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Published: November 5th 2006
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We caught an early bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap for our last few days in Asia and to see the temples Angkor before heading back into Bangkok and then to Oz! Man it’s flown by!
The bus was pretty uneventful, just miles of flat, green land and forests - I know I should be appreciating the scenery more but after three months you start to take things for granted. As we drove into the bus station at Siem Reap you could see the absolute commotion as tuk tuk drivers and touts jostled and elbowed each other for room around the bus! It was complete madness and with no armed guard around the bus it began to descend into anarchy with locals arguing with each other for who got to carry your bag. Luckily enough the place we stayed in Phnom Penh had a place here and rang ahead, so there was this little guy with a huge print out of my name just waiting to whisk us away from the melee!
Stayed in the Siem Reap river star hotel which wasn't great, but that didn't really matter because we were planning on spending most of our time
at Angkor, plus it had A/C and in this dead heat that was essential. The humidity was in the high 80's and you had to carry a bottle of water with you constantly and change your t-shirt three times a day! Anyways that day we strolled around the small town, around the market and down to 'Bar Street' to a place called the Red Piano for a great Khmer curry and loads of Angkor beer to cool it down!
Siem Reap was a bit smaller then Phnom Penh and had none of the nicer state buildings, the only reason for its status as a tourist destination is its proximity to Angkor, so we got up the next day and hired a tuk tuk driver to take us to Angkor and around the ruins for a day. When you rock up at Angkor, it looks just like a photo, it’s so big that it appears two dimensional from a distance. As you begin to walk into it you really get a feel for the scale and intricate detail of it and how long it must have taken to build. The place is really awe inspiring; it was made a thousand
years ago! When London was a small town with only 50,000 people this place was a major walled city with over a million! It was lost to the western world until some French guy discovered in the 1900's and so it is still in fantastic condition - its easy to imagine what it must have looked like a thousand years ago. We climbed the stairs to the top and cooled down in the breeze - it was heavenly and because its in the middle of a jungle the views are fantastic.
After a few hours just wondering around there we got our tuk tuk to some of the other ruins (Angkor Thom, Bayon. Pa Thom - where they filmed tomb raider), it’s pretty boring to describe them so I'll just stick some pics below, needless to say - they were beautiful, really peaceful and a lot to take in. We carried on like that from about 10 until sunset which we watched go down behind Angkor! Very touristy but a lovely sight.
The next day we opted to take a break from temples and headed out to the non-existent floating villages. We'd heard a lot about them, basically
there are a load of Vietnamese boat people that live and work in a floating village on Tonle Sap Lake, apparently its pretty poor and harsh but well worth seeing. The government charges a fixed fee of $10 a person to catch a boat there just to see (gangsters!). Anyways, we got to this lake and the only thing that was there were a couple of kids literally floating in wash basins begging off passing boats! Apparently the floating village floats somewhere else for their summer holidays!
That evening we went down to bar street to eat, by this point we were feeling pretty cynical - we were tired and grumpy and having to haggle for everything, constantly say no to tuk tuks and beggars and getting ripped off by the government (they charge $40 into Angkor - and the money is collected by an oil company!) was taking its toll. We sat there eating watching a street seller throw the odd nut at her toddler to eat then smacking her for crying when she was hungry! The place is really sad, the thing is - it's just so corrupt and charity never seems to feed down to the
people that need it. So, more out of spite for the mother then charity, we went down to the fruit market and bought a load of bananas and fed the baby and then walked around just handing them out to kids on the street. By the time we had ran out, we were like the pied piper of hamlet with a trail of kids walking behind us chomping on bananas and trying to get more! Sounds cheesy but it was cool at the time.
The next day we hired some bikes and went back up to Angkor to cycle around it. I'll spare you the adjectives; it was beautiful, serene and peaceful just plodding through the jungle from one set of amazing ruins to another. In turned into quite a long day and we didn't get home till dark. Given that I had made her cycle around Angkor for 25km on a "hell-cycle" all day, I took Dulce to a 'seeing hands' massage place for some therapy, before packing our bags for Bangkok the next day!
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