Cambodia: Siem Reap to Phenom Penh

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We did the whirlwind tour through Cambodia ~ about 10 days which is par for the course for tourists mainly interested in Angkor Wat. This seems to be the big draw these days (since the movie Tomb Raider came out about 6 yrs ago and was filmed in Angkor Wat) and Siem Reap - the town near Angkor Wat is becoming
very built up with many, many! hotels (from big and fancy to nice looking newer guest houses).
In the off season after March when it is hotter you can definately negotiate a good
rate! There are some restaurants we liked, one at the top of an Indian hotel (yes, Indian cuisine) where we saw a great fireworks display in the sky on the eve of the New Year. That was a great surprise and we coudn't have picked a better place or time to see it! The New Year celebrations in Cambodia are a little more sedate than in Thailand... none of that water throwing!

We flew in to Bangkok and then went the budget route via bus to the Cambodian border. There we changed buses and some of the personnel escorting us (it was an organized trip to get us to Siem Reap which took about 12 hrs including border crossing, lunch and dinner stops). If you have more money fly to Siem Reap as the journey was not exceptionally scenic. However, it was interesting to see after nightfall as we drove through a farming area in Cambodia how DARK it was. For miles there was absolutely no artificial light anywhere - quite an unusual sight, really, I loved it. If we could have viewed the sky there I'm sure it would have been so star filled and awesome.

Coming into Siem Reap the luxurious, grand hotels stretched out north from the town for miles it seemed.
In town there was an older "downtown" section - here we found a place that had great (but expensive) gelato and sorbet - in this heat we didn't care! Newer, smaller hotels and guest houses were on the other side of the downtown, part of which was also along the Siem Reap river. This part of town was lovely, worth walking around. We stayed four nights in the same hotel where we were originally dropped off. It was large with two double beds and a good size bathroom for $10/night (the "Hilton").
We also found on the "Happycow.com" website a vegetarian restaurant that had organic food. We got to go there only once as they were closed several days for the New Year holiday. The food was good but minimal English spoken there. By the way, happy cow is a great resource for not only vegetarian food but food of better quality. We also found there a wonderful organic restaurant called the Livingroom in Phenom Penh.
If you find something good and it's not on the site already, put up your own review or add one about a restaurant they already list. You can look up places all over the world here.

The 3 day pass of Angkor Wat was enough for us but you can also buy a week long pass at a discount and enjoy spending time on the extensive grounds just walking, and hanging around in the energy. I recommend that if you have the time and the money. Cambodians are wonderful and friendly but of course in Angkor Wat especially they want and hope to sell you things, so what else can you expect? Just smile and say "no thank you" and keep walking, or browse and bargain away. But remember a lot of the stuff is pretty cheap anyway! We bought a book and all these are copies so you can get them down to a few dollars on these. Just have fun with the kid vendors, they are so cute, or don't say anything.

For going into Angkor Wat we hired a cyclo-driver, not a guide to tour us around for the 3 days and this was fine for us. If you want all the low down then you need to hire a guide too. We learned a bit from our
driver but now I think it might have been better if we had the guide also for the first day so we could get
a greater appreciation of Angkor in general, the people who built it and the rich history of the region and the Cambodians. In the three days we were able to see many of the sites and get a pretty good sense of the place but by no means exhausted the possibilities for exploration. Some sites are an hour or more drive away and I think we only fit in one of those. At this time of year, though hot, there were far fewer people so we could really feel the peacefulness in many places. We should have stayed one extra day in Siem Reap and taken the opportunity to visit this family who had invited us to their house. But William had already bought the bus tickets to Phenom Penh. They were very kind, but the father (of the girl you see me with in one of the photos) was the only one we could talk to. He said he lived in a house with no electricity. While still in this area we did however take time to visit the Landmind Museum which was well worth the stop and we learned a lot there about this issue which is still a huge problem in many parts of the world (landmines that harm people that is).

A little story about the disfigured girl we got a photo of with me:
One day in Angkor Wat William and I were walking to a bathroom (nice like the ones in many American parks). William was a ways ahead of me and passed on the road this girl who was near some other tourists putting out her hand for money. William called to me (like to warn me that she might approach me). When I got closer and saw her I was immediately scared of her. I walked faster to avoid her and didn't look at
her again. She was making grunting sounds and had a severe limp.
I feared she might follow me to the bathroom but she didn't. When I came out I saw she was still near the bathroom path and decided I would give her some money. I didn't look at her too close for too long but I bowed to her and offered her a blessing. She uttered something and seemed very appreciative. William came along then with the camera and offered to take a photo of us. I had overcome my fear and stood next to her. I loved how there was a light in her eyes that came through even in this photo and was amazed to see that. I hope you can see that....
We did not show her the photo in the camera like we usually do and she didn't ask to see it. It was a remarkable moment for me.
If you get a chance to go to the landmine museum you may read many stories of people like this. If the exploding mine doesn't kill you it can maim you terribly. She had obviously been burned and possibly became deaf and mute.

Another thing we did while in Siem Reap - and many tourists do this - was take a ride out to the Tonle Sap Lake fed by the Tonle Sap and Siem Reap rivers and get on a boat to see the floating village there. (The Tonle Sap Lake is the largest fresh water lake in the world!) This is kind of amazing to us westerners and I don't think we have much of an equavalent to it, not even living on a house boat on the S.F. bay at a dock. In the summer monsoon months the lake and rivers rise hugely and flood a large area of the valley around. The "shanti-town" village near the river that we photographed moves to a little higher ground in the summer months so they always stay near to the water... they, and others around the lake area are fishing villages. The people here seemed incredibly poor (and dirty) but not unhappy.
Our boat driver who took us out to the lake said he had a wondful childhood growing up in the floating village. A life on the water would be interesting but can you imagine being confined to those little
"houses"!? Supposedly when the lake rises the water no longer looks brown and the fish are good.
Another thing I though interesting is that most of the people in these villages are Catholics and the schools there are Catholic, the result of missionaries (what else!?) coming into the area - probably after the Khemer Rouge destroyed the life of most people in the country in the late 70's.

The bus trip to Phenom Penh was not remarkable - we went through a lot of flat, dry farm lands with leafy trees along the road and in some spots a lot of plastic garbage - mostly plastic bags. We always refuse to have things given to us in plastic bags whenever we can - what a nuisance and eyesore they are becoming in so many parts of the world!!

We stayed in Phenom Penh long enough to visit the Palace, enjoy the New Year Festivity (I think it was the last night of it), and get our Vietnam visa which only took a day. I didn't want to go to the museum that was about the killing fields (Tuol Sleng - the genocide museum) which was a school that had been turned into a Security Prison/torture center (S21) for the Angkor regime under Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Now that we have been reading about all this I wish we had gone there in spite of the emotional challenge it presented.... I know going there would have given us some additional perspective on what happened...
I was a college student in the late 1970's and not being much interested in world events at the time I knew nothing before coming to Cambodia about "the killing fields" other than in the early '80s there were Cambodian refugees coming to the U.S. What role the U.S. may have played in all this is still not clear to me. But we did get a little info mostly about the Khemer Rouge and their communist leader from watching a documentary film and an older hollywood movie (called "The Killing Fields" based on a book by a journalist) about the "take over" by the communists that happened in Phenom Penh in early 1975 and later the whole country. William and I both read the book: First they killed my father
which was a hair raising, amazingly detailed account of a young Cambodian girl who went through this
period (when so many people were being enslaved, starved, tortured and killed) and survived it, finally ending up as a refugee in the U.S.
Now, we are trying to get through the book Brother Number One about the communist leader Pol Pot to try and understand more about what was going on in the region at the time and how this atrocity (enslaving, starving and/or killing a quarter of the population, mainly the middle class, intellectuals) could happen as recently as the late '70s. Of course, this was all on the heals of the "cultural revolution" in China that had begun several decades earlier and seemed to provide a model for other SE Asian communist idealists to follow.

I, now a student of the concepts of "collectivism" (the currently preferred term for socialism) vs "individualism" find myself drawn to, yet revolted by the dramatic recent history of Cambodia and other countries since the writing of the communist manifesto and similar documents which people in this part of the world including Ho Chi Minh studied and got behind in a big way.
Ayn Rand, a novelist around the 50s and 60s wrote extensively on this theme. For modern day people it is worth understanding the distinctions of these and that there are two kinds of "capitalism" which I think most people don't realize. An excellent large website educating people about the nuances of "collectivism" and what it means for us as members of a society, as well as "individualism" and its implications is: Freedom-force.org the website of the international organization with supporters/members from 60 countries.
If you have ever heard the term "New World Order" and want to know what they are really talking about this is a great resource.

Back to Phenom Penh.... we were on our way to Vietnam after three nights again by bus which also took most of the day, a beginning to the adventure of more political sort of revelations for us! Since it was the dry season and the rivers were low we opted against taking any boats for a portion of this journey. The bus ride was kind of fun as you might see by some of the photos of Cambodian's near the river crossing and crossing this border into Vietnam was interesting as well. We were wondering if the "communists" at the Vietnam border would be foreboding and serious and stern but it wasn't so! Just a silly pre-
conceived idea!

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Photos

Cambodian border town
It was not hard to see that Thailand is the more prosperous country. The towns and buildings at the borders always tell. Cambodia's main sources of income are agriculture and tourism - visitors coming to Angkor Wat

Riding through Angkor Wat
On one of the many beautiful, wide tree lined roads that wind through Angkor Wat - a huge spread out area. Adjacent to the temples were many vendors selling all kinds of stuff and food.

Angkor Wat Temple
This is one of the many temples of Angkor Wat ~ one which has a moat surrounding it.

Ruins
We spent three days exploring Angkor Wat. It was enough for us as it was so, so hot. But one could easily spend more time just wandering the beautiful grounds. We didn't come close to seeing every ruin.

William's favorite temple
He liked this one because of all the big faces in it.

Christina's favorite temple...
...I could feel the energy so strong here! and resonated with the feeling here. I call this the Goddess temple as bare breasted women were everywhere here. This temple, like some others also had doorway after doorway in long corridors that came off a center area in the 4 directions suggesting to me that it may have been a place where (female?) spiritual adepts were initated into each new level of spiritual awakening or awareness. This temple was built in the early 9th century. Later ones look very different with fewer or no female figures. Like me, everyone speculates about these places and the people who built them but no one really knows!

Christnas 2nd favorite temple....
This was called the dancing hall and also had many female figures always dancing and always above the male looking meditating figures. These "goddesses" are dancing on lotus petals that are rooted.

This was a very popular dragon motif
found many places in Angkor Wat

Landmine Victims Band
They were very good, playing beautiful, haunting music at various spots in Angkor Wat park and ruins which covered many, many square miles.

Kid vendors...
that hang around in Angkor Wat selling bead jewelry, books and postcards. Some spoke english very well.
They could be pesky but I liked them.

Instant friends
We spoke at length with this girls father, a Cambodian who had lived in the U.S. many years. This girl was so sweet and cuddely but spoke not a word of English. She was 17 but looked younger to us - and this has often been true with Cambodian youths we talked to.

Snake/dragon border motif...
very common on the older ruins