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Published: April 1st 2010
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March, 4th - March, 7th Just when I thought I was getting better I threw up in Simon’s face. Not my proudest moment I have to say. We were walking back to our delightful guesthouse when I came over all funny and felt like I was going to be sick. As I’m English and we don’t spew in the streets (unless it’s at the end of a night on the booze) I was reluctant to do this in public so put my hand over my mouth which of course sent chunks flying onto Simon.
Besides that little incident we had the most amazing time in Siem Reap. The Bun Kao Guesthouse was run by a lovely friendly family who were so helpful. The owner, Mr Bun Kao, used to be a social worker and gives tuk tuk driving work to his friend Dee who looks after 10 orphans as well as his own three children.
The city of Siem Reap has some amazing restaurants and bars and the food here was so good. We had a delicious pizza one night then tasty Spanish cuisine the next and sampled a Tomb Raider cocktail which was inspired by Angelina Jolie
when she was in town filming Tomb Raider.
Dee picked us up from the airport in his tuk tuk and was also our guide for three days of touring around the Angkor temples. He had only been driving his tuk tuk for three months having been a moto (motorbike) driver before then. It was so hot in Siem Reap and we were grateful for the breeze through the back of the tuk tuk after traipsing round temples. Travelling on the tuk tuk was fun if a little scary. Traffic in Cambodia is just as crazy as Bangkok so we were sharing the road with cars, vans, buses, bikes, motorbikes, pedestrians and with no apparent road rules it’s all a bit hair-raising.
It cost $80 for two three-day passes for us to look around the temples and we certainly packed a lot into our three days. The temples are all so impressive. The size of them is awe-inspiring and the detail on the engravings is fantastic. It is so hard to describe how unique they each are. Some have been overrun by the jungle and have huge trees growing through them (like the Tomb Raider temple Ta Prohm) while
others have the most intricate 3D images of huge faces (The Bayon has 216 faces). Considering the temples are around 900 years old it is mind-boggling to think about the process involved in constructing them. Apparently elephants were used to bring the massive stone slabs to the sites.
We saw sunset at Pra Rup along with hundreds of other people. The temples aren’t too crowded in the day but sunset and sunrise are peak times and it’s always a bit of a crush.
All the temples have rows of stalls selling food and drink and souvenirs and some of the vendors are very persistent. Especially the young ones. They start by asking where you’re from and when they hear England they either say ‘England, capital city London L-O-N-D-O-N’ like a little robot or start spouting off phrases like ‘luvvly jubbly’. They may be cute but can get quite irritating. It was quite entertaining to say we were from some random place though because they have no idea where Kazakhstan is so couldn’t tell us the capital. But they soon bounce back with ‘how long are you in Cambodia?’. Eventually they get bored and go and hassle someone else.
It is heartbreaking to see the poverty but if these kids make a living from selling tat to tourists then they aren’t in school getting an education to do something better. The elderly hawkers are the most heartbreaking because there is no welfare system so they don’t get any support. It’s really sad and we felt awful saying we had no money to buy things because compared to these people we are millionaires.
We saved the most famous temple - Angkor - for our final day and got up at an ungodly hour to watch sunrise. It was pitch black heading towards the enormous structure but we managed to be found by a guy selling coffee. The coffee, or hot chocolate in our case, came with a plastic stool in a prime viewing spot for sunrise. Great. So we settled down for an hour to watch the sky lighten and the sun come blazing up through two of the towers. It was a very impressive sight and would have been almost spiritual were it not for the hundreds of other people there.
After exploring Angkor, Dee, who lost his parents and sister to the Khmer Rouge, took us
to a killing field where we saw pictures of the atrocious conditions prisoners were kept in and images of torture. There was also a case containing bones and skulls of the victims. For someone who has seen so much suffering Dee is an inspiration and took us to the charity he works for, Krousar Thmey which means new family. It is through this organisation that he took on the ten orphans he looks after at the orphanage just outside the city centre. He took us to see his home and several of his children who were a bit shy of us. I don’t think they see many white people. The boys sleep on the floor of the ground floor of the orphanage while the girls sleep upstairs. Cooking is done outside in a kind of shack and water comes from a pump in the ground. Dee has planted many vegetables and fruit trees to help provide for his family and chopped us both a coconut, we didn’t have the heart to tell him we hate coconut juice and drank it anyway.
Siem Reap and the Angkor temples are inspiring places and proved to be a great introduction to Cambodia
and its people.
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