Asia Steps

View of the Palace Rooftops from the Okay Guesthouse

After a dreamy breakfast at the BoddhiTree, we left for our new guesthouse with the promising name of “Okay Guesthouse”. Turns out it’s more than ok,we got a room on the 4th floor which was well worth the climb with our backpacks since we have a great view of Phnom Penh skyline.

We then started our tour of the city and saw the national museum, art galleries on 178 street, central market (Psar Thmei), royal palace and silver pagoda. Phnom Penh is really great and everyone is very friendly.

Route Map for Our Day Trip Outside Hanoi

Hanoi feels like combination of several different cities all rolled into one: The Old Quarter and the Hoan Kiem Lake, the business district with its new high-rises, the beautifully scenic and residential West Lake area as well as several major avenues and circles with major landmarks, for example, Hanoi’s opera house or the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.

Many tourists who visit Hanoi don’t realize how drastically everything changes as soon as one ventures just outside of Hanoi. Our friend, Aryeh, took me out on an informal bike tour (motorbike) during my brief visit to Hanoi last year. I enjoyed it so much that I really wanted to do it again but this time with Tamar. Aryeh was kind enough to hook us up with his friend Marc, who lives in Hanoi. Marc is an avid mountain biker who’s been living in Hanoi for 4 years and is very familiar with all of the trails surrounding the city. He also thought it would be fun to take a trip, with a motorbike for a change, to see a site or two that he’d wanted to check out for some time.
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