Cambodia

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D-day! We board the scam bus from Bangkok to Siem Reap (Cambodia). Shield & sword at the ready! We shall, we shall not be scammed! We have heard that the journey is continuously interrupted by visits to fake border crossings where we will be forced/encouraged into buying our visas there - for more than we would pay at the genuine border. We also were advised that the genuine border crossing itself is renowned for corruption with tourists - more and more money is demanded with different excuses - an extra dollar to get your passport back etc etc. True to the rumours, in the minibus we see a sign for the border - straight ahead - so … we divert to the left! Wehey! We stop, a lady boards the bus, she is a new ‘helper’, pretends to be as nice as chips, which in itself screams I AM LYING, bearing in mind no-one has yet been this nice & helpful to us in Thailand. She casually tells us that she will be sorting out our visas for us - oh how nice! Well, no, we don’t think so, so we cling for dear life to our passports. We have to get off the bus to sit in a roadside ‘café’ where they tell us to buy lunch - just another little way of ripping us off - so we don’t bother. We all sit down to tables where the lady and the driver did the rounds with forms/taking money. It got a little tense at one point when a group of us jointly refused to get our visas there and insisted on being taken to the real border to purchase our visas. They got angry! We stayed there for over an hour until they were convinced they had got as much out of people as they could, then we were separated into 3 minivans and taken to a random spot. We got out again into the stifling hot sunshine, rucksacks on, and yet another new ‘helper’ who would walk with us the rest of the way to the border. First step, we had to have a medical utensil shoved into our ear to take our temperature, fill out medical forms to swear we didn’t have swine flu, and then onto our first window!

Got through the border, being overcharged only slightly but that goes for every Westerner. The crossing took a while but thankfully was fairly uneventful. On the other side, we decided to get a taxi instead of staying on the bus which apparently draws out the journey until its dark, and takes you to guesthouses which have a deal with the driver to make sure you stay at that particular guesthouse and yet again, get ripped off. The bus journey apparently takes 3 hours more than a taxi so we went with that and had no trouble whatsoever. Arrived at Jasmine Lodge guesthouse as recommended by friends, and we had the most delightful welcoming by the staff!! What a surprise and change from Thailand! That night we sat down to eat, the owner even came up to Holly knowing her name from the online booking, introduced himself, and asked all about our journey. From the moment we arrived, a young guy called Hak, could not do enough for us.

A bright and early start the next morning, and we are on our way in the STIFELING heat, in a tuk-tuk, to the glorious temples of Angkor!! A pretty drive on a long tree-line road, we welcome the wind in our faces, and arrive at our first stop - one of the man-made wonders of the world - Angkor Wat! Angkor Wat is an example of Khmer architecture and was built for King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century.

We get our first sighting of the structure from over the water that surrounds it. We are dropped off across the road from the front of the walkway to the wat, where we are surrounded by a group of children trying to sell us postcards, water and other bits & pieces. One girl who called herself ‘spider girl’ gave Holly a drawing& a letter & begged us both to buy some water on our return, which we said we couldn’t do because we already had some. We walked up the sandstone causeway, which runs over the moat (190m wide) that surrounds the structure - it is a long stretch, which takes you to the front entrance, where monks were sat all along the walls. The day was so hot; we were sweating walking around the wat. It is hard to take in the scope of the place, and the work that has gone into the intricate details is outstanding. The sculptures are particularly stunning; you can’t believe what the place has witnessed in its time. The majority of the Buddha sculptures had been beheaded; they were destroyed in this way by the Khmer Rouge during their overtake in 1975, while they also used the walls of Angkor wat for target practice.

The surroundings of Angkor Wat are also very beautiful - lots of gardens and trees, ruins and of course the moat. After 2-3 hours at Angkor wat, we made the walk back down the causeway and started walking towards where all the tuk-tuks are parked up (with all the drivers asleep in them) to find our guy. Not before being stopped by spider girl and her pals, who said to us ‘you said you would buy our water, you promised me, remember me? 'Spider girl’. Yep she tried it on with us good and proper - when we said - no we didn’t tell you that, we said we couldn’t buy any more - she gave us a mock shocked gasp and said ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it, that is so bad, you said you would, Oh my God…’ Very well trained little girl! Kev recalls looking back and the littlest girl of them all gave him the biggest puppy dog eyes and stuck out bottom lip you can imagine - it’s awful! Hard to separate yourself all the time.

From here we went on to Bayon, which is famous for its faces - people often say they feel like they are being constantly watched and judged by the giant carved faces! It is a very cool site, really amazing to walk around. You drive along through trees and all of a sudden you stumble across these places and wonder how they ever got there! Fascinating to walk around, Bayon is on many levels, and you have to walk up some extremely unsteady, steep steps to get to the main centre of the whole structure. Elders encourage you to light an incense stick to offer to the Buddha shrines, but then ask for money afterwards for doing it.

Our last stop for the day was Ta Prohm - the ‘Tomb Raider’ Wat of them all. Engulfed by huge tree vines and forest it is a one off sight - the structure looks as if it is being eaten alive by the trees which have developed a heavy handgrip all over the wat - astonishing. You reach one point where the roots are absolutely monstrous, and veer all the way up into a colossal tree - you cannot quite believe that it is a natural work of art - it is that perfectly eerie and wonderful. It really does look like the perfect film set for a tomb raider - esque film. One thing about all of the Wats was that they are all very peaceful, despite there being plenty of people walking around, you never really seem to bump into anyone else. On the way back we made a quick stop at ‘The King’s bathtub’, which was quite simply an unimpressive lake, and just gave some more children a chance to yank on us & claim we ‘hated Cambodia’ if we did not accept a free bracelet, which when finally taken they would use to blackmail us into buying the rest (unsuccessfully!). There were options to see some smaller wats but by that point we had been Wat viewing for the whole day and the heat had become unbearable so we decided to head back. That night, we went to an internet café to watch Millwall in a crucial game, but unfortunately they lost and it was bad times for Kev! We went for a quick drink at a place in central Siem Reap called… wait for it… ‘Angkor What?’ everywhere was pretty empty and the town is very small. Early night for an early rise.

The next day we hopped on a bus to Cambodia’s capital - Phnom Penh. The views on the journey are quite beautiful - shacks, countryside, rice paddies, misplaced wats, and bicycles. As soon as we arrived in the afternoon (as it does every afternoon) it started pouring down with rain. Grabbed a shared tuk-tuk and went guesthouse hunting, finally finding some space in ‘Okay guesthouse’. Room was pretty good apart from ours backed onto the outside back of a restaurant owned by a family who seemed to be constantly vomiting and s*itting, and the smell liked to drift up through our mesh window covers and into our room. We pretty much chilled out for the rest of the day after the bus journey.

Up early the following day, we had arranged to meet up with ‘Mr Lucky’ again (yesterday’s tuk-tuk driver) to take us around the city to some places we wanted to see. We started at the Tuol Sleng museum, also known as S-21 - a former school turned prison/torture chamber by the Khmer Rouge in their take-over. An estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned there, out of which there were only 12 known survivors. The whole place had a very bad feeling to it, we both felt very sick very soon. Every room in the first block, on all 3 levels had been used to torture people - on the wall in each room there was an enlarged photo of how it was discovered, who was discovered in it, exactly as it was found - a body left, dead and tortured. Absolutely horrific - the bed had been left with cuffs, in each room where it had always been - blood still stained the floor all underneath it and all around the walls. Other blocks in the area were prisons - tiny spaces, with shackles still cemented into the ground in each cell, again the floor just covered in bloodstains. Some parts of the blocks were used as galleries to display stories, photographs, testimonials, and displays for items such as clothing, torturing tools etc. One particularly harrowing section had pictures of the innocent - children, mothers, boys, girls, and men - all of who had been detained and tortured within those very walls. The children’s faces would bring anyone to tears. In the central courtyard, still stood the docks where they hung, and part drowned people - dipping them upside down into barrels of water until they were unconscious. A board of rules stood, displaying how those detained would have to behave: ‘while getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all’. The museum is absolutely essential in being able to fully understand what Cambodia went through - and to what extent. Not only this - but to see how far the country and people have come from those not-so-long-ago times.

After the museum we stopped by the Russian market - what a mistake!! We walked half way in and had to run out heaving after seeing and SMELLING the stench of huge slabs of raw, rotting, fly infested meat, everywhere! Most of which hadn’t been cut up and still had limbs and heads. We have never smelt anything like it and people were sat amongst it in the boiling heat, all day.

We then went onto The Killing Fields. We visited ‘Choeung Ek’, literally a large area of fields where people were killed and buried in mass graves by the Khmer Rouge regime during it’s rule of the country from 1975 to 1979. There is a tall monument that holds hundreds of skulls and the clothing of those left there. There are lots of large bunkers in the ground, which were actually mass graves. Some were like mud pits, and some were separated into women & children, who, we found out, were known to be raped before their murder. One particular memory that stands out in our minds was a large tree we came across - the sign on it said - ‘killing tree in which executioners beat children’ - beside it were old clothes and tiny bones.
The day was a sad and gruelling one, with tears and deep sorrow, but extremely interesting & important. Needless to say, it left us all in deep thought for the rest of the evening and beyond. That afternoon we got back, Kev started to get really ill - sickness, bad stomach, fever, temperature. Unfortunately this carried through the next few days, which were therefore spent at the guesthouse. A few days later we were to board a bus to Vietnam…but the illnesses did not end there!!

The people of Cambodia were amongst some of the friendliest we had met on our journey so far. A trip to this country has two very conflicting experiences. One day you can be walking around in astonishment at the magnificent, beautiful temples of Angkor, the next you are taking in the horrors of S-21 & The killing fields…

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