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Published: November 28th 2011
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Hi Home,
I'm now writing to you from Battenbang, Cambodia and it has to be said that we have very mixed opinions of the country so far...
We flew from Laos on Friday morning to Siem Reap,Cambodia, and spent the day being ecotourists. This first started with eating at a great restaurant for brunch where 100% profits go to the children's hospital. We then went and visited the hospital and they were asking for volunteers to give blood so we enthusiastically agreed. Sadly, as I donated in England last month I couldn't do it but Jenny was allowed and we both still got the free t-shirt at the end which was highly valuable as most of our clothes were at the laundrettes! We then went and found a spa and had a massage and a facial which was divine..especially as we paid less than $40 for both!
In the evening we went to a local orphanage and had a tour around it before spening time with the children. There were about 50 there between the ages of 1-18 and all seemed genuinely happy. A lot of them were leaving for the weekend to go to the farm the
orphanage owned in order to work with the animals and try and make the organisation self-sufficient. We have heard some horror stories about orphanages getting children to beg in the city centre in the evening but this one was great. Later on, the children dressed up in costumes they had made and performed 3 traditional Khumar dances for us. The only real distraction was that we were being eaten alive by bugs but apart from that, we really enjoyed it!
On Saturday we got up early and hired a tuk-tuk driver for the day to take us on a tour around Ankor Wat. As we only had a day, we were restricted to only seeing 10 temples but that turned out to be plenty!
The area is just outside Siem Reap and is very green and lush with trees everywhere, apart from in the clearings where the tumbling temples are. We started with the most famous, Ankor Wat, which is surrounded by a moat. At this point it was 0900 and almost 30 degrees!
We found with all of the temples that although the structures were incredible, there was very limited information around to know exactly what
we were looking at. Also, the biggest problem we had with the area was all of the begging. Cambodia has been the first place we have felt harassed and there was something very distasteful about them begging and chasing us through the temple and then complaining when westeners were showing too much shoulder...there certainly was one rule for tourists and another for locals.
Fortunatly we had a much better evening and went to 'Jimmys Village School'. Here, a local nicknamed Jimmt has set up an evening school three months ago to teach children English as the education system is still very poor. He does it using his mothers front yard and has 50ish children crammed onto desks, 6 nights a week. As we arrived an Aussie had just finished teavhing them Óld McDonald' as Saturday is singing night. Suddenly we found it was our turn and had to quickly think of a song to teach them. We settled on 'Row row row your boat'and wrote it on the white board, with pictures. We then spent an hour energetically teaching them the song, along with the actions we had made up. Once they had got the hang of it we
then split the class and had them singing in rounds - it was really good fun and at the end of the lesson we were bombarded with 50 children wanting to hug us goodbye!
The owner Jimmy was lovely and we spoke to him every day we were in Siem Reap and tried to help in anyway we could including proof-reading emails for him and helping him set up his laptop that a tourist had donated him. He has no real structure to his lessons and just downloads lesson plans from a Cambodian website so we have introduced him to BBC Bitesize Key Stage 1 which will hopefully help him.
We are now in Battenbang after taking a 6 hour boat trip here earlier today which we were told 'did not comply with international safety standards'! Luckily it only temporarily broke down once and the rest of the time we were floating through merky water looking at all the floating villages. There was a group of Russian tourists on board with huge long lens cameras and proceeded to take pictures throughout the journey, including putting them in the faces of the locals on board...it was shameful. One little
girl looked so scared by it all that we drew a smiley face on a balloon and gave it to her!
Once arriving in Battenbang, we were accosted by tuk-tuk drivers and eventually taken to the hotel we had chosen. After a very quick bite to eat we were taken to see the killing caves where the Khumar Rouge had blugeoned people to death and pushed them into this cave between 1975-79. There were boxes of bones inside the cave and the whole place was very eery. Afterwards, we were persuaded to watch the sunset (which we seem to be told to do on a daily basis at the moment!) before seeing thousands of little bats leaving the caves in long ribbons for the night.
As Im sure you can tell we are less than enthusiastic so far and although we have met some charming people here, we feel like we are constantly being ripped off so are very much looking forward to heading back to Vietnam at the end of the week and to the paradise island of Phu Coc.
I hope England isnt too cold- we are melting out here!
Lots of love
Izzie xxxx
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