After the journey from Bangkok the day before neither Margarita,
Francesca or myself could do an early morning for the temples, so we
decided to get up and have a long breakfast before catching a moto out
to the Tonle Sap lake to see the floating fishing village of Chong
Kneas. The lake itself is the largest in South-East Asia and flows into
the Melong River through the Tonle Sap River. Every year when the
Mekong floods during the wet season the Tonle Sap changes direction and
the lake grows from about 2500sq km to around 13000sq km,so you can see
why a floating village built on boats is a good idea.
The village was full of small children playing marbles, swimming
in the lake, or helping their parents fish or cook. All of them would
run up to us and try out their English, sometimes getting no further
than saying "Hellogoodbye" and running away again. We walked as far as
we could through the village to get away from the mercenary boatmen who
wanted $20 for a boat onto the lake and found and teenage boy who
offered to take us out for $8, showing us all the diiferent parts of
the village, split along racial lines between Vietnamese, Cambodian and
Lao areas. The main food is obviously fish and there are many
fish-farms along the banks of the lake which we had a look at, along
with a couple which grow crocodiles as well. After a swim in the lake
(ok, I watched as the girls swam) we headed back to Siem Reap for the
sunset and our first vist to Angkor Wat itself.
I still can't describe how I felt when we got there, I can't say
that it was a disapointment but the very fact that it can be seen from
the road and you have to fight your way through hordes of postcard
selling kids means that the sense of discovery I half expected was
missing. We all agreed that it was a stunning temple but it didn't have
the emotional connection we all expected. Luckily with repeated visits
at different times of the day we got to see it at it's best, which is
equal (I think) to my visits to the Pyramids in Egypt. Sunset is a very
popular time to go to Angkor, at other times, such as first thing in
the morning, it's close to being deserted, and with the monks from the
nearby monastary walking around it has a much greater effect.
The next 3 days were spent getting up at 4.30am in order to get
out to the temples for sunrise, and returning in the evening after 6pm
for dinner and bed. By the end of the 3rd day I was at the point where
I would have been happy if I'd never had seen a temple again, although
there were a couple of standouts. Ta Prohm is proberly one of my
favourite temples of any country, it's been left pretty much as it was
first found with very little restoration work being done. The jungle
has completly overrun the area, huge trees with enormous buttress roots
pulling down walls and blocking doors and corridors, giving the snese
of discovery and adventure missing at Angkor Wat. First thing in the
morning with no one else around and just the sound of the birds in the
jungle I don't think that it could have looked any more beautiful the
day it was finished in 1186.
Sunsets were usually spent at Angkor Wat, once we learnt to
ignore the other hordes (usually avoided by sitting at the north lake
instead of the south) it was a very pleasant way to spend the time,
with the sun-lit temple being reflected in the lotus-filled waters of
the lake. For one sunrise one morning Francesca and I went to the
temple of Phnom Bakheng, more commonly used as a sunset viewing point
by hundreds of people, and watched the sunrise over Angkor Wat rising
out of the jungle a kilometer away. About 10 minutes after the sun
rose, the 20 or so people who had made the climb up the hill left,
leaving the temple to the 2 of us for an hour of much appreciated
piece, only broken when an old woman who came up to collect rubbish
stole the cookies I had brought for breakfast. I only offred her one
and she took the whole packet and walked off! I was really looking
forward to those cookies as well, but reasoned that it was good karma
for the day. But I've learnt not to offer the whole packet to anyone
again.....
At each temple there are food stalls (great pancakes)and
children selling drinks, postcards and other souverniers. First
immpresions are that they should be at school but after talking to them
we found out that they go to school for half a day and spend the other
half either helping their parents or selling things to tourists at the
temples. Most of them have learn fantastic English skills doing this
and they are so quick-witted that it's hard work trying to win any
argument over why you don't want more postcards. The first argument is
that you may already have some postcards but they are "same same but
different" to the ones you are currently being offered. This a line
which crops up everywhere and there are even guesthouses with this as a
name. When one of the girls told me that if I didn't buy something she
would cry, I replied "well if you cry that will make me cry too". The
comeback "If you cry you are a ladyboy" was so quick that I had to buy
something from her out of admiration. One lunch we spent with a group
of kids at one of the temples, once they knew we weren't going to buy
much from them they were happy to sit with us for a couple of hours,
talking and playing with my cameras and trying to teach me how to sell
cold drinks to tourists. If I had to live off the money I made, I'd
starve. I'm sure that having to work with 3 currencies ($US, Cambodian
Riel and Thai Baht) teaches them good maths skills as well, they can
work out how you need to pay a bill using a combination of all 3 monies
in seconds, far quicker than I could. Or maybe I'm just not as clever.
By the third day though it was getting abit tiring trying to fight them
off all the time, trying to explain that you're not saying NO as a
bargaining tactic, it's just that you don't want 10 bracelets....
Mostly though it's pretty harmless entertainment.
After 3 days Margarita had to return to Bangkok, so Francesca
and I decided that enough temples was enough, and took a day off. We
had a very long and fantastic breakfast in the Blue Pumpkin restuarant,
fresh granary bread, doughnuts and tea, then went out to the
'unofficial' Landmine Museum. The goverment doesn't like it as they
have their own museum they want people to go to, and it used to have
live examples of landmines collected by the owner, a mine layer for the
Khmer Rouge and now a mine clearer in the surrounding villiges. It's
quite a depressing place, full of mines laid during the way and
unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans during the Vietnam war which
the owner has cleared and deativated. It's staffed by people from the
area around Siem Reap who are themselves landmine victims, and their
stories printed up on the wall are pretty depressing reading. There was
one in particular about a 13 year old boy where you could tell when
people had got to a certain paragraph, where it read "he thought he had
no future and used to cry in the evenings." You could just see people's
faces fall.... There are around 40,000 cambodians who have lost limbs
due to landmines, and 40-50 people are killed in their fields every
month. And with an estimated 6 million still to be found this will go
on for years to come. And America still makes them for their own
use....
Francesca left for Phnom Penh the next day, I stayed for 2 more
days to get back to some of my favourite temples at different times,
each temple has it's peak time to be visited as people follow the
classic "Big Route" or "little Route", established before the civil
war, and at other times they can be close to empty. There were a
couple of temples which I didn't have time to see which are buried in
the jungle north of Siem Reap, but by this time I was also getting
pretty templed-out and wasn't appreciating them as much as I should, so
after 7 days at Angkor I got on the bus, had 7 hours of being thrown
around by the pot-holed roads, and arrived in Phnom Penh in time for
sunset by the lake.
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