The Cambodia Experience

I've just now returned from Cambodia - Ty is there for another 9 days - and what an amazing country!!! I so wish that I'd had more time there, but I have to work on Monday. Here's the run-down of everything we did and saw while we were there:

Saturday, February 2: We drop Jakob off in Ty's (empty) apartment to facilitate cat-sitters, then grab the train to Seoul. We arrive early enough at the airport to be among the first to check in - which we believe allowed us to be upgraded to Business Class!

Business Class seats are *this* big!

We partake of the free beer and wine... and are pleasantly surprised (and a bit giggly) when the plane waitresses ask us to fill in an evaluation of the service!
We arrive in Siem Reap and get our moto-remorque (picture a scooter pulling a cart with seats in it) to our guest-house. We sit on the balcony, listening to the constant bustle of the street below....

Sunday, February 3: Instead of heading straight to Angkor Wat, we explore the town of Siem Reap, finding ourselves on a dusty (and a bit dodgy) street which happily leads us to a gorgeous luxury hotel (that we decide to stay in for one night later in the week) and the Butterfly Cafe, where we devour some delicious food, sitting in the garden and delighting in the atmosphere.

At the Butterfly Cafe - no butterflies in these pics, unfortunately

We head to Angkor Wat for the sunset, which also allows us to get our passes for the next three days.
Having only seen it in pictures, I find myself unprepared for the sheer enormity of the place, which we barely see a fraction of over the next 3 days. It's absolutely indescribable - crumbling or re-built temples, crowds of tourists (or sometimes nobody at all), kids trying to sell you everything, moto-remorque traffic jams. I try to imagine what it must have been like when it was first re-discovered by the French... the Cambodians knew it was there all along.

Inside Angkor Wat

We walk through a few of the main areas of Angkor Wat - but as it "closes" at 5:30, we have to leave before seeing too much. It's a first taste of what we both came to see.

Monday, February 4: We awake at the ungodly hour of 4:30 am for our sun rise balloon ride over Angkor Wat.

In the balloon over Angkor Wat.

It's a massive balloon, tethered to a 200m cord. We arrive at 5:45 but don't end up taking off until 6:40! Angkor Wat is amazing to see from the air... just huge.
We get back to our guesthouse and meet our guide for the day (definitely a good idea to hire a guide for your first day there - we learned so much about everything, from the architecture and design to the history of Cambodia), before going through Angkor Thom (including the Bayon temple, known for the faces that decorate its towers, Baphuor - built in the year 1060 - and the Royal Complex, including the Elephant Terrace and the mis-named Terrace of the Leper King) in the morning, stopping for lunch (curries eaten from coconuts), then an afternoon visit to see the main carved murals of Angkor Wat, learning all the legends and stories behind them (Which are sometimes a bit confusing (and giggle-inducing).

The faces in the towers at Bayon

A demon woman at the Elephant Terrace

Climbing up the ruins in flip-flops!

It's a long, hot day.... filled with clamouring up and down ruins, dodging other tourists, and a near-overload of information from our forever smiling and laughing guide.
We sample some palm-juice from a vendor supporting a yoke on her shoulders, then sample some really amazing (and bizarre) Cambodian fruit. It seems like every turn presents us with another new experience - we're certainly never bored.
But the day is not over yet: We have an amazing supper at a French restaurant, lamenting the fact that France didn't colonize more countries (if only for the quality of food and ready availability of good wine), before returning to loll about in hammocks on the balcony of our guesthouse, counting the geckos on the walls and reliving our spectacular 20-hour day.

Tuesday, February 5: We get a bit of a later start to the day, and head straight to Ta Prohm, probably the most famous bit of the whole complex. This is the ruin that has been overgrown by immense trees and that was made famous in the Tomb Raider movie.

The Tomb Raider Tree at Ta Prohm

Awed by the trees creeping over the ruins....

... and kissing in front of eleventy-million Asian tourists

An Apsara in one of the smaller, very well-preserved/rebuilt temples on the way home

It's definitely a feast for the eyes - amazingly awe-inspiring and gorgeous - but (not surprisingly) completely overrun with tour groups. We wander in and around it for almost 4 hours, only allowing us a few quick visits to some smaller, lesser-known temples on our way back.

We grab our stuff from the guesthouse and head on to the Angkor Village Hotel, which is our "treat" for the trip. We stake our claim next to the pool and are probably the sketchiest people at the "Welcome Cocktail". There's something fun about rubbing elbows with the super-rich who find us to be adventurous because we're smelly backpackers.
That evening, we go to the theatre across from the hotel for a traditional supper and dance show. At first, it's amazing -- like all the carving dancing women that decorate every square inch of the temples has come to life, accompanied by strange and haunting percussion instruments.... and then.... the screeching oboe and wailing singing starts (Mom - do you remember that Korean shaman ceremony that we left after 3 minutes???), which I can barely stand (but which Ty finds amazing - so, yeah, a bit of a difference of opinion there).

Wednesday, February 6: We take full advantage of our luxurious digs and order an immense breakfast to the room, sitting in our complimentary plush robes on our balcony overlooking the lotus pond before returning to dusty backpacker mode and heading back to the temples for our final day of exploration.

On the elephant. When tourists first started coming to Angkor Wat a hundred years ago, this was the only way to see it all.

We start with an elephant ride around the Bayon temple - which is cheesy and wonderful and fun! - before continuing to Preah Khan, which is by far my favourite of all the places that we saw.

Almost as soon as the forest is cleared away, it starts to grow back....

Imagine cataloguing and numbering each of these blocks, then trying to put them all back exactly where they originally belonged - a seemingly impossible puzzle!

There are fewer people, and more explanations of the on-going re-building and preservation of these amazing structures. It *is* easy to get "templed-out" when visiting Angkor Wat, but (for me) Preah Khan was the cure.
From there, we quickly visit the holy pool of Neak Pean before embarking on a rather surprising trip to the Floating Village of Tonle Sap lake.
We had originally hoped to spend the night at a less-visited area, as we'd seen things online saying that we could. A bit disappointed, we opted for a boat tour instead -- which proved to be amazing beyond our expectations! The ride there, in the moto-remorque, was hardly a comfortable one: a mud road winding between shacks on stilts (it's the dry season), fields filled with tethered water buffaloes, and some of the worst poverty imaginable (and yet, incredibly, the Cambodian people are still amazingly quick to smile some of the warmest smiles I've ever seen).

On the boat

This family, that smiled and waved as we passed, lives in a decrepit shack with 2 walls on a pile of mud surrounded by water that is completely polluted. The surface area of the floor is roughly the size of the average North American bathroom.

Our boat, questionably sea-worthy and piloted by a (smiling) teenager, takes us along a brown river, past tiny shacks on stilts where entire families live, past floating schools (and even a floating basketball court!) built by charities from other countries, and onto the lake, where hundreds of houseboats (mostly inhabited by Vietnamese) have created a sort of "city" - complete with shops, restaurants and even livestock - of over 4000 people. It's awe-inspiring and heartbreaking to see poverty made so picturesque.

Thursday, February 7: My last day - and reserved for shopping! We hit the Old Market, and pick up t-shirts, carvings, silk and other souvenirs (yes, yes, you probably have a gift from Cambodia coming soon).... and even manage to befriend a few of the vendors.
Exhausted, we find a place offering traditional Khmer massage (legs and arms, while seated in a very nice cushy chair) for $6 each. An hour later, feeling rather kneaded and wobbly, we eat (yet another) amazingly delicious meal.

Moto-remorques outside the Old Market

The Old Market at night

My flight doesn't leave until (arrrgh) 11:50pm, giving us a final chilled out evening together, overlooking the constant activity around the Old Market... until I have to grab a moto-remorque to the airport, and leave Ty behind to enjoy the rest of Cambodia on his own.

Miscellaneous Tidbits of Information:

• Cambodians smile all the time. And it's 100% genuine. Given their country's history of violence, genocide, war etc, it's really surprising.

A group of musicians outside Ta Prohm, all of them victims of landmines

• There are victims of landmines just about everywhere. It seems that you can't walk 100m without seeing another person with burns on their face, or missing limbs.... and it's everyone - older people, young children... and it's one of the most horrifying things to see.
• The food is absolutely incredible - I don't think I ate the same thing twice.
• When Cambodians see a couple, they instantly assume that you are married. Ty and I had all sorts of fun questions like, "How long have you been married?", or "Where did your husband go?" from everyone from hotel staff to our boat pilot to moto-remorque drivers. We definitely had a good laugh at that and learned to just play along.
  

Self-camming in front of Angkor Wat (reflected in the water behind us)

So, yeah, I definitely loved Cambodia - with only 5 days to visit one place, and even with the busyness of our days, it was still only scratching the surface. I know that I will certainly have to go back there at some point....