One year anniversary in Siem Reap

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Monday 01/06/2009

To celebrate one year since we met each other in an Adelaide night club, Andy and I went to the Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospital in Siem Reap to donate Blood. As I said in a previous blog, it was a very good experience, one I can only recommend to anyone physically able to donate blood.

Earlier in the day we had visited the National Angkor Museum. We had both been super impressed by the presentations as well as each of the gallery halls interior design. We where suffering from an overdose of information and thus needed every new bit of info to be served to us in a different manner. Angkor Museum truly succeeded in that. One of its many galleries was, naturally, dedicated to Angkor Wat - with a miniature to scale of the original in the centre of it. A large screen lit up and the lights dimmed as we walked into the gallery. We sat down and were moved by the short film. As it ended, the screen gradually faded out and the miniature suddenly illuminated. We had goose bumps! It was the most successful museum I have visited in a long time, in terms of capturing people’s interest.

We spent our afternoon relaxing, lazily bumming around and doing some packing. That evening we made a delightful discovery quite by chance.

We had wanted to go and watch the short film on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge that was being screened at a nearby night market. We arrived at a beautiful market, made of bamboo hutments, with grassed areas and small man made rivers flowing through. We entered the small cinema and watched the atrocious documentation of the suffering that Pol Pot’s regime had caused in such a short period of time. Within three years of rule, the Khmer Rouge had managed genocide of its own people. The Cambodian’s suffering has not ended yet. To this day there are over 6 million landmines that have not been de-activated in the country. It is not uncommon to see people with their limbs missing. Many of them try to make a decent living by selling books or playing traditional Khmer music under the trees at Angkor or in markets like this one.

We spend an hour or so wandering around the little market and even enjoying a nice foot massage followed by a pint of Angkor Beer and a coconut Mojito. We ended up in the adjacent street market, with all kinds of goodness being cooked up in woks. We stopped for some yellow fried noodles, before getting a tuk tuk back to our guesthouse.

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