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Published: December 3rd 2008
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sunrise
at Angkor Wat After several days in Phnom Penh we hopped on a bus to the little town of Siam Reap. Our destination was Angkor Wat. Angkor is the biggest tourist draw for Cambodia with about 50% of the country's tourists only visiting this site.
The bus ride was alright except for the incessant horn honking of the driver. It was also kind of cute how many times we stopped to pick up seemingly random Cambodians. There was one time where we stopped for about twenty minutes while this lady's family loaded up just about everything she owned. I guess she was moving.
Siam Reap is a decent town. It doesn’t have the sketchy feeling of Phnom Penh and it is quite small in comparison. There are a ton of guest houses and fancy hotels to serve the masses of tourists that come to visit the gem of Angkor Wat.
We spent a total of three days at Angkor Wat. There are lots of temples in quite a large area--over 40 I believe. There are also others scattered even farther out of this main area.
For the first day we hired a tuk-tuk. That was nice. Unfortunately we didn’t have
the money for a guide. That would have been really cool but…well, what are you gonna do?
The second day we got bicycles. This was an awesome way to see the place. The main temple, Angkor Wat, is so big that it’s recommended you visit it several times. We went there every day. During the hot part of the day it’s almost completely empty. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip. I got to run around the temple like a little kid. It’s really hard to describe the awesomeness of this experience. I’ll just say it was awesome!
For day three we got a tuk-tuk again (10 hours, 15 miles of bicycling and a blazing hot humid day wore us out). We visited a temple that was 23 kilometers away but is one of the most well preserved of the era. It’s amazing to think that this kind of artwork adorned all of the temples we saw. It’s just ridiculous what this civilization pulled off.
At this point in time the Cambodians pretty much let you have the run of the temples. This is likely not good for preservation purposes and won’t last forever.
Floating village
on the way to Battambang If you’re thinking of checking out Angkor do it soon so you can take advantage of this.
I guess we really didn’t do too much else in Siam Reap. I wish we could have but our budget was stretched thin and we decided to take a boat to the second largest city in Cambodia, Battambang.
We only spent three days at Angkor because of the pass situation. They only offer 1, 3 and 7 day passes. I could have easily spent a week there. For anybody going the best advice you can get (and take) is to avoid trying to see too much. These structures are so phenomenal that you should really just hang out in, on and around them. Absorbing the atmosphere and thinking about what they were like back in the day is mind blowing. I would recommend a nap in the forest around Angkor Wat. Or even in Angkor Wat…what the heck.
We decided to take a boat to Battambang because it sounded interesting and was something we had never done before. It certainly was interesting as well as uncomfortable.
The tickets were $20 (about four times more than the bus). The boat
was long with a bench running the length on each side. The large loud engine was mounted on the back (right next to the ends of the benches). Fortunately we were not stupid enough to get on the boat first. We were packed in knee to knee for the almost seven hour journey.
The ride was fascinating as we went through several floating villages. All of our stops were in these villages. Check out the pictures. I don’t remember if I noted this in the previous blog about Phnom Penh but the large freshwater lake in the middle of Cambodia is one of the richest fishing areas in Southeast Asia (and it’s a huge lake). It appeared that this is how the people in the floating villages survive.
One thing to note was the bathrooms in these villages. They were simply small rooms with smaller doors that had a whole cut in the floor. That’s it. You went directly into the lake. Yum! Who wants fresh caught fish!
We arrived in the slower paced city of Battambang and found some nice accommodations. After a week plus of doing as much as we could we chose to just
relax. We could have seen some more temples or more places where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed people, but honestly we were over that and just wanted to hang out and absorb the atmosphere.
We liked the place although there still seemed to be scammers abound. It was really hard to tell though. You feel a bit bad mistrusting so many people when they may in fact be legitimate, but what other choice did we have? We were seriously low on money and just couldn’t afford to be scammed, plus, unlike many others, we were heading back to our jobs in Thailand that pay very little.
We did donate as generously as we could to those beggars who were disabled in some way and to women with children. There is no social support system for the disabled in this country and they are often shunned in society. I would recommend to anyone visiting the country to do the same. In fact you should just put a donation category into your budget. It is looked upon kindly by the Buddhists anyway.
We ended up leaving the country with almost no money but with an important realization. It
Angkor Wat
From inside an ancient library. is far easier for us to earn a dollar than most of the people in Cambodia. This really justifies donating what you can while visiting. Besides, all that money that everybody spends at Angkor Wat (the fancy hotels, park passes, ridiculously overpriced airfare)--none of that reaches the masses. It goes to the corrupt government officials. That’s just the way it is.
We took a bus back to Phnom Penh. This time the driver wasn’t so horn happy. That was nice. We departed Cambodia the next day. Maybe someday we’ll go back. Maybe the government will get their s*#! together. I think the former will happen sooner than the latter. For the sake of the Cambodian people I hope the opposite becomes true.
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