Siem Reap and Angkor

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Like many others, we had bought into the Euro-centric idea that in 1858, some European explorer had hacked his way through the jungle and "(re)discovered" the ruins of Angkor... which had been lost deep for centuries.

Well, we found out Angkor was never lost! But this lie is perpetuated in textbooks and websites to this day. How did this horrible untruth come about to be accepted in the West? We decided to do something about this nagging issue and looked into it. We wrote a special article on Henri Mouhot, the supposed "discoverer" of a place that was never lost and posted it at Wikipedia. (Due to open editing at Wikipedia, not always good editing, please refer to the Henri Mouhot Nov 7, 2006 edition of Zak's article)

Confusion at the Phnom Penh bus terminal
We bought our tickets 5 minutes before the bus was due to leave. And it was taking off from another part of town, not from outside our guest house! We might have thought the staff were trying to trick us into missing our only bus to Siem Reap and forcing us to stay another day, but it rally didn't seem like it: They quickly stacked our luggage on 2 motorcycles and drove us to the bus terminal.

We still can't figure out how things work there. No one of the staff we bought ou tickets from got on the phone to make any reservations, or book the seats, yes we just handed over the money and recieved some kind of written receipt that indicated we had indeed bought our tickets.

To read more, please see our new travel page -
www.soulent.com/zm2005
We've got pictures, useful travel tips and a guestbook there!

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