Siem Reap - Home of Angkor Wat

After a 6 hour bus ride, we arrived in Siem Reap which is in the north west of the country. The hotel we checked into (Golden Temple Villa) was very flash for what amounted to about $10 per night per person. For this we got free breakfast, a very nice looking room, free bananas (!!), and a free half hour massage from the massage parlour (hmm, writing "parlour" makes it sound dodgy - or is that just me!?). A great deal! I think the only drawback was that the shower head in the bathroom was attached at about waist height. Cambodians tend to be on the short side but still, this was way low. On the plus side, my knees have never been cleaner.

Our main purpose for being in Siem Reap was to check out Angkor Wat and various other temples in the area. For this we had a tuk-tuk driver who kept us supplied with cold water and constant smiles, and a knowledgeable tour guide (a different one for each of the two days we spent checking it all out). Our tour guide for the first day was excellent. The guy on the second day was only ok but he did teach us the term "OMB". It stands for "Oh My Buddha". :) More appropriate than OMG when you're in a Buddhist country I guess.

The various temples in Angkor were created in around the 12th century AD and there are lots of them. In two days, you can only see a selection of the best. We started our tour with a stop at Angkor Thom (the name of the old city) and the main temple there, The Bayon. Our guide explained that this temple had been created by a Buddhist king with the aim of making one that was better than Angkor Wat. Gotta love a little one-upmanship in your Buddhist kings!

In our two days of temple touring, here are the main bits I found interesting:

• Early on the first day I tried to take a photo of a statue of some kind of deity. Now I’m not saying anything supernatural was going on here but when I did this with my new point and shoot camera, a little message popped up on the camera screen saying “Blinked Eye Detected”. Would technology lie to me or I did get winked at by a Buddha!?

  

  At the entrance to Angkor Thom

  
• Angkor Wat is impressive because it’s bloody big and also in pretty good shape. While smaller temples have been taken over by trees in parts, the size of Angkor Wat meant that didn’t happen. That said, for a non-archaeologist like myself, I found that the more a temple was ruined, the more interesting it was. I like that idea of nature reclaiming what humans made. A temple where the entrance is almost completely blocked by the roots of a gigantic tree that has worked it’s way into the architecture of the building looks awesome.




We had to queue for this photo so it's gotta go in the blog.








Awesome tree plus if you look carefully you'll see a  random Chinese lady doing the obligatory peace sign for a photo. 

• The detail on some of the carvings on the walls was amazing. Sometimes it was like a Where's Wally cartoon in the amount of "things" that were going on in a simple picture. You really had to take the time to look in order to see the hidden gems.

• Particularly on the first day, the guide we had was fantastic. He was a bit of an amateur photographer so he was regularly telling us exactly where to stand in order to get a great photo. I like this one of "Da Wat" from a distance...

• The sun in the middle of the day is fierce. Our guide went on the theory that if you are moving around while everyone else is having lunch, you can cut down on the some of the crowds, thus making it easier to get great photos. A wise idea but the drawback was we were two sweaty and sunscreen drenched tourists by the end of the day.
• On the second day, we got up way freakin' early to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat. We were easily in place, standing in front of the lake that fronts the temple by about 5.30am. The sun didn’t actually rise up from behind the temple until about 6.30am. This meant an hour of standing around, taking the same photo over and over again of the silhouette of Angkor Wat, while hordes of people of every race and language jostled for position lining the lake. It was as much a people-watching exercise as anything else. I watched one woman take a photo of a lotus flower growing on the edge of the lake. Rejecting the natural beauty of the setting, she decided to remove a couple of distracting lilypads from the scene and then dipped her hands in the water and splashed the lotus flower so that a few beads of water would land artfully on it’s petals. Then I watched another woman who decided she wanted to get to the front of a big crowd of people and her way of doing this was to put her head down (she was pretty short) and just kind of push on people until they moved. It was bizarre. The people in front of her just held their ground because it was so silly but she would just go around and try the next person to see if their arm was more likely to give way to the weight of her head. Eventually there were a few people in the crowd having a chuckle at this human battering ram lady and she turned around and gave up. Anyway, my shots of the sun rising over Angkor Wat looked average at best but the antics of the crowd made up for some of that early start.

I think this is the lotus the lady was prepping.


If the temples in Angkor are the number 1 attraction of Siem Reap, then without doubt the number 2 attraction is Angkor Wat Putt - a 14 hole mini-golf course a little way from the centre of town. Here's their branded car...

We’d heard about it on TripAdvisor as it was receiving high praise so we thought we’d check it out. We called up the owner and he drove out to our hotel to pick us up. His name is Mr Tee and he’s a bit of a legend. Something of an entrepreneur actually. Someone had suggested once that he make a mini-golf course back while he was a tour guide and instead of just laughing it off as a crazy idea, he did the research, loaned the money and has created a 14 hole mini-golf course, complete with miniature replicas of some of the sights at Angkor.

When Mr Tee gave us the scorecard, he apologised that the par for each hole isn’t marked. Apparently this is because he didn’t know what “par” is when he made the cards up! For someone who didn’t really know what mini-golf is, he’s done a great job! The holes were tough but still quite possible and if you hit a hole-in-one you win a free beer. Neither of us could manage that but I got a free beer anyway because I won and so the K-Man owed me. It was while drinking our after-game beer that we had a good chat to Mr Tee about his business. He’s really quite open about the various challenges he’s faced. It’s only been open a few months and is far from raking in the money just yet but it’s building steadily. I really hope he can make it. He still plans on adding four more holes when he can afford it in order to get up to 18 holes so we were brain storming ideas for what they could look like. The difficulty however, is that he needs to remain respectful in what he does otherwise he could get shut down by the police. For instance, I love the idea of having the golf ball roll out of Buddha’s mouth and into the hole but that could be deemed insensitive to the Buddhist faith. Having replicas of the temples is fine but I think he’s limited a bit in just how wacky he might want to make it. I actually get the feeling he’s fine with that too. On the drive back to our hotel, Mr Tee’s phone went off. The ringtone was “Gangnam Style”. There is seriously no place you can go that is untouched by Gangnam Style.

After two busy days spent in Siem Reap, it was time to catch a 12 hour bus to Banlung in the Ratanakiri province (in the north-east of the country) for our jungle trekking experience...

First Stop: Phnom Penh

The first part of our trip was spent in Phnom Penh, a city of about 2 million people - all of whom seem to be born with an innate ability to dodge each other as they hurtle along the streets on motorbikes, tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and bicycles while carrying something thats hard to balance. At one point we saw a bunch of motorbikes each carrying three large mattresses on the back. Bizarre.

We started our first morning with a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum followed by a visit to the Killing Fields. While far from cheery places to go, they are considered "must-see" options for tourists so along we went to find out about the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 70's. The genocide museum used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into an interrogation/torture prison. We saw one horrible sight after another as we were led through the buildings. We stood in the stark white rooms where it all took place and saw photos of torture, heard stories of the horrific treatment dealt out to innocent people and kept experiencing those moments where you wonder how one person can do such a thing to another. It was pretty tough going. Over at the Killing Fields where thousands of people met a horrible end we saw endless rows of bones and skulls and heard more stories of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge and their 3 and a bit years in power. I could write heaps more about all this but think its sad enough without rehashing it all in a travel blog.

The rest of the day was more fun. We wandered the local streets looking for a store that had fish that would eat the dead skin off our feet while we drank a free beer (all for $3) but we couldn't find it. We also strolled along the riverside where locals like to walk in the evening, fish and kick soccer balls. We knocked back countless offers of a tuk-tuk ride (a motorcycle pulling along a chariot basically - a great way to cool off as they are quite open to the wind but we weren't going far enough to justify it). We also found some quality Cambodian food. I'm pretty sure I worked in a short nap during the heat of the arvo too. It's been about 30 degrees or so but humid too so mid-afternoon is a bit tough going.

The following day we checked out the National Museum. So many Buddhas. Just when you thought that there couldn't be another statue of a serene looking Buddha, you'd round a corner and there was another one, smiling happily as if to say "Gotcha!". We also saw plenty of the Indian gods as they too have had a big influence on Cambodia.  There were a few spots where someone gives you an incense stick to place in front of a Buddha and we did that the first time but then found they expect a donation so I got good at respectfully saying no thanks after that.

After the museum it was pretty chilled. We managed to track down that place where the fish eat the dead skin off your feet but it had obviously been closed and was completely gutted. Very disappointing. My feet had so much to give! :)

After two days in Phnom Penh, we boarded a bus for the 6 hour ride to Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat. I'll write about that in another blog post.

The First Post

On the 14th December, accompanied by indoor soccer star and buddy The K-Man, I'm off to Cambodia for a quick holiday. If time and internet access allows, I'll be writing the occasional blog update.

Three destinations are planned. Start in Phnomh Penh (the capital), then over to Siem Reap (the home of Angkor Wat) and on to Banlung (3 day trek in the jungle). Then back home in Melbourne on Xmas Morning at 6am.