All good things must come to an end - so other good things can begin

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Just a warning, internet access is spotty enough in Siem Reap that I may not add photos until later. I will also add photos to previous entries eventually, so check those again later too if you're interested.)

Saturday, April 5 - We disembark

I must say, it was no fun to have to pack our suitcases Friday night and know that we would be leaving the boat, but all good things must come to an end, so pack we did. We spent the night tied up to shore not far from a small gathering of floating fish farms and right next to a monastery, from which we heard monks chanting first thing in the morning.

As before, the bank was steep and our diligent crew carved some steps out of the dirt, and then they threw our heavy suitcases up to their shoulders and toted them down the gangplank, up the bank and a few minutes walk to the waiting busses. I hated to see them working so hard, but as usual, they went about their work with smiles on their faces. We tipped generously - tips are collected at the end of the cruise and distributed among the staff, which made for no concerns over the week about how and whom to tip.

By 8:30, we had all made the same trek to the busses, first walking along a little stretch of pathway between two rows of houses, where the ubiquitous smiling children stood outside waving and occasionally posing for photos. We hit the road by 8:45, on the road for our 4 ½ hour trip to Siem Reap.

The drive was mostly uneventful, and despite my best efforts to stay awake and enjoy the scenery, my eyelids kept drifting closed. The scenery didn’t change a lot along the way, which made me feel less guilty about dozing.

We passed lots of countryside, mostly many dry rice paddies and some shrinking ponds full of ducks crowded into the green water that remained. There were plenty of skinny cows wandering about, and here and there massive grey water buffalo lumbered along the side of the road. From time to time we went through large villages with teeming marketplaces, all the typical vendors crowded into tightly packed stalls covered with awnings or thatched roofs.

Traffic on the road - which was sometimes gravel and sometimes paved - was fairly light most of the way. There were motorcycles, bicycles, occasional oxcarts, a few cars, minibuses, and a few other large tour buses like ours. There were also “Cambodian taxis,” mid-size pickup trucks with raised walls around the bed and awnings. Our guide explained that these taxis were like airlines, in that they have three classes: in First Class, you pay the most but you get to sit inside the cab with the driver; in Business Class, you pay a bit less and ride in the back with as many other people as they can cram in with you, and Economy Class will get you a seat on top of the cab in the open air. Plenty of fresh air up there, but no protection from the sun. (I should never complain about airline seats again.) The other unbelievable sight was the motorcycles with absolutely the most enormous loads we’ve seen yet. Some were carrying what appeared to be three or four large pieces of furniture, strapped together, piled high above the driver’s head and extending out both sides of the motorcycle making it at least as wide as a car.

The traffic rules are still a bit of a mystery to me. It seems that everyone is meant to drive on the right (though some of the cars that came from Thailand have their steering wheels on the right), but there is usually no center line painted on the road, and if it seems easier to drive on the left for some reason, people don’t hesitate to do so. Passing an oxcart with a full-size tour bus while three motorcycles and a Cambodian taxi are coming at you from the other direction? No problem - they’ll get out of the way; just give the horn a tap or two. Car in front of you going too slow and no chance to pass on the left due to oncoming traffic? Just pass in the ditch on the right.

We did make an interesting stop at a roadside market. The vendors here were selling a lot of fruit (pineapple, mango, bananas), cold drinks (Coca-Cola, water, Fanta in various flavors- lychee is good), boiled eggs (just your everyday variety, piled in deep baskets with a couple of samples on top split open to show the bright orange of the yolk), cigarettes, and a few unusual items: whole roasted ducks in a glorious orange hue, sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf or cooked inside bamboo, fried crickets, fried spiders, and what appeared to be small roasted frogs. The spider vendors also had a few live spiders - they resembled tarantulas, large and black and hairy. They’re just called “black spiders” as far as we could tell, and they are venomous, but when caught, their fangs are removed so they can't bite. When cooked, they shrivel to smaller, crispy, black, spider-shaped finger food that are reminiscent of those little matchstick-sized fried potato sticks you can buy at home. Though I think the potato sticks taste better. Despite Phali’s claim that the spiders “taste like chicken!” I would say they taste more like…well, like fried spiders. I could have used a little something to wash it down.

We pulled into the city of Siem Reap at about 1:00, after driving through a brief but torrential rainstorm, which is a bit unusual this early in the year. It did seem to alleviate some of the humidity and the weather definitely felt cooler when we got off the bus. Mom and I got a taxi to our little hotel/guesthouse, The Villa Siem Reap, where we have a “garden bungalow” room for $50/night. It is a large tiled room with all the amenities (a/c, satellite TV and DVD player, minibar, safe), set in the back of the hotel at the end of a little tiled path through some lush greenery. We have a little covered front patio with a table and two chairs, and we’re back from the street enough that noise doesn’t seem to be any problem. This is the first place we’ve been on this trip where we actually hear birds singing, though in the distance during the day, we can also hear the faint sounds of power saws and other construction noises - this town is under construction everywhere you look!

Statistics says that Siem Reap got about a million tourists in 2006, and that they expect to have 2.5 million tourists this year. Everywhere you look, the town is built around tourism. There are everything from five-star hotels on the edge of town, to shack-like little backpacker guesthouses downtown. There are art galleries and cheesy souvenir shops and street vendors and covered markets. There are restaurants, bakeries, bars, coffeehouses, ATMs, internet cafes (“75 cents per hour - fastest internet in Siem Reap,” they all claim), travel agencies, places to get a foot massage ($6 for 30 minutes) or a full Swedish massage ($12 for one hour) or Four Hands massage (“two ladies with experience.”) The dollar rules as the second. unofficial currency of Cambodia. ATMs dispense dollars, and change less than a dollar is dealt with in riel, at 4000 to the dollar.

There are cell phone shops about every 25 feet everywhere you go, but I haven’t seen a payphone anywhere. And there is food of every kind: street vendors making soup on the sidewalk, fast food, Indian food, Thai food, Khmer food, Italian food, French pastry, and Irish pub. Not far from our hotel, you can have dinner at Happy Special Pizza, but if that’s not good enough for you, walk another 30 feet further and go to Ecstatic Pizza!

The sidewalks make for an interesting obstacle course - where there are sidewalks at all. Perhaps the Khmer word for sidewalk also means “parking space”, because everyone from motorcycles to SUVs park right there. In some places, many motorcycles are parked in one area, completely blocking foot traffic, so you have no choice but to walk in the street - and then the tuktuks are often lined up along the curb so you’re forced to walk further out between the tuktuks and the moving traffic. The tuktuks drivers are often lounging in the passenger seats of their vehicles, halfheartedly calling, “Tuktuk, Madame? as we walk by.

Where the motorized vehicles don’t block your path, all the little business that are spilling out of the storefronts will keep you on your toes. Soft drink coolers, menu boards, chairs and tables, and children playing (presumably while their parents are working inside) all clutter the path and make for slow but very interesting walking.

We took a walk around “downtown” Siem Reap in the late afternoon, stopping at an internet café to check email. (Our hotel allegedly has free wifi, but I can’t get a connection on my laptop.) We decided to eat dinner at our hotel, which has a nice little covered dining patio that catches the breeze. An order of vegetable spring rolls, Thai Red Curry and a Chicken with Vegetables and Cashews set us back about $11, and we splurged and each had a couple of glasses of white wine for $2.50 each. We couldn’t even finish the food, but it was absolutely delicious.

After dinner, we were surprisingly tired, and mom was ready to call it a night. I couldn’t resist going out for a quick walk, and the town was still clearly hopping busy. The Central Market is a 2-minute walk from the hotel, and I strolled through there for a few minutes. Silk scarves, silk bags, silk pants, silk dresses - the riot of beautiful colors is astounding. The vendors were not as aggressive as some we’ve seen. As I walked by their stalls, they often just said hello, or beckoned me to come in. Stopping to look at anything for even a split second will bring them right to your side, smiling and pointing out the variety of colors or styles they have to offer. One woman came up to me while I was trying to glance sideways at her display of scarves: “How are you tonight, Madame? Are you happy?” I assured her that I was, and then asked, “And are you happy?” She replied, “Yes, but I will be much happier if you buy something from me!” And what do you know - she had a special price just for me!!! I’m always amazed how this happens to me all over the world. I don’t why I’m so lucky, but every where I go, I get offered, “Special price, just for you!” (That was humor, in case it’s not obvious. I’m not very good at conveying humor/irony in writing.)

After declining her special price, I headed back to our hotel. Just down the street from us is a big bar sort of place. It has walls except for the side that faces the street, which is completely open. Inside, on the back wall, are five big television screens of varying size, all playing something different. The one in the middle was playing a movie, and the others were showing soccer matches, or kickboxing matches, and what might have been soap operas. All the chairs in the place were lined up to face the screens, and a few people sat inside, drinking beer. Outside, a crowd of tuktuk drivers, little kids, guys in some kind of police/security uniform, and other people lined the street, squatting in the dirt or leaning on bikes, completely focused on the action on the screens. I’ll have to try to notice tomorrow whether Siem Reap is crowned with a forest of TV antennas, as every other town, city, or floating village has been.

Maybe one of these days in Siem Reap, we’ll turn on the TV in our room and see what’s available. I remember coming across a previous season of Survivor and a Zulu soap opera in South Africa, so who knows what we’ll find in Cambodia…?

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Photos

These little piggies go to market...
(Those are pigs in the baskets on the back of those motorcycles)