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Published: March 5th 2009
Well, we are finding it very hard to leave Siem Reap. I think we are really in ‘relax mode’ which I must say is a nice place to be, but as I have started to wear my pyjamas along the road to get our morning coffee it must be time to break the spell and head to Battmebang. Also the waitress at the Khmer Kitchen has started to teach the kids how to make a margarita, another sign I think!
We are still spending lots of time poolside, café side and tuk tuk side. We are all enjoying the pool, especially as we don’t know when we will get to do this again, (although upon hearing this news Grace promptly set about finding the only hotel with a pool in Battambang).
We continue to practice our Khmer and can now count up to five and are heading up to ten, not so hard as it is five and one, five and two and so on. Luckily we will fit right in if we make a mistake or two after seeing ‘Scream Bled’ (scrambled) eggs on a menu and Totally ‘Gool’ printed all over some back packs
at the market.
There is never a dull moment here and Grace feels better now after she had been insisting that she had twice seen six people on a motorbike, we have now all seen it with our own eyes, sure enough two adults and four children. That even eclipses the Vietnamese!!
We are continuing to enjoy our love affair with the food here. We tried out pizza at the Happy Herb Pizza Restaurant the other day which was delicious., although after witnessing the effects of ‘medium happy’ if you are asked how ‘happy’ you would like your pizza it might be best to say just ‘mildly happy’ rather than ‘as happy as a cat with two tails‘.
We also did a cooking class this week which was great fun, we started by going to the market which was great as we had two Khmer girls with us and they could tell us what things were, like the meat that we thought was liver is actually a ball of congealed chicken blood, very tasty in rice apparently. We managed to side step the live fish flapping around the market paths and didn’t get hooked by any of
the chicken feet poking out of the stalls.
We cooked four dishes; a chicken soup, fish amok, ginger chicken, and chicken with yellow noodles. The kids got to do heaps of the preparation and no fingers were harmed in the making of the dishes. It was very tasty and the Khmer make it all seem so effortless.
The girls and I also found time (lucky we had a bit of it) to visit Angkor Children’s Hospital. The tuk tuk dropped the boys near town and the girls and I at the hospital, it just turned out that we were at the wrong hospital. Lucky our future little girl guide Olivia had brought a map and we realized that we only had to walk about fifteen blocks in the heat of the day to end up three blocks away from where we had dropped the boys to be at the right hospital.
We visited the ‘Angkor Hospital for Children’ Visitor Centre, watched the DVD and looked around the gallery. The hospital was built in 1999 after a photographer Kenro Izu who I believe is American, visited Angkor Wat to take photographs and was so moved by the plight
of the children that he established “Friends Without A Border” which then built and funded the hospital. As one in seven children here dies before the age of five it is a much needed resource for the community. The focus is not only on the hospital (which sees up to 350 children on its steps each day) but also community visits, especially for HIV patients, and education for health professionals to develop quality health care providers for children in other provinces throughout Cambodia.
The Visitors Centre is great, a new eco friendly building (designed pro bono by an architect from New York) on hospital grounds which has art by patients as well as a changing exhibition and items for sale by donation, also some displays on statistics and case studies. Definitely worth a visit if not purely to remind us how lucky we are in the ‘first world‘. Donations help enormously though and the website is: www.fwab.org
It is amazingly inspiring to see how one person’s vision has become a reality.
Yesterday we took the tuk tuk with our driver Paul (one of the drivers that took us to the temples) to visit the Tonle Sap Lake, it
is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia which provides fish and water to much of Cambodia. It is connected to the Mekong by the Tonle Sap river at Phnom Penh. The lake is a natural phenomenon as during the wet season the river current actually changes direction (due to the rising levels of the Mekong River) and flows upstream flooding the area around the lake and increasing it‘s size several fold.
The ride out to the lake was fabulous, past lotus flower farms, water buffalo and amazing homes (some extremely primitive and some Cambodian ‘Vogue Living‘ style).The only problem was that no-one had told us that the lake had moved! We are here in the midst of the dry season and when we got near the lake edge we were stopped and told that due to this we would have to take a boat along the river out to the lake all for $20US per adult.
We decided against this and although disappointed not to see the lake we decided to drive back to town, stopping on the way to take photos of the ‘morning glory’ lotus flowers by the roadside. While we took photos Paul
went off through the bushes down to the water to the lotus flower farm where he bought some lotus flowers for the children and showed them how to eat the seeds (they taste like a sweet raw broad bean), the kids thought this was great and ate them all the way back to Siem Reap then played ‘fishing‘ over the side of the tuk tuk with the stalks, so just when we think things aren’t going our way we are surprised by something else!
We decided to visit the War Museum in Siem Reap as the children have had lots of questions about landmines (especially Finn) who has found it difficult to connect a ‘landmine’ with what has happened to the people affected by them whom we meet on the streets. Predominantly these people have amputations and blindness. We were met by a guide offering his services to us. We have not really used guides this trip as we think it may be a bit difficult at times with the children’s concentration span, the subject matter and the heat but he spoke great English and understood that we may have to ‘bail out’ half way through. We were so
glad that we took his offer when we could so easily have said no.
Having this man guide us through gave us the opportunity to look around the outdoor museum and view the tanks, air craft, artillery and landmines, and hear the history from a very personal experience.
His experience was amazing, he was forty four and had lived as a child through the Khmer Rouge regime and then at fourteen became a soldier when the Vietnamese took over and continued to fight the remaining Khmer Rouge. At the beginning of the tour he told us ‘some people, they call me the cat-man, you uknow a cat-man? You know a cat have nine lives, I have more than that’.
This man had been wounded by five landmines, shot three times, injured by a hand grenade and caught tetanus. This may all seem unbelievable except that we were all invited to feel the nail and ball bearings that remain implanted in his body, see the scar on his abdomen, look at the piece of bone that he says is implanted within in his eye and feel his false leg. He then told us that he was treated in
hospital after he lost most of his vision in both eyes and was being transported by ambulance when he was told by the ambulance officers to escape who were concerned for his fate. He then lived for two years as a beggar before ending up in a Thai refugee camp where the Red Cross arranged for treatment for his eyes, restoring some sight in one eye. His work and marriage prospects have been poor because of his physical disabilities but mostly he says because of his symptoms of tetanus. While I write this it seems so unbelievable but at the time the sincerity and history of this man seemed so valid and moving we have no notion that it is anything but truthful.
Our kids have really enjoyed playing with the children who sell post cards and bracelets on the streets and are quite upset that they will have to leave them. We resisted buying from them or buying for them, despite their requests for food (although one day I relented and was about to take them to the market when a policeman turned up in the alley and they scattered into the darkness).
Our children look out for
the kids and vice versa and they play hand claps and talk to each other.
We walked around town on the weekend and the kids from the street saw our children across the river and ran over the bridge to see us, within seconds there were nineteen kids surrounding us with their cheeky smiles. For us it has been best to offer these children a bit of interest and time and encourage them to be in school rather than give them money or food.
Having said that it is so hard seeing these little people on the street as well as the beggars and land mine victims, they have such a hard life but in the main they are friendly and always offer a smile or a bit of a chat. Some people come right up to you and just stand, hands out which happened to Mac and Mitchy the other day, apparently a lady stood for some time until Mackie turned to her and said ‘I have no money’ (upon which Mitchy gave him some for her).
Other people come up with ingenious ways of making a living, like the street performer that has been in
Siem Reap this week. He is a tiny, muscular man, who does magic tricks and as a finale jumps through a home made ring of knives with a burning poker on it, over broken bottles and then does a backflip all while still wearing his thongs! Never a dull moment…
We made a brief visit to the Sofitel Hotel (run by Accor who Mitchy used to work for). It is pretty spectacular and although I really believe that the cheaper the accommodation the more authentic your travel experience I also would say ‘who needs authentic all the time‘? There are lots of high end hotels here (with high end prices) that would definitely give you a relaxing, quality experience. Most of these hotels have spas offering massage and spa treatments. I have taken advantage of the massage service at the Freedom Hotel which was great, but be aware that the Khmer massage although very good is a lot more robust than other forms and expect a pummel and a thwack just as you start too relax!
It was always going to be an interesting experience when Mitchy decided this week that he needed a haircut. He decided
against the ‘New Zealand Haircut Shop‘, run by a shearer from Wanganui (okay that was a lie but the shop does exist!) and instead went for the ‘Cambodian Falling Down, Rickety Tin lean-to, with a Dirt Floor, $2, Haircut Shop‘. He gathered a bit of an audience for this, including the five of us and three Cambodian blokes who rolled up for a ‘butchers hook’. (Meanwhile outside a six(ish) year old boy played marbles across the traffic. I did think he was a bit of an ungrateful little bloke when I waited for the cars to pass and went and retrieved one of his marbles from the gutter across the other side of the road, but then realized that was part of his game!)
Anyway all went well until the end of the haircut when the hairdresser gave Mitchy a bit of a back rub and some Khmer pummeling across the shoulders, finishing off with a very robust yank on each ear!! There was a loud Aaaaah from Mitchy at this point and he looked a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights but says he hasn’t heard so well in years.
More from Battembang, if we ever
leave Siem Reap!
Oh, and as for the pig….
Tourist Tid Bits
Pick up the Siem Reap Visitors Guide for some comprehensive information
Hotel We stayed at the Freedom Hotel on highway six, a few minutes out of town by tuk tuk and a $3 or less trip depending how many people and how much energy you have to haggle.
The hotel is clean and has a great freshwater pool, internet in the foyer and restaurant.
We had two connected rooms to begin with for $45***** a night but then down sized to a triple for $25 a night.
Food Heaps of choice in all types of food, here are the ones we tried:
Khmer Kitchen in the Alley (say hello to Ara!)
The Khmer Family Restaurant in Pub Street (yes, this is the real name of the street)
The Red Piano, Pub Street
The Angkor Palm just off Pub Street
Butterflies, on the other side of the river
The Singing Tree (not far from Butterflies, very laid back, vegetarian and seafood, yoga classes, free wi-fi internet)
Happy Herb Pizza, delicious but see above warning
Supermarkets All supermarkets
tend to be quite pricey
‘101’ (24/7) a few doors down from the freedom Hotel (gorgeous staff)
Lucky Mall Supermarket and Shopping Centre a few blocks from the town centre
Market five minutes walk heading away from town from the Freedom Hotel
Laundry Keep your eyes open and you will see it for $1 a kilogram with a 24 hour turn a round
Activities War Museum: ten minutes by tuk tuk out of the centre of town and definitely worth a visit and a guide $3 entry per adult plus a donation suggested
Tonle Sap Lake: several activities/sights including a floating village Chong Kneas and bird sanctuary, just check if you need to take a boat to the lake
Angkor Hospital for Children: right near central market
Temples, temples and more temples
The Night Market, sit back relax and let the fish nibble your toes
The rest of the time, eat, drink and be merry!
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Leonard
non-member comment
This is the most wonderful travel blog
It is a great pleasure reading your entertaining and informative stories! Sounds like the trip so far is everything you had hoped it would be and more. You really seem to have very special kids. Look forward to following your adventures! Be well all.