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Published: March 5th 2007
South gate entrance to Angkor Thom
The Angkor Thom tug-of-war team were a bit unnerving for the opposition!19th January - 3rd February 2007
What a journey!! We took the ferry in Thailand from Koh Tao to Chumpon, 4 hours, before catching the night train to Bangkok, another 10 ish hours. From Bangkok we took another train to Aranya Prathet, another 6 hours!! From here we then took a tuk-tuk to Poipet, only 5 minutes to the Cambodian Border. After walking for half an hour down the road in Cambodia in the heat and dust with rucsacs that are getting heavier by the day!, we finally arranged to share a taxi with a retired Swedish couple to Siem Reap, only 4 hours, but along perhaps the worst road in Asia!
Apparently, an unnamed local airline are paying the Cambodian Government to not repair this 'road' which at the best can only be described as a dirt track! This is to keep tourists flying between Bangkok and Siem Reap rather than being totally mad and doing the crossing overland! We could see why!
We finally arrived in Siem Reap the evening of Saturday 20th February. We were dropped off in a local bar (hurrah!) and the bar staff gave us the details of an Australian run guest
Bayon Temple
The stone masons in the Bayon era were skilled at creating monstrous creatures from single slabs of stone! house which we duly checked into. Comfy bed, hot water and air conditioning after weeks of cold water 'showers' in Thailand! hurrahh!
Sunday 21st January - Friday 26th January
We spent most of this time visiting the breathtaking UNESCO world heritage site of Angkok Wat!! There are literally hundreds of temples, monuments, lakes and even riverbed carvings covering a huge area just outside Siem Reap. We took a tuk-tuk, complete with a local guide from the hotel (unfortunataly all the guides from the hotel had developed an Australian accent from the owner!) and toured the main sites, (including the tree made famous in the first Tomb Raider film!) as well as taking time to travel further afield to some of the less visited sites. (This had the added bonus of helping us avoid the bus loads of noisy, rude and ignorent Korean tour groups who seemed to appear from behind every carved edifice!)
A fantastic few days but, as we were a bit templed out after a few days, we spent another two days relaxing in the town!!
One of the most memorable places we visited during our time in Siem Reap was the landmine museum.
This museum was set up by Aki Ra, a former government soldier who had fought against the Khmer Rouge. Both his parents had been killed by the Khmer Rouge during the Killing Fields genocide.
He was forced to join the Khmer Rouge and was trained to lay landmines, make boobie traps and fire rocket propelled granades, having fired his first gun aged about 10!
His village was freed by the Vietnamese army and he was given the option of changing sides or being killed!
He stayed fighting the Khmer Rouge until 1993 when he began working for the United Nations helping to clear some of the 3 - 6 million mines which had been laid by various fighting forces in Cambodia over the years.
He decided to open the museum as he had collected so many items of militaria. Hundreds of deactivated mines, bombs and other munitions cover the site of the museum, as well as photos and examples of the damage such weapons can cause. There are several children who live and work in the museum who are the victims of landmines. There have been some 27,000 victims of landmines in the Battambang province alone
Terrace of Elephants, Angkor Complex
Dee gets to grips with some 'trunky' Angkor stone work! and this figure is rising daily. We heard that a team of 7 landmine clearance workers had been killed in the area the day before we visited the museum.
Neither of us truely knew the situation with regards to landmines in Cambodia before this visit. A very sad story but full of hope.
Anyway, back to more happy times! We also visited a silk farm, just outside Siem Reap (where I agreed to eat a silkworm lavae, yummy yum not!) and we managed to squeeze in some lovely cakes and other pastried products in the town, much more our kind of sustinance!
26th - 31st January
On 26th we said farewell to Siem Reap and took a river ferry along the Stung Sang river to Battambang town. We had been told the journey would take about 4-6 hours and this 'about' proved to be around 9! However, whilst we had sore backsides from sitting on the roof of the boat all the way, the scenary and people we passed by made it definately worth the pain! As well as the fantastic countryside, we passed though numerous floating villages with some great scenes of rural Cambodian life,
kids jumping off trees into the water, huge fishing nets on bamboo frames being dropped and raised from the water and all manor of other daily rituals and tasks.
We eventually arrived into Battambang and checked into a lonely planet recommended hotel. Not sure when the lonely planet had last visited (perhaps when the country was still part of French Indochina!) but we didn't find the accomodation 'pleasant, clean and friendly' as expected! Oh well!
In the evening we booked onto a cooking course for the next day at the restaurant where we had dinner, 'the smoking pot'!
The cooking course was quite an experience! We were taken to the local market to buy the produce
The cooking course was quite an experience! We were taken to the local market to buy the produce including all the fresh vegetables, herbs as well as some live serpent head fish which were skillfully dispatched with a rather rusty knife and a few sharp bangs on the pavement!! There were all sorts of other produce at the market including frog skins stuffed with couscous, deep fried bugs and grubs, whole skinned birds, various smelly dried fish and all sorts
Buddhist Monks, Angkor Wat
"And it took me weeks to decide what colour wear today. Typical!" of rather unpleasant looking food stuffs we were glad we weren't going to be using!!
We went back to the restaurant and prepared three dishes ourselves, including making curry paste, which was a job in itself! We made an chicken amok curry, with strained fresh coconut flesh for the milk, we made stir fired chicken with basil and chili, including 7 cloves of garlic and 5 chillies per person! Finally we prepared a fish soup with the recently deceased serpent head fish! Afterwards we all ate our own concoctions and honestly all in all, they all tasted surprisingly good, which will come as a major shock to most of you I realise!! Amazingly enough, no stomach ache or need for hospital treatment!!
The afternoon was spent strolling in the sunshine on the river bank, still waiting for any ill signs from the cooking course! We headed to an old colonial style bar overlooking the river for a few sun downers before heading back to the hotel.
The next day from a written guide to the Battambang province, we learnt of a family home stay which could be arranged through a local moto driver (a moped taxi driver
The infamous tomb raider tree!!
Plus the infamous beer raider himself! called Sambath). We headed to the hotel and discovered that the home-stay would be for two days staying with Sambath's auntie and uncle in a rural village some way out of Battambang. He and his cousin would take us out in the day time to see various sights, temples, monuments and to see local people in their day to day activities. We agreed and arranged to head out the next morning.
The rest of the day was spent buying some gifts for the family we were going to be staying with, balloons for the local children and some essential; chocolate rations for us!!
The next morning after breakfast we met Sambath and his cousin, and rucksacks firmly strapped on, holding on tight he headed off on the back of the mopeds!! It took about an hour to reach the village for the home-stay along some good (and some not very good roads!!) We got to the village via some tiny dirt paths, sometimes along river banks, sometimes along paddy fields sometimes over bridges which looked like props from an Indiana Jones film!
We finally arrived at the family house in tact and met most of the family,
Tree roots, Angkor complex
Something stirs in the undergrowth..... extended family and friends! It was quite an occasion for the locals and we found out that the last village home stay had been before the new year and they only ever had about 5 home-stays!
The family house was wooden and reed built, held u+p about 5 feet off the mud ground on wooden poles. This was to keep water, ants, rats and other unwanted guests out!! The bedroom however was great! Very basic but with a comfy bed, hole-less mosquito net and electric light (which was connected to an old moped battery!).
Once we had settled in, Sambath took us for a walk around the village, along the river and over a bamboo monkey bridge! The locals we met were genuinely so surprised to see white people they tended to just stop and stare, to run off or to start crying! It was quite an experience after having spent so long on the tourist trails.
During the home-stay we headed out on the mopeds to visit Wat Banan temple, Rumsay San cave mountain, where hundreds of people were pushed to their deaths in the Killing Cave during the Kamer Rouge occupation, and Phnom Sampeo. We
Tree roots, Angkor complex
The new pot plant thrived in the sunny corner by the neighbours wall! were also lucky enough to visit a fruit farm where we tried some rather cheeky fruit spirits, we watched a cock fight (not very nice!) visited a local family cutting their rice harvest, we visited a rice mill, watched an entire family help make the traditional rice noodles via a huge wooden frame and finally, the highlight, took a bamboo train ride!
A bamboo train is actually that! A small flat bamboo floor which is simply placed on top of two pairs of wheels, attached to a moped engine for power which then heads off down the countries main single railway track! When one bamboo train meets another bamboo train coming the other way, the one with the lightest load simply unloads all its cargo and people onto the side of the track, allows the other 'train' to pass, and is then rebuilt and sets off again! The same happens if the bamboo train meets a proper train (the bamboo trains use the main train lines!), it simply unloaded, taken to pieces and rebuilt when its clear! Great fun and luckily enough we were considered to be a weighty enough load to be given priority for our whole journey!
Dusty feet!!
After a day on our tuc-tuc! In the evenings we had dinner with the family around a wooden table beneath the house. There was some fantastic food and good company. The balloons we gave to the tens of local children who gathered round the house every morning and evening were very well received and some hours were spent playing, then crying when there was the inevitable 'pop' before a new, bigger balloon was produced and play could began again! We also had a great time writing every ones names in English, much to the delight of the locals!
After two days we said our goodbyes and headed back to Battambang town. We collected our bags and took the local bus for the 5 hour trip to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Phem. we checked into the Okay Guesthouse and headed out into the city.
1st February - 3rd February 2007
Phnom Penh, Cambodian Capital
It was a total change from the relative calm of Battambang being back in another major, noisy and traffic filled city! A world away from the rustic, gentle pace of life in the village home-stay! We had a lovely dinner though and had a few beers watching
the sunset over the Tonle Sap river.
We spent the next couple of days visiting the main sights of Phnom Penh. We went to the National Museum of Cambodia which contained some very impressive stone carvings of Hindu deities of the Angkor period, we visited the Royal Palace, throne hall and the silver pagoda; so called as the whole floor of the large building is made up of 5000 solid silver tiles!
One of the most harrowing visits we made was to the Tuol Sleng Museum. In 1975 Tuol Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot's security forces and was turned into prison S-21. It became the largest detention and torture centre in the country and between 1975 and the cities liberation by the Vietnamese troops, more than 17,000 people held at S-21 were tortured then exterminated. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records and photos of all the 'prisoners' who passed through the prison. There were thousands of these photos on display including those of men, women, children, the elderly and some western journalists.
During the most insane period of the Khmer Rouge's reign in early 1977, up to 100 people per day were being
Battambang Cooking class
Dee-lia getting down and dirty in the kitchen! tortured and killed at this centre.
The museum still has the inmates cells, the rows of metal shackles, instruments of torture, barb wire and other poignant reminders of the schools history on display. It was a shocking experience as could be seen on all the visitors faces.
In our final evening in Cambodia we headed down to the water front to make the most of the various happy hours we had seen advertised. Most of the happy ‘hours’ lasted from about 6pm - 10pm and we weren’t about to point out the obvious booboo to the bar staff!
We took a tuk tuk to Amok traditional music restaurant for our last Cambodian amok curry and took a moto back to the hotel.
3rd February 2007
Early 6:30am start to catch the bus to the boarder crossing with Vietnam. We are unloaded off the bus just before the boarder, walk to the boarder, pay about five different Cambodian ‘boarder officials’ a dollar each for we know not what, walk out the other side to the Vietnamese boarder, do the same again, pass out the other side and walk about a mile to another bus to take
us to Saigon, or Hoh Chi Minh City and the next leg of our journey!
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