18 to 20 March - Settling into Siem Reap

---

We arrive in Siem Reap at 6am shattered by the experience of the night bus. As is the norm, the bus station is in a yard away from the town centre. It’s not the most welcoming of places to arrive at as the yard is confined with the only tuk-tuk drivers allowed in being those preselected by the bus company for onward journeys to hotels. There is no haggling over the price for the tuk-tuk rides as it is a set fee of $3 per person. Despite the unsettling nature of the place, the arrangement does work ok. I go with Ellen and Alex to their hotel, the River Queen Guesthouse and thankfully the owner, a chap from Bosnia called Alix, is there and allows an early checkin. I then make my way to my hotel, the City River and thankfully get an early checkin, with an upgrade thrown in as well. Small blessings after the bus trip. We rest for the rest of the day, meeting up again in the afternoon and head out to the airport to collect Gina from her flight in from Singapore. On the way back to town Gina fills us in with stories about her trip – Changi In the evening we head out in SR old town for a cambodian bbq. Alex and Ellen kick on to the temple bar where Alex loses his wallet.

The next day we do some gentle touring around town. Alex and Ellen head out to Angkor Wat whilst Gina and I settle for some of the lesser sights. After the bus ride and Gina's travels we decide to take it easy. In the evening we finally locate Sam (and Nick) at the I Win guesthouse. We have a little get together with Sam and he updates us on his adventures.

The highlight of the first couple of days in SR is a helicopter flight for Gina, Sam and I over Angkor Wat temples. We’d promised this for Sam as a birthday present and it was a great treat for all of us. It’s quite a different way to look at the temples. The complex of temples that make up Angkor Wat is quite immense and when you walk around them it’s quite staggering to think how they could be lost for hundreds of years when the Angkor empire went into decline. However from the air you get another perspective with how the temples are concealed by the jungle. The land around SR is very flat with only one small hill of a couple of hundred feet in the immediate vicinity - not the one we'd been to the previous day but another one to the east of the town. Other than that hill, the land is flat, and very arid. Despite the nearby presence of the great inland sea of Tonle Sap, the land around SR affords only one rice crop a year, very unlike any other part of SEA. This probably accounts for why SR province is the poorest part of Cambodia. Staggering to think this town has an international airport, a range of 5 star hotels etc, and yet is the poorest region in the country.

Anyway the helicopter fight is great fun, particularly for Gina who is an aviation junkie. I had some reservations about going up, shared by Sam I think, but the jerkiness I thought we'd experience was just not there. Our pilot, an aussie called Phil, had a couple of years experience in the area and he made the flight a very smooth affair.

In the afternoon I rode out and found Scott, the manager of Trailblazer Foundation in the backblocks of SR. TB are a grass roots charity working mainly in delivering clean water in the SR province. I'd researched them before coming over and Ellen and I had planned to hook up with Trailblazer before we left Australia - Ellen even raised some funds from our local Rotary Club. I'd sent them a stream of emails saying we'd like to pop in and meet. After getting no response I thought the best thing would be to just grab a pushbike and head in the general of where I thought they'd be located. After a couple of detours I found the place. The plan had been for Ellen and I to do some work with TB. By the time we got to SR, all of us, including Alex, Gina, Sam and his mate Nick were keen to do some work for TB. I wasn't sure how this number of volunteers would fit in with the TB schedule so I was bit trepidious about saying how many of us there were. But Scott was pretty laid back and said come out the next day and we'd all be slotted in somewhere. That was all good to hear because the last thing I wanted was for a bunch of do-gooders to turn up from nowhere and get in the way. So we were set to commence work the next day.

---

Photos

The Ice Man
Delivery of Ice near Sam's guesthouse

Route 6 BBQ
Stallholder setting up his BBQ stall in the evening