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Published: July 25th 2006
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I read in the guide book that Siem Reap means Siam (Thailand) defeated, which the author that was a pretty subtle name for a city so close to the Thai border. Cambodians are supposedly still sore at Thailand for having occupied their temples for 10 years back a couple of hundred years ago.
Yesterday morning we set our alarm for 4:30am so we could arrive in time to see the sunrise over the temple of Angkor Wat-the biggest and most famous. It has a huge moat in front so I got some pretty cool pictures of some bright patches of sunlight peeking through the clouds and reflecting over the temple and into the water. I went a little camera happy since each picture seemed better than the last as the sun crept up. We'd climbed up a hill to another temple the night before to try and catch the sunset the night before but it was all cloudy. Oh the perils of travelling in the rainy season.
So after catching the sunset at 6am, our tuk tuk driver/guide took us around to about 7 different temples until we could do it no longer around noon. We soon found out
Cambodian tourists
Angkor Wat, Siem Reip that our driver was really not a guide since he didn't offer any explanations and just napped in the tuk tuk while we went inside each temple. But luckily locals were selling an array of guidebooks for $6 each and we managed to get a really decent one that had ideas for walking tours of each temple. Most of the temples had something distinct about their architecture like beautiful carved stone reliefs that depicted some event in history, a Hindu legend, or event in Buddha's life. Another temple had these huge stone faces carved on pilars, and another one was the only temple that had been left virtually untouched and had these crazy trees growing inside the temple. That was the temple that Tomb Raider was filmed in. A lot of reconstruction was going on in the temples, especially since as recently as 1985 the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge were fighting in the actual temples. During one of the battles, the Khmer Rouge made these big pots of soup with lots of meat and vegetables and added poison. Then they ran away and hid. The Vietnamese were so elated that they had won the battle so easily that they
ate the soup to celebrate, got sick, and then the Khmer Rouge came back and killed them. I've had some pretty tasty soup here so I'm not that surprised 😊
Siem Reap is definitely a mixture of the haves and have nots side by side. The brand new airport we flew into was the most gorgeous airport I've ever seen-it was really like a fancy museum with black marble and modern art sculptures everywhere. The personnel was also dressed to the nines in full military dress. Clearly they're out to make an impression on visitors.
The town is full of new 5-star hotels everywhere you look. I hadn't made the connection that Cambodia has only been open to tourists for 12 or 15 years, but it's booming here. We've seen busloads upon busloads of Japanese and Chinese tourists which is a switch from Thailand and Laos. The first night we stayed in a guesthouse far from the center of town that was across the street from rows of bamboo shacks over a river. Now that we're in the center, every time we walk down the "tourist street" of restaurants groups of small raggedy children tug at us and
Angkor Wat
Hindu goddess beg for money.
Today I went to the Landmine Museum that was started by a Cambodian man who voluntarily defuses landmines throughout the countryside. The "museum" was only about 4 miles away from town down a bumpy dirt road into the countryside. When the driver stopped I wasn't sure that it was the right place til I saw a cloth sign protruding above some tarps proclaiming that it was the Landmine Museum. I walked under the tarps and there were piles and piles of defused landmines of different kinds lying on the ground in separate corners and spread throughout the area. On the walls, pamplets of information about the different kinds of landmines, the damage that landmines do to people all over the world (50,000/day are killed), info on the recent landmines treaty that all of the 1st world country except the U.S. signed, etc.
The Cambodian guy who started that place had a pretty amazing story. He's 27 or 28 now (he's not sure) and when he was 5 years old both of his parents were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. At 10 he was put in their army and given his first automatic weapon. In the
army he learned how to plant landmines (which costs roughly $5 vs. $500 to defuse a landmine). Later when the Vietnamese were fighting the Khmer Rouge, they captured him and he fought for their army against the Khmer Rouge. After the war was over, he made it his mission to defuse landmines in order to make his country safer and he can do 40 in one hour just using his sandal to feel around and his fingers. All of the landmines he defuses are kept in his museum to help spread awareness to foreigners about this big problem. The museum survives on donations alone, and the money that comes in goes towards the schooling and care of child victims of landmines that live there with he and his wife. I met a few of them that were helping in the museum. The girl that put the DVD into the player so we could watch a little film was really adept even though she just had two stubs instead of hands. Foreign volunteers that are touched by the museum sometimes stay and volunteer for awhile teaching English to the kids and acting as guides for the museum. One wall had the
Inside Angkor Wat
Historical battle scene story of each victim that he housed, and most of them also had found foreign donors who had promised to pay for their university education once they reached that age. The info also mentioned that Siem Reap was a unique place in Cambodia in that there are doctors with medicine and decent schools, and mentioned that an hour into the countryside would show a completely different place where the people have no medical care. I thought that was interesting since most all of the foreigners only come to Siem Reap and then leave without seeing anymore of Cambodia, so this is the only picture we will have of the country.
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