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Published: October 25th 2007
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Siem Reap_monk
I'm a morning person, so about 5:30 every mornig I'd wake up and go upstairs to the outdoor patio to watch Siem Reap come to life. Diagonaly across the street from the hotel was the Siem Reap Gendarmerie. Ever morning at 5:40 one of the supvisors would blow the first whistle, 5 minutes later the 2nd whistle would blow and the gendarmes would straggle out to do the daily cleanup of the grounds. Also several Buddhist monks would walk by daily on their way to a nearby temple.
Today was a travel day. We had hired Loy Bun Seak as our driver for the Siem Reap area and to drive us to Phnom Penh. Talk about a smart idea! Bun Seak has a very nice (and wonderfully air conditioned) Mercedes passenger van. He is extrememly knowledgeable of both Siem Reap & Phnom Penh, super nice, and we couldn't recommend him highly enough if you ever go to Cambodia! (Even though he doesn't think so, his English is really very good.)
Bun Seak and his wife Peni picked us up at our Hotel in Siem Reap at 8 AM for the drive to Phnom Penh. Talk about a real view into the Cambodian countryside! Immediately on the outskirts of Siem Reap we were surrounded by rice fields as far as the eye could see. These apparently belonged to folks who lived in Siem Reap as there weren't many houses along the road at that point.The further south we drove toward Kampong Thom the more roadside housing started appearing. Most country houses are built on stilts as the land beneath them is under at least several inches of water in the monsoon season. Almost all homes have what looked to
Siem Reap_schoolkids
Starting at a little before 6 AM schoolkids would start making their way to school by bicycle or moto. School doesn't start for at least an hour and a half but a lot of kids seemed to go early. You can also see some of the gendarmes sweeping the sidewalk of the precinct. The picture is a little fuzzy as they don't like to have thier pictures taken (especially when they are accepting bribes) so I had to be a little sneaky just to catch the kids. be standing water between them and the road. It turns out that this water was not just a few inches, but a few feet, deep and the residents raise their own fish in them.Many homes had wooden wheeled carts, brahamin cattle,and the further south we got water buffalo, in the front yards. Palm & banana trees were everywhere. Most homes were plain, numerous ones with wooden shutters painted a bright blue for decoration. (I only saw one home that had planted flowers around the front stops for decoration.) A few homes were new and very solidly built, apparently by folks who have been able to acumulate some money.
The wild and wacky driving (by American standards anyway) continued on this 2 lane national highway. If you want to pass someone, or something, you honk your horn and just pull into the left lane (providing the oncoming traffic has at least a few seconds to swerve over to avoid you). What's really fun is barrelling along at 60 KM per hour and trying to decide if the cattle, (or worse, the water buffalo), alongside the road in front of you will decide to cross the street unexpectedly. Thankfully we didn't
Boy & water buffalo
The water buffalo seem to be very docile, this young man was barely bigger than the one he is leading. have any close calls.
The trip took about 4 hours. About an hour north of Phnom Penh the fields became more and more flooded as we entered the Mekong River's floodplain. At this point many people were using boats to fish. Prior to that, those we saw fishing were using nets, either by standing in the water or on the banks of ponds or rivers.
There are no buses for the poorer people to use to travel, instead 12 passenger Korean vans are loaded with as many people as they can cram inside, with all of the passengers' possesions hanging out of the back of the van, and then people pay to sit on top of the van. Obviously an accident with this type of arrangement has fatalities as a matter of fact. We were told that when they get too full on top they will even rent the space on the hood opposite the driver, we didn't see that but did see numerous vans with the folks sitting on top. Kendal said that he calls these "vans that steal people's souls". (I don't know if that is a local term or he just made it up.)
Buffalo power
I have no idea what their top speed is........ We stopped in Skuon and were going to sample some fried spiders, but were told that due to the still high water lever the spiders aren't available yet. I'm not sure whether I was relieved or not. (Seriously, they really do fry tarantulas and eat them, try typing 'fried spiders' in to Google and see what comes up!).
Once we got to Phnom Penh we had to kill some time before we could check into our hotel so we went shopping at the Central Market and the Russian Market (no they weren't selling Russians, it is just named for the street it's on). Either place is a huge, hot, narrow maze. Fortunately Kendal could keep his bearings, otherwise we'd still be trying to find our way out. We wandered throught the center section of the Central Market which is their version of a food court. I've never seen a better representation of Dantes' Inferno.......
One last thing, my poor camera skills really suffered badly with my sitting at the back of the van and trying to take pictures as we zipped along at 60KMH. I took a lot of pictures, but a higher percentage than normal were flops.
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