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22nd - 26th April
First experience in Cambodia wasn’t great. At the boarder everyone requires a dollar, we had to give a dollar to the official on the Laos side for stamping our passport, another dollar to the man who gave us our visa and a dollar to the man who stamped us into Cambodia.
Then we were suppose to get a VIP bus all the way to Seim Reap, however we were told that we had to go and spend the night in Phnom Penh. Then rather than the VIP bus we were all expecting we were crammed, like cattle, into one minibus. When we made it to Phnom Penh it turned out that if we didn’t stay in their guest house (Number 10) we would have to pay again for our transfer to Seim Reap. So all in all a bit of a scam but not too much stress, other than 6 hours out of our way.
We also got a sneak preview of the lake side area in Phnom Penh, so knew that when we came back we would avoid that area completely and avoid Number 10 guest house which was a real hole, including
cockroaches on the pillow and bed bugs!
We arrived in Seim Reap the next day and stayed at Aroma Daily guest house, situated behind a crocodile farm, so you can spend the evening teasing crocodiles by throwing berries at them. Tee Hee.
That evening we started our tour of the temples of Angkor. Which firstly involved watching the sunset at Phnom Bakheng, the temple mountain. The best way to get around the vastness of Angkor is by tuk tuk, our driver stayed with us for the entire 3 days and we got to see everything.
The next day was an early start as we had a lot to do, this included Angkor Thom, which is the ancient city surrounded by walls and gates with demons and angels on either side to protect the grounds. Also the Phimeanakas Palace, Elephant Terrence and Bayon Temple. We visited my favorite Temple Ta Phrom, which is where Tome Raider was filmed, this was left in it's rediscovered state after many years of war in the country. The idea was to give visitors an understanding of what the entirety of Angkor looked like after many years of being forgotten, very cool! We then
visited the holiest of holy, Angkor Wat - enough said.
I thought a lot about how to write about Angkor and be able to describe in enough detail our experiences but as I’m not that good at writing I really don’t think I’d be able to do it justice. It’s just amazing, especially when you consider that 1 million people once lived there at a time when only 60,000 people lived in Britain. I can only recommended that you have to see it for yourselves to really understand what I’m talking about. I think in total we took about 150 photos, that's nothing compared with the masses of Japanese tourists with their SLR extra long lenses and back up digital cameras. But I hope that the few choice ones on here will give a good taste and set the scene.
On the final evening we went to a Cambodian BBQ restaurant which involved eating Crocodile, Snake and Squid, cooked yourself on a make shift table BBQ, it was very good but the jury is still out on the Crocodile.
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JOHN
non-member comment
ANGKOR
FABULOUS !!!!