Crossing into Cambodia

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I made the long bus journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap, crossing the border into Cambodia, along with a group that I'm now spending the next few weeks with. I'm sharing with Angela, a Canadian girl who works and lives in London. We're joined by Stephen, Megan, Joe and Pete from the UK, Angelique, Jen and Alison from Sydney, and Hans and Siri from Norway. Along with Rebecca and Helena from Denmark, Mandy and Stephanie from Germany and Justin from New York - so it's a pretty good mix of people, ranging from 18-29. We have enough in common to keep conversation always flowing and enough differences to make it always interesting.



Cambodia feels and looks different to Thailand, I guess it's less developed, more raw. Or maybe I just didn’t see that side of Thailand so much. One of the nights in Siem Reap we went for dinner at the New Hope restaurant, New Hope Cambodia is a charity near a slum village on the outskirts of the city. They have a big focus on education, providing a school, but they also enable families to put their children into education by providing a medical centre too, along with support through social workers and emergency relief. As well as offering classroom education, they also provide vocational training; one of the ways they do this is through their restaurant, which also then generates funding for the charity. I would recommend it to anyone who visits Siem Reap - the food is amazing. We had a 5 course dinner, which included an appetizer of fried crickets (i did not eat these!) and a desert of green beans in coconut milk and palm sugar (which was actually pretty tasty).



Whilst in Siem Reap we also visited the temples and, of course, the infamous Angkor Wat temple. We got up at 4:30am to see the sunrise over this 'wonder of the world' which was a breathtaking sight, but sadly we were joined by hundreds of other tourists (it was like the Next Boxing Day sale but with cameras and tripods). The temple is huge and the stone carvings are so detailed, it's mind bending to think how they built it in such an isolated place, all those years ago. In the afternoon we visited the temple nicknamed 'the tomb raider temple' after the film it featured in: It's surrounded by jungle and over the years trees have grown in and around it, even on top of it. We ended with the 'Smiling Faces' temple, but I have to admit there were more tired faces than smiling ones, as we were all a bit 'templed out' by that point. We went out for dinner and drinks on Siem Reaps 'Pub Street' (there is actually a sign in lights across the street) and sampled some Mekong Whisky (mainly because it was the cheapest drink at $1).



We also got a boat out into the floating village on the lake in Siem Reap, to one of the restaurants/cafes. It amazed me that they had floating churches, police stations and schools on the lake. I just couldn’t imagine how their communities live that way, but on the plus side if you don't like your neighbors moving house is easy. We watched the sunset over the lake, which was beautiful. But there was also quite a lot of poverty within the community around us, children were rowing around in what looked like metal bath tubs trying to sell things to arriving tourists and there were young girls in boats with their mothers, who had Pythons round their necks - making money by charging a dollar for a photo with them

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