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Published: January 19th 2010
I don't know how I'm supposed to write a blog with Todd watching this Cambodian TV channel. There's no way to know for sure what the heck is going on but it's fun to guess as totally inexplicable scenes are interjected with seemingly random musical interludes. It's dizzying.
What a great day! We followed up an amazing breakfast with a walk around the corner of our guesthouse onto the busy main drag of Siem Reap. We decided to rent bikes for a ride down towards Tonle Sap lake while the temps were still cool. We stopped into a shop and borrowed bikes for a dollar each and pointed them into the street. I must say that the traffic here is a fascinating thing. Siem Reap is not a big city, certainly bigger than Cortez but it's no Bangkok. But to see everything from 4 year olds on full sized bikes, to motorbikes with 2 adults and four kids on them, tuk tuks, cars and full-sized tour buses share the same 2 lane
road, all at different speeds and with no aggression, no displays of anger, no apparent rules of the road...it's really an admirable thing of beauty.
We rode for about an hour south towards the lake passing from busy city streets quickly onto a quieter section that passed a crazy collection of shacks on stilts and brand new mansions. The road follows the Siem Reap river, a rather stagnant, brown thing that desperately needs a year's worth of River Clean-Up days. A good illustration of why one should not drink the water under any circumstances. All along the road are little 'gas stations' which consist of racks of old Johnny Walker bottles filled with gasoline, little eateries, peoples' homes, orphanages, schools, catatonic dogs, cute little kids yelling 'hello!' and the craziest longest legged chickens ever. A more difficult element to describe are the smells one encounters while wheeling down said road. Independently you might smell the thick diesel fumes, wood smoke fires, rotting fish, raw sewage, dead animal and cooking ginger. But along certain pieces of road all of these smells combined in a synergistic frenzy to create a wall of sensory overload. I mean WOW. No way to describe
it. Luckily, like a plane coming out of a cloud you emerge from the other side not too worse for wear.
But I'm making this out to be an unpleasant ride. It was wonderful! It wasn't too hot (probably in the low 80s, the humidity was (relatively) low, it felt great to be moving around and exploring, to get a good glimpse of real life in this tourist town...
I had my first encounter with the Cambodian police. As I was riding along a man on a black scooter came alongside me and asked me to pull over, that he was a policeman. I wasn't too concerned but very curious as to what he could possibly want with me. The fact that he was in civilian clothes added to the intrigue but the POLICE stenciled on the black scooter helped a bit. In broken but respectable English he told me to wrap the strap of my bag around the handlebars of the bike, showed me how and then with a big smile, wave and 'don't forget' he was off again. It took me longer than it should have to realize he was trying to prevent someone from riding
next to me and swiping the bag. It's not a bad approach to prevent crime before it happens, educate the visitors, keep the reputation of a place in high standing. What a nice guy.
We rode back to town hungry and sunburned and met up with our tuk tuk driver S'na who took us to a restaurant specializing in Khmer style food. We tried the Khmer Curry and Amok both of which were spectacular. Khmer curry is very similar to Thai curry - the spices are a bit different but it is also coconut milk based. S'na then took us to an artisan colony where we could see how stone, wood and metalic art is created. Similar to the intricate carvings in the temples, the stone artisans craftsmanship was truly amazing. From there we went to the Old Market. Think of it as Walmart, Cambodian style and way cooler. From the street it appears to just be deep shops selling spices, backpacks, shoes, clothing...but as you peer deeper into the shop you realize that the outer shops are merely gateways into the inner market. You push past vendors selling scarves, jewelry, bags, into the produce section selling every fruit
and vegetable you can think of (and a few you can't since they're so unusual) and finally into the meat area where hundreds of chickens are plucked and ready to be eaten, feet still on them. The atmosphere in the middle of the market is a bit stifling, a bit dark and definitely has its share of rich and unusual smells. If you watch Amazing Race you'll remember the teams in one of the recent years had to go find a scarf at a specific vendor in one of these markets...I can now sympathize with the task as there are hundreds of scarf vendors in each market. But this is where everyone buys everything they need, truly a one-stop shopping experience.
Now it was time to go purchase our temple passes so we hopped in the tuk tuk and headed out of town to the pass office and then beyond to enjoy a sunset meal on the edge of one of the reservoirs built as a moat around Angkor Wat. It was nice to finally catch a glimpse of this storied set of ruins and in a few hours (it's about 4am) we'll be off to start exploring them.
My brother's 7th grade class had a few questions so let me see if I can answer them adequately. The currency used here, believe it or not, is the US dollar. This poor country has been through so much in the past 40 years I think it's safe to say they're in a regrouping mode; we were commenting yesterday that it's actually brilliant to use another country's currency...nothing to print or monitor in that case. The ATMs spit out US dollars. Our hotel room is a bit of a splurge - a very very nice room in a guesthouse is running us about $40. It feels like a lot of money from the Cambodian point of view but the rooms in town run anywhere from about $5 to over $1000. Just depends on what you're looking for. Siem Reap is a city growing very quickly as Cambodia recovers from past conflicts and wars - there are still many many areas where you are warned to stay on the established path because land mines have not yet been cleared. During the Khmer Rouge reign which started in 1975 (I'll leave it to you to wiki for specifics) up to a
quarter of their population perished, teachers, intellectuals and certain ethnic and religious minorities targeted. People were pushed out from the cities into the countryside where the land, the animals that worked it and the infrastructure were all in shambles following the Vietnam war. Many starved to death. This recent history is what the current Cambodia is trying to rise from. Siem Reap is becoming a popular tourist destination because of its proximity to the vast Angkor civilization ruins - think of it as a town on the outskirts of an American national park. It is the largest religious monument in the world, Angkor, and during its heyday (1100 to1400) about was home to up to 750,000 people.
Hopefully I'm getting some of the details right. But back to the class's questions. The kids here wear uniforms to school, blue pants and skirts and white button down short sleeved shirts. Many of them ride bikes around, often with two or three siblings somehow also clinging to the bikes. Sometimes you will see an entire family riding around on a scooter - Mom, Dad and as many as four kids. We saw one woman today driving a scooter with what looked
like a 6 month old baby in one hand. I'm pretty sure there aren't too many child seats in Cambodia. Many of the kids are shoeless or have ill-fitting flipflops. Their homes are very simple, often with hammocks to sleep in and not much else. We saw several kids steering cattle down the road when they should have been in school - I would be curious to know what percentage of kids are attending school. Many families live on the very edge of existence and count on their children to contribute and help out - school often takes them away from the daily chores that keep some families in food and water. I was happy to see so many kids in uniforms - education is so important and to me it was a sign that, at least for these lucky kids, the future was not yet written.
You would find the sanitation here to be very different from home. There is a respectable amount of garbage along the roadsides and the river was choked with it. Roadside clean-ups only get organized when everything else is running smoothly in a country. But that is no different than many developing countries...
the main road to the lake
cows going down the road Montezuma County styleI'll have to stay on the look out for pictures of things that will represent some of the cultural differences, like the fried tarantulas sold on street carts. Really it's a beautiful place full of friendly, hard working people just trying to get by.
We'll take a bunch more pictures today and I'll try to fill in a few blanks but for now I should try to get another hour or two of sleep. Hope some of this makes sense as I started it last night when I was completely exhausted and now finishing it in the wee hours of the morning. And I HATE proofreading. And YES Jeff's class, I DO like beer and have a bit of a swearing problem. I'm trying my best to keep it clean, people. 😊
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more questions
Ok, here with another one of my classes with more questions for you (6th graders... they're not even close to being as smart as 7th graders- they're dum): Wildlife? Any big animals? Weird animals? Strangest food you've eaten? Are you going to try a fried trantula? How are you able to post these blogs? What's technology like over there? Where are most of the tourist from? Europe? America? Antarctica? Do the majority of Cambodians speak English? What's their native language? Do you go inside the floating school?