlight which ones we made it to in our travels.  We were flattered that many people picked their hometowns (for those of you we didn’t visit, we still want to come!) and loved all the ideas (and reasonings!), but we’ll need to make several more trips to make it to them all.

Here they are!  Places we have been or will go to are in bold and I’ve tried to link back to our blog posts about the ones we have already visited and I’ll come back as we get more written and update the links for the other bold ones.

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Our awesome dive shop, Scuba Junction

We arrived on Koh Tao and were met right off the boat by someone from our dive shop, Scuba Junction.  We got the paperwork out of the way, settled in to our bungalow, and got started with our SSI Open Water course!  The bungalow was very convenient because it was a 30 second walk to the dive shop, and since it’s a small town on the island it was close to everything else as well.  We set it up through Scuba Junction and got a nice discount for when we were diving.

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City streets

Our first morning in Bangkok we set out exploring.  It was hot, humid, and felt like there could be a thunderstorm at any minute.  Our first order of business was finding something to eat.  We were stoked because we both LOVE Thai food and were so ready to try the real deal.  And what we found did not disappoint.  We ended up at a vegetarian restaurant (and cooking school, but more on that later!) and had our first (of many) wonderful Thai meals.  Absolutely delicious.

Bangkok is an interesting city.  It has it’s own particular smell to start with.  A kind of combination between tasty, tasty Thai cooking and open sewers.  It’s not the cleanest city and it is extremely hazardous trying to cross the street.  In fact we would walk several blocks out of our way in order to cross the street sometimes.  But, everyone is very friendly and we found it to have a really good feel to it.  And did I mention that the food is AMAZING?!

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Buying fabric in Hong Kong turned out to be a bit of a different experience than anywhere else we’ve been so far.  We looked up where we might be able to buy some fabric and found a whole lot of shops all in one area of town.  Hong Kong has a great subway system, so we took a ride over there and this is what we found:

Hong Kong's typical fabric shop

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We were very sad to leave Sabi Sabi.  It was such a beautiful place and we loved seeing the animals so much.

The same day we left the game reserve my mom had to fly back to Johannesburg and then on home, so we were also sad to say goodbye to her.

A driver came and picked us up and then took us to Nelspruit, a nearby town where my mom would catch her flight later that day.  But first we had another treat in store!  We met up with my aunt’s foster daughter, her husband and their new baby!  They gave us a wonderful lunch at their home and we had a great time chatting with them.  They also gave us some good travel advice, dropped my mom off at the airport and us at our hostel.  So kind of them!

We had a couple of days left before our flight out of Africa, so we decided to stick around in Nelspruit and see the Blyde River Canyon which is only a short drive away.  We rented a car and I was very happy to find that the traffic in that area was not so busy.

It was a beautiful day exploring the canyon!

Rock Pinnacle

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While the big cats were the main event at this reserve, we also had many, many other spottings.  Here are some photos of the other animals we saw:

Swimming monitor lizard

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I have to start this post out by thanking Phil and Joanna, without whom we never would have been at the Little Bush Camp in the Sabi Sabi private game reserve.  This is absolutely the most luxurious, incredible place I can imagine for seeing these animals and I feel beyond lucky to have spent three nights there.  My photos definitely do not do this place justice.  It was perfect.

Our swank room!

The food was amazing (and endless) with lots of delicious choices for each meal.  I was stuffed constantly!

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Once we had the camp set up we got to start relaxing.  I found this to be a very laid back part of the trip.  Mornings and evenings we got to go on walks on our beautiful island.  We saw some animals (although nothing as spectacular as in Chobe) and enjoyed the landscape.  It was so nice to get some solid hiking in after spending a lot of time in vehicles!  We saw zebra, lots of kinds of antelope, elephants, hippo, lots of birds, and a snake in the big tree IN OUR CAMPSITE.

Island Scenery

We hiked around a giant baobab tree near the camp

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