Day 269 - Bonus Day!!

Or at least it would be if Ed was still working. Today’s date has been firmly etched in the mind for many years now and this time around it brings into sharp relief just how expensive a year travelling more or less the entire world can be. Oh well, there’s always next year…

To take our minds off money matters we left our hotel shortly after 5am in the tuk-tuk we’d rented for the day, driver (and sort of guide) included. This is the half-motorbike, half-chariot thing that we’d scared ourselves half to death in when we were in Bangkok. We were spending the day at Angkor Wat, one of the world’s great manmade wonders and a definite highlight of travelling around Asia. It’s an enormous (largest temple in the world) 1000 year old temple complex with a correspondingly huge moat, and our first sighting of it was deliberately just as the morning’s first light was breaking, and what a sight that was. Over the next half hour or so hundreds of people arrived to watch the sunrise over the main temple - impressive sunrise, annoying people.

We went for a walk around inside and saw some of the ongoing restoration work - the Khmer Rouge thought it would be a good idea to try and destroy it in the late-1970s - as well as some Buddhas. Over the course of the next few hours we looked around a few of the different temples, with our trusty tuk-tuk carting us between them. We saw Bayon, famous for its huge faces carved into the stone, and a temple where Tomb Raider was filmed. We had some fun bartering with a 5 year old kid for some tiny things we want to use as Monopoly pieces, but we couldn’t strike a deal - he’s obviously been well trained.

Once temple-fatigue set in we visited the Land Mine Museum, a couple of tin shacks in a remote location run by a larger-than-life character who is in constant conflict with the government, the army, the tourist board and international mine clearing organisations, who laid mines in his younger years and who these days spends a week a month clearing mines. It was an interesting place with disabled mine victims conducting ‘tours’, which really means a hands-on look at various types of mine with different degrees of lethality. There were lots of interesting newspaper cuttings posted up with plenty on current efforts to outlaw landmines, predictably slating America even though China and Russia still have millions of them and America has agreed to make their mines self-destroying and detectable, negating the main arguments against mines. Also, Ed remembers someone speculating many years ago that the unrelated problems of 13 million unexploded landmines in Cambodia and 13 million BSE-infected cows could be solved by shipping the cows to Cambodia and letting the problems cancel each other out, as it were.

For lunch we had one of the best meals of the trip so far, on helpfully and accurately named Bar Street. Asian food has been great when we’ve been able to tell what it is, and Cambodia seems to improve further on its neighbours no doubt as a result of the French influence. Amok and Khmer are words to look for in London’s fusion restaurants we reckon.

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