Siem Reap

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Leaving Bangkok and Thailand I wasn't in the best of moods. The life of living in a backpack and not having a proper home can be hard on you. The same thing happened to me last time I went to Thailand and I actually think it has something to do with the country. It is nothing special, you see what you are allowed to see and to the native people you are an income only. Thailand has now gone from a backpacker country to a 5-star hotel country. Honestly, I just wanted to back to England and live a life of routines. Thanks god we went to Cambodia to clear my head from the stupid thoughts.

Going from Malaysia to Thailand you clearly notice you enter a poorer country. And going to Cambodia, well it doesn't really get much poorer in this region. Thailand seems like Singapore in a comparison.

A really really early bus from Bangkok (I woke up at 6.40!!!) took us to the boardertown and then a short tuktuk-ride to the actual boarder. Then the usual stamp out and get visa and stamp in which took a couple of hours. We grouped up with a Swedish couple to be in a stronger point of bargaining on our forecoming transport from the boarder to Siem Reap, the town where the famous Angkor temples are. And if you don't know about these temples, shame on you, go study!

We had heard all about the horror-stories about the bus so we decided to get a taxi. After one hour of bargaining, we had only managed to get the price down from 60 to 55 dollars. We gave up and paid the price.

Cambodia has a double currency, the riel and the us-dollar. One dollar is 4000 riels.

As the taxi-drivers lack of English we were quite thankful when he took us to a nice and well-priced guesthouse. All buses or taxis or any form of transport takes you to a guesthouse. It is how it works, and the guesthouses can pay up to 12 usd for a couple. They actually pay most of your bus-journey from Bangkok. It is not a very good way in my eyes as our room only costs 5 usd a night and we have tv and a bathroom. If we only stayed one night, the guesthouse would make a big loss on us. This didn't happen to us as we didn't take the bus from Bangkok, but many people do.

The road from the boarder to Siem Reap is only about 120 km long, but it takes almost 5 hours. It is the worst road I have ever been on. The potholes are big as craters, if you have another vehicle in front of you, you are in a thick thick cloud of dust impossible to see anything. If you take the worst dirt road in England and make it 10 times worse, it still wouldn't be close. As I sat next to the driver, I was constantly brazing myself for the next pothole.

The next day we just took it easy, trying to get the feel of the new country and the pricelevel. I find it quite hard to think in dollars, trying to calculate everything in baths right now. We saw the bats in the trees, all the 5-star hotels and the markets. Siem Reap is a fairly small easy city heavily influenced by the temples. This means that there are thousands of tuktuk drivers everywhere. The food is good, better than thai, and there is a good selection. I have had mexican three times the last week. Apart from the temples, there isn't much to do. One day we went to a pool and spent a couple of hours reading and swimming a bit. Unfortunaly there was a major buildingsite next door, but we aren't very posh so we enjoyed ourselves.

Then there is the temples.

We bought ourselves a 3-day pass for 40 usd. As you are allowed to visit the tempels for free the last 2 hours of each day we went with a tuktuk to get our passes and watch the sunset from the famous watching-sunset-place. As it is so famous there was about 30 tour-buses and another 150 tuktuks with people going to the same destination. It was a short climb to the top of a mountain-tempel which you can do by elephant for 15 usd. Of course it is way too expensive so we walked. I must say I did not enjoy my time there waiting for the sun to go down. I found other people very offensive not realizing that this is a religious site and wearing pretty much no clothes and smoking, littering and being loud. There was a fair amount of people I would like to throw off the tempel for lack of decency. So we went back fairly quickly.

Back at the guesthouse we met two Germans who unfortunatly was leaving the same night for Bangkok. They are the nicest Germans we met so far, even apologizing for speaking German to each other. We exchanged travel stories and I am pretty sure we talked them into going to Koh Lipe. We also met two Americans from Seattle that travel Cambodia by bicycle. It is a really nice way of travelling as the country is pretty much flat.

The next day, our first day of the temples, we rented bicycles to move ourway around. The cost was a massive 1 usd a day. The ride from our guesthouse to the most famous Angor Wat is about 6.5 km, but it is a nice and easy ride anyone can do. Angkor Wat is the most southern of the big temples and just north of it is Angkor Thom which is a squareshaped wall with entrances to the north, south, east and west. This was our target for the first day.

We walked around all the big and famous temples, some covered by Chinese and Japanese tourists taking pictures of themselves in front of the big buildings. Most of the temples have some kind of restauration being done to them. They are very cool, in my eyes the most cool religious buildings in the world maybe the Aztec temples are as cool but I haven't seen them yet so I wouldn't know.

It is very hard to explain to someone how big they are, but I could never get enough of it in a picture. They are one of the seven big wonders of the world, in my eyes number one. Sure the pyramids are amazing, but you don't have each stone of the pyramids covered in carvings of warriors, women and elephants. You do here. Unfortunatly the climate has taken it's toll and carvings have lost their details and buildings have crashed to the ground.

The second day we went towards temples north of Angkor Thom, a few with water features. Well, they do during the rainy season. As it is the dry season now, there wasn't much water. At each tempel we went to the same kind of people were selling the same kind of things. T-shirts, cold water, soft drinks, food, books, postcards. Everything for one dollar. Same price and same mercandise. Kids selling postcards 'you wanna buy postcard, 10 for 1 dollar'. They can count on to ten in 6 different languages and know every capital of countries where the tourists come from. So I started answering the question 'where you frome?' with Marocco and Slovenia. It's all of course as a way to sell.

We travelled from tempel to tempel taking pictures as a true tourist. When the day came to it's end we came to my favourit, big square shaped with steep steep steps up to the top. The first had stone elephants in the four corners. The next tempel called Pre Rup we didn't have enough light to really check out, the sun went down. I wanted to come back to this one but it is farily far away from the other. Now it was dark and we still had at least 10 km to go to our guesthouse. As everything seems further away in the dark we were knackered when we got back.

The last day we were gonna see two of the big three, Angkor Wat (the worlds largest religious building) and Ta Phrom (the one they didn't clear the forest from so it looks like trees have taken it over). We started with Angkor Wat. You walk over a bridge towards the surrounding wall. Most temples have these walls, I can't see why really. Nobody would have been foolish enough to attack a people with enough manpower and strength to build all this. Anyway, the tempel of Angkor Wat is amazing. Maybe more from a distance. But it is built in levels, each with a watercontainer (dry during the dry season). When you think you can't possible go to another level, there is the really steep steps up. It goes on and on and on. And then there is a tower with even steeper steps up in the middle of the whole thing. Of course I had to climb it. Up it's fine. Down it's scary. We went there midday to get away from all the tour-groups that go for lunch midday.

We then headed for Ta Phrom, stopping a bit by the temples on the way. After a massive portion of vegetable fried rice for a dollar we entered. Ta Phrom was by far the most crowded place and we had worked ourselves up a bit thinking it would be sooo cool. Sure having massive trees coming up through the walls or on top of temples is cool, but having Chinese people lining up to get their picture taken by it is not.

Then we went back into Angkor Thom to see our last temples and headed home.

One cool thing we did see was monkeys having a bath in a piece of water. The most cool thing was when they started divebombing from trees overhanging the water. Just like people. We had also heard stories about snakes but having thousands of people walking around every day scared them away. I did see two, but they were both dead and fairly small.

The next days we spent taking it easy, eating good and relaxing. And then I picked up a cold. It feels stupid to have a cold when the temperature never goes below 20 and hits 35 during the days.

Now we will spend a day or two here before heading to the capital Phnom Penh.

All in all Cambodia is a very friendly place, I would recommend most people coming here. It was a nice change from Thailand and once again I enjoy to travel.

I will publish loads of pictures of the temples when I get them ready. The internet connections here are bad.

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Comments

[susantravels]

Cheer up, jag skrapar bilen varje dag!
Är på väg till Kambodja och tittade in, lycka till på resan! Om du är trött på turistfällor får du nog lämna den snitslade backpacker-trailen. Alla är så ihopklumpade längs rutten i sydostasien att det räcker att ta sig någon mil åt viket håll som helst så kan ni känna er som upptäckare igen. Fast fortfarande turister(!), det får du nog svårt att skaka av dig... Testa några mindre öar i Koh Chang-arkipelagen om ni tar en vända i Thailand igen. Lugnare där.