Advertisement
Published: December 3rd 2007
Edit Blog Post
....that's what Siem Reap is all about. It's a small town near the temple of Angkor that has been taken over by the tourism market so is full of hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, massage places and internet cafes. The big swanky hotels are along the main road out to the airport and it seems likely that many people staying there don't even make it into the town. As mentioned before we arrived for the start of the water festival. This is much bigger in Phnom Penh where they have dragon boat races for 3 days with hundreds of boats taking part. Tragically, we read that this turned out to be not such a happy celebration as one of the boats overturned and a number of participants drowned. The differences from home strike you when the rest of the event continues rather than being cancelled after such an incident. There were races in Siem Reap but only for a day and we were templing so only saw the celebrating and firecrackers that night.
So, we had two very dusty days in a tuk-tuk visiting the different temple complexes in the area separated by a rest day. The first day we saw the
closer sites. Ta Promh is a beautiful crumbling, overgrown temple with a few remaining carvings and corridors giving a hint of Indiana Jones feeling when you find a quiet corner, which is possible (although it has actually been used for a few bits of Lara Croft). Banty Kdei was another smaller temple with fewer people that was also quite atmospheric. The more famous ones were also impressive and I particularly liked the Bayon which is part of Angkor Thom. It has many towers each with a large carved enigmatic face on four sides with much dispute over what they are supposed to be faces of. And then there was Angkor Wat itself which is crowded with people but does have the most amazing carvings running along the corridors around the outside depicting scenes from various religious stories or historical events. Sadly some of the main towers had scaffolding and tarpaulin on so sunset was not quite as striking as it might have been.
At all of the temples it is amazing the areas that you are allowed to walk over and steps you can climb as at home they would be deemed far too dangerous. It does mean that
you can imagine a little what they might have been like a thousand years ago when many of them were built.
The second temple day we got up at 5am (actually were supposed to get up before then but the alarm didn't go off!) to see sunrise over Angkor Wat. This was quite special (although we were not alone!) but we also headed off to see the temple again before the sun quite came up and almost had it to ourselves (apart from a few monkeys) for a short while which was even more special. Breakfast that followed produced the worst coffee of the trip so far, completely undrinkable, but the early start was worth it.
From there we headed north to Banteay Srey, a temple believed to be dedicated to women due to the much more intricate carvings. This is built from pink stone which glowed in the early morning light and the carvings were beautiful.
And then further north still along a very dusty road to Kbal Spean which is also called the River of a Thousand Lingas. It's a steep and hot walk up through the trees to the river where there are carvings
in the stone under the water including those that give the name to the river - I'll leave you to look up what a linga is but will also say that the limestone carvings are mostly washed away by the water. However, it's a beautiful setting and some of the other carvings are still in good condition.
One of the main reasons we had travelled out to Kbal Spean was because there was also an animal conservation centre there which we wanted to visit and we had even changed the day of our trip to the temples to be able to go when it was open. So, I was hugely disappointed when we got there to find a sign on the gate saying that they had had to cancel the visits that day due to staff illness.....while these things have to be expected here we do seem to be very good at going to things on the wrong day!
Our final stop on the way home was at the Land Mine Museum, another both depressing and uplifting place, set up by a Cambodian national who has been clearing land mines in his country ever since the end of
the war and has now set up a charity to help people injured and disabled by land mines. There are still around 700 incidents with unexploded ordinance in the country every year, mostly in rural areas, so it is still a huge problem and this man seems to be single handedly trying to solve it.
And that was Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, except for our rest day of which the highlight for me was a meditation class with a local monk - there are certainly times here when you need to calm your mind and try to blot out the rest of the world for a while....
We headed back to Phnom Penh from Siem Reap and had another quiet day including another 'eating for a good cause' lunch. Cambodia seems to have many organisations that run training schools for local disadvantaged young people to learn catering and restaurant skills - we must have eaten in at least 6 and the food has been excellent and the staff very eager to please. Cambodia is probably one of the poorest countries I've ever visited. In fact I was probably rather naive about it before I got here. It
came home to me the morning we got up for sunrise. There were always a number of young men hanging around the place and it was never clear which were staff or just friends etc but we found 4 of them sleeping in the hotel reception, one on a camp bed but the other 3 sharing one cushion for their heads on the tile floor. I'd assumed that all of them had homes to go to.....
I've gone on a bit haven't I?! Our arrival into Vietnam will have to wait for next time. All the news we get from home is very depressing - bad weather and political scandals - hope you're all surviving them?
Lots of love
S & H xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.048s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.022s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb