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Published: March 25th 2008
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It's a short flight from Saigon across to Cambodia and a whole new world. The main reason for coming this way was to go like the thousands of others and see the Temple Lara Croft made famous, well that and Angkor Wat. When you arrive at the airport you get in line with the rest of the plane to get your Cambodian visa, I'm sure the guy handing back the passports enjoys his job as he seemed to enjoy a little bit of banter with every female. From there you go outside to participate in that great Asian ritual of the touts. Fortunately it's a bit more organised here with the taxi counter sorting out who will be your driver and offering you the cheapest option, a motorbike into town for USD1. Apparently the helmet is an optional extra that not many people have taken up, so risking head injuries in a third world country off I went with my trusty driver. This is where the real negotiations start, you see they know you're here to see the temples and they know you'll need a driver, plus you're now a captive audience so let the hard sell begin. Oh well it
worked and that's how I found myself on the back of a scooter with the wind in my hair, cruising around the temples.
I was looking forward to seeing Angkor Wat after seeing the scale model of it at the Palace in Bangkok, but it turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax though. Sure it's huge, has incredible carvings (bas reliefs) and seems like it goes forever, but there's just something that didn't quite grab me about it, oh well. Some of the other temples impressed me more for different reasons, like the Bayon, East Mebon, Ta Phrom, Banteay Srei and Kbal Spean.
There's a couple of options to get an overview of how big Angkor Wat is, helicopter (USD140) or tethered balloon (USD15). I opted to spend the USD15 to go aloft to see Angkor Wat from the sky. Being tethered does not mean that it stays still!! This thing moves around a fair bit as it goes up in the air, so much so that one of the fellow balloonists decided that sitting on the floor and not looking over the side was a far better option than taking in the sites of Angkor
Wat.
The one piece of valuable advice I got prior to arriving here was get a hotel with a pool, essentially that is the only consideration that you need to have when looking for a hotel in Siem Reap. After a day of exploring the temples the pool is a very much welcomed oasis. A days exploration starts at 6am and finishes when you're completely over walking around in the hot sun looking at stylised piles of rocks with carvings. From then until dinner time it's pool time, it does take a while to soak out the Cambodian dust. Fortunately I've only got to keep up this unrelenting pace for three days. On my final temple day I managed to make it back to the hotel by 11.00am just before the heat became unbearable, it's all about the timing.
Having seen all these nice little trailers going around behind scooters I decided that for my great venture out of town to Banteay Srei and Kbal Spean that I'd have to let my scooter driver go and trade up. Definitely not the way to win friends and influence people, after a little bit of negotiation he worked out that
I would not be requiring his services again. But I'll give him top marks for persistence though. So began another round of negotiations with tuk drivers to negotiate a fair price to drive me around 100 kilometres over some of the finest dirt roads that Cambodia has to offer. Having the tuk turned out to be an excellent option and a marked improvement on the scooter, it's like a lounge chair on wheels, you feel like a king. The price difference was also minimal, due in part to my former scooter driver charging me a more than friendly rate (and he's probably still wondering why I had to let him go). As it turns out my tuk driver lives about seven kilometres out of town and has three kids under four years old. Like a lot of the tuk drivers he owns the scooter but not the tuk which he rents for around USD30 a month. Given the number of tuks around that are constantly asking you to use their services I'm surprised that these guys make money.
The Cambodian Riel is like a secondary currency to the US Dollar, for the tourists just about everything is paid for
in USD with the Riel being used as cents. So if something costs $2.50, you hand over your USD5 and get back USD2 plus a collection of Riel notes. I've managed to work out that 1 000 Riel is the same as 25 cents, so it just adds to the confusion, besides it's not really a holiday unless you have five different currencies in your wallet!
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