Angkor Temples day 2

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Banteay Srei is around 30km from Siem Riep town, the temple itself is much smaller than Angkor Thom or Wat but it’s also much less touristic. We stopped at another temple on the way to the museum, larger than Banteay Seri and the great thing is we had it to ourselves for the whole half hour we were there. The landmine museum is very small, it contains only 4 rooms but they really make a strong impact. The museum is run by a man called Aki-Ra who became a Khmer Rouge soldier when both his parents were killed during the cleansing. As a soldier he had many names, one with the Khmer Rouge, one with the Vietnamese army to which he defected to fight the Khmer but he eventually decided to call himself Aki-Ra after meeting some Japanese people. Aki-Ra doesn’t know his age or much about life before being a soldier for the Pol pot regime. He has spent the last 18 years defusing mines and unlike the armies and other organisations using high tech demining robots, he uses a stick, a knife and a pair of pliers. He set up the museum to make people aware of the horrors of mines but from this he has set up a home for the child victims of landmines. It is shocking that there are still around 6 million landmines here, many of them dropped by the Americans, the rest left by the Vietnamese along the Thai border to stop the Khmer supporters getting back into Cambodia. Another disturbing reality is that America doesn’t contribute greater resources to the clean up, after all their bombs are the reason Pol Pot and his cadres amassed such power. I heard they spend more money retrieving the bodies of the soldiers that died in Vietnam than helping save lives that should never have been endangered to begin with.

We had lunch in our favorite restaurant and later we decided to finally try another restaurant. It was time to branch out. After dinner a walk down bar street proved to be a wise move. We searched for a bar as everyone was going their separate ways the next morning, we found a bar offering 2 for1 cocktails. Enough said

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