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Published: April 22nd 2007
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Our bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap was along a rare and beautiful section of paved road. Siem Reap is the town found nearest to the Angkor Archaeological Park - a collection of temples and ruins built by the Khmer empire between the 9th - 13th century by successive kings each trying to out do the others. Angkor means ‘capital city’ and this is the capital city of an empire that ruled from Burma to Vietnam. Its quite impressive.
We'd arranged to meet David and Rebecca, who we’d travelled with through Laos, at a guesthouse called The Prince Mekong. It’s a nice guesthouse offering lots of free extras…bikes, laundry, breakfast etc, but was quite new and had yet to invest in air conditioned rooms meaning sleep was rare and fitfull. Erich the owner was super helpful in organising our time though.
Most people choose to view the temples on a tuk tuk but we thought we'd make use of the free bikes. So, we were up early at 4.30am for a quick breakfast and then a 7km cycle for a sun rise viewing of our first temple - Angkor Wat - which is supposed to be the
jewel in the crown.
We'd been reading articles on this temple since before we'd come away and so it had a lot to live up to. We were suitably impressed. There were approximately 4.6 million other people there, and our pictures look nothing like the pictures we'd seen in the travel magazines, but it was still amazing.
We spent the rest of the morning doing what is known as the small tour circuit - with a few extras attached thanks to the extra freedom our bikes gave us - taking in temples such as Phnom Bakhen, Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Keo & Ta Prohm. In all we cycled about 20km which considering the heat (39c) was a long long way.
David was unable to join us on the first day due to a bout of the now very familar travellers dodgy belly, so for the second day we ventured out as before, at the stupid hour of 4.30am for a sun rise viewing of Angkor Wat. We toyed with the idea of cycling the grand tour circuit but decided this was just too far in this heat. Instead we had a more indepth look at Angkor Thom
and Banteay Kdei before returning back to Siem Reap.
By now the lack of air-con was killing us, it was impossible to sleep in our room. So despite the fact that the Prince Mekong was a great place to stay, we decided we had to move the next day and find an air-conditioned guesthouse. We found the Hello Paradise just round the corner which had one of the nicest rooms we stayed in for a while. We were put in to room 101, probably at the request of the staff at the Prince Mekong. Almost immediately the building work began. Drilling, hammering......just our luck. Still, at least we had a place to escape the heat.
Paul, who loves his temples, convinced Vicki that we needed another days viewing. This time we opted for a tuk tuk though, and looked at some of the temples found on the grand tour circuit further afield. Thanks to the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia has only really opened up for tourists in the last 10 years, but in that time places like Siem Reap have seen a real tourist boom. There are squillions of people. On the grand circuit however it was still possible
to get away from it. Several temples we visited we had to ourselves.
So we spent a couple more days pottering around Siem Reap, finally plucking up the courage to catch a bus back to Bangkok. The section of road from Siem Reap to the border with Thailand is notoriously bad. Rumour has it that one of the major airlines is giving the Cambodian government a backhander to keep it that way too.
We were picked up at 6.30am. We arrived in Bangkok at 10.30pm. The distance covered was only 350km. Ridiculous. We had a 2 hour wait before the bus actually left. 5 minutes after leaving the bus broke down for over 1 hour. We then did the usual 100 stops at all the bus drivers mates restaurants and then it took 2 hours crossing the border. On the Thai side the road improved though and we enjoyed a relatively straight forward journey back to Bangkok, where we had left 6 weeks earlier.
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carmen
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Great Blog!
Thanks for sharing your adventure. I loved the pics and info you provided!