Today is our second day of temple touring. The tours are all very well organised here and the three days that you do that are indicated on all the maps, so if you are traveling independently then you know that at least you are doing the right things and not being led completely astray. There is the Small Tour Circuit which is what we did yesterday, then the Grand Tour Circuit, which is what we are doing today and finally, but not officially there is the extended tour, which is what we will do tomorrow. Although the Small Tour sounds like a subset of the Grand Tour, it actually isn’t and you visit totally different temples on the two days. The Small Tour circuit uses roads that are within the radius of the roads that the Grand Tour uses, hence the names.
Our first temple for the day is Preah Khan, which we got to by going back through Angkor Thom. When we’d gone to Angor Thom yesterday, we didn’t stop at the South Gate entrance, although I’d wanted to because of the statues that line either side of the bridge leading up to the gate. Today, however we stopped so that we could take some photos of the bridge and climb up on top of the wall to get a good view of the bridge which crosses the Siem Reap River.
Today we drove straight through Angor Thom and on to our first temple stop of the day, which is Preah Khan, a long flat temple that is just outside the walls of Angor Thom. Again this temple was in very broken down condition. We did learn one new English word – BECAREFUL! It was on a sign in front of one of the rather dodgy looking doors, that you couldn’t walk through because on the other side of it was a pile of rubble from where the roof had collapsed. Many of these temples that are in a run down condition are being restored, so what is either tumbled down now or being held up by support beams may in a few years time be restored back to something resembling it’s original condition. The walk around Preah Khan was very enjoyable as you can walk through the temple on the way in and then round the outside of it on the way out, so you get a range of perspectives. A sit down some where along the way gives us time to read the guide book and get some idea of who built it, why and when and what it’s main purpose is.
Next stop was Neak Pean. Very small, very different and very cool. You enter along a long pathway to come to an area with a large square pool in the centre of it. On each side of the pool is a smaller pool, that is fed from the main pool. The fountains that feed the smaller pools are housed in little caves and are in the form of an elephant, a lion, a human and a horse. The elephant fountain is shown in the attached photos.
From there it was on to Ta Som, another of the long flat temples. Ta Som is famous for the tree that totally encapsulates the east gate. The gate is big, but the tree around it takes over the whole entrance way and the tower – quite amazing really.
The final temple before lunch was East Mebon. This is another one of the layered vertical ones where you go scrambling up really steep steps to get to the top of the temple. The steps up from the main entrance looked pretty daunting, not so much for going up, but for coming back down especially when you’ve got a back pack with a heavy camera swinging around in it. We were just contemplating heading round to one of the sides to try and find a simpler route when we were latched onto by one of the local unofficial guides. You have to watch out for these, as once they’ve latched onto you, they can be hard to let go and you know what’s coming at the end of the trip. In this instance, we were quite happy to have someone show us the simplest routes to the top of the temple and so paid him a small tip for his help at the end of the tour.
After a late-ish lunch we visited our last temple for the day - Pre-Rup – which was another of the layered vertical variety and although it was larger than East Mebon, we had no trouble scrambling to the top of this one and managed to do so without the ‘assistance’ of a local guide.
For dinner, we took a Tuk Tuk into the night market, which is about 1k down the road and cost $US2 each way. Dinner was still a fairly up market affair at $US27. We’ll be getting cheaper in the days ahead, although we don’t expect to get down to $US3 that we’ve seen in some roadside stalls.
Tuk Tuk’s in Cambodia are little motorbikes (90-125cc) that pull a small carriage that can take up to 4 people. We use them around Siem Reap, but other people use them to do the temple tours and some people even use them to do the extended tours, although that would be a dumb idea because although they are covered, they are also open, so on the dusty roads you’d get pretty messy. We do see some people on them with surgical masks to try and keep the dust out of their nose and mouths. We found the air conditioning in the car did that more than adequately.
The other very popular form of transport around Siem Reap is of course, scooters. Honda has the very inspirationally named “dream” and 125cc monster. Suzuki have taken a slightly different marketing approach, although some would say a more realistic version by naming their 110cc scooter the “smash” – nice. Helmets are not compulsory in Cambodia, although we’ve read that they will become mandatory from next Thursday January 8th. With helmets costing $US18-20 and an average wage of only $US80 per month, it’s a big ask for the population, but apparently they are flying off the shelves.
Beyond that, there isn’t too great a requirement for safety gear on scooters in Cambodia. They are definitely being used as they were designed, with most people riding them in jandals. The most common protective gear appears to be a surgical mask to protect against the fumes. Having said all that, the Cambodians are really slow drivers and riders and are also very good at all merging in together, so although accidents do happen, the level of protective gear is what I would probably wear if I was riding one in this heat. Fortunately for me (and Anne) the government doesn’t allow scooter or motor cycle rentals to foreign tourists in Siem Reap because of the number of crashes and injuries that they receive – my pick would be mostly self inflicted.
As well as being the pulling power for the Tuk Tuks, scooters are used for just about everything else, particularly getting your produce to market and you see people riding around with them laden down with piles of wood, fruit and vegetables and even up to 3 pigs, which I’ll try and get a photo of because they are put into these splint cages and carried on their backs on the back of the motor bike with their feet protruding out either end. Not the most gracious for the poor old pig, but it certainly makes a site for the tourists.
We got a couple of texts at 6pm (midnight NZ Time) wishing us a happy new year. We managed to survive until 9:30pm before crashing into bed. The hotel had a really amazing ice bar and DJs playing and although we did hear the count down and then the amazingly loud fire works and music that went on to 1pm, we were too tired to be bothered getting up to join in the celebrations. All the walking in the humidity and heat and still getting our body clocks into the local rhythm must have taken their toll. It’s either that, or we’re getting old.
Anyway, happy new year to everybody.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Day 2 – Tuesday 30th December – Angor Wat and other Temples
I’m writing this on January 2nd - our first day off and after 3 and a half days visiting the temples. It’s been a great time – some magnificent sites and certainly having our own driver for the whole time made it a really enjoyable experience. Anyway, back to the blog.
Off for our first day of temple touring today. One ticket covers all the temples and you buy a 3-day pass for $US40 per person. The ticket office is on the way to Angkor Wat (the first temple out of Siem Reap) and when you purchase your ticket, there is a little digital camera connected to the ticket machine that snaps your photo and then prints it on your ticket. All very good for security, fraud and as a souvenir of your visit. The digital photo thing seems all the rage in Asia, as we’d experienced the same thing at Bangkok Airport both on arrival and departure.
Armed with our tickets we headed to Angkor Wat, the Big Kahuna of Cambodian temples and believed to be the largest religious structure in the world. Legend has it that when one of the historic kings died, he took his eldest son to the heavens with him, however, he was turned away (sorry, not sure why – maybe too young, or possibly not dead) but as compensation he was allowed to have one of the heavenly buildings built for him on earth. Being a modest chap and not wanting to piss off the gods, he decided to have the celestial ox stables built as his dwelling on earth and hence we now have Angkor Wat, or what has been described as the 8th wonder of the world.
Anyway, we were dropped off outside “the Ox Stables” and preceded to make our way over the causeway which crosses the very large (190m wide) moat to the entrance to Angkor Wat. The temple complex is a massive rectangle 1.5km x 1.3km with gates at the 4 points of the compass and causeways on the East and West gates. The West Gate is the main entrance and the one that we entered through. Once inside the outer wall, the causeway continues right up to the front of the temple past two small stone buildings (libraries – one on either side of the causeway). One of the pools was full of pink lilies and made the other one look very low rent, until you realized that without the lilies, the empty pool created a perfect reflection of the main temple.
Entry to the Wat is via incredibly steep stone stairs. To make it easier and safer for the huge number of tourists that now visit the temple each year, wooden steps have been created over the stone steps, that are of a much flatter gradient. Because there are so many different points that you can enter the temple it is still easy to find the more vertically challenging original stone steps to clamber in and out of the various levels of the temple.
The temple itself if massive (1025m x 800m) and richly decorated with beautiful bas-reliefs (stone carvings). They depict a varied and vast array of battles between armies, heaven and hell, gods and demons, good and evil and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is apparently (according to Lonely Planet for one) the most famous of the carvings and depicts 88 Asuras (devils) and 92 Devas (goddesses) churning the sea to extract the elixir of immortality.
As I said, the temple is built on a number of layers and we clambered up and down these, marveling at the engineering, the craftsmanship, the magnitude and magnificence of it all and wandered through the grounds for almost 3 hours before returning to our driver and on to the next great temple – Bayon, which is contained in the Angkor Thom temple complex.
Angkor Thom (Great City) is actually a bigger temple complex (some 10sq kms) than Angkor Wat, but the Bayon, which is the main temple in the complex is much smaller than Angkor Wat. Bayon which is the creation of Jayavarman VII (who seems to have been a prolific temple builder and created many of the temples in the area) is famous for it’s four faced towers. When I say 4 faced, look at the photos – a big smirking face on each side of the tower and there are 54 towers, so 216 faces looking out in four directions. The temple itself is in something of a state of disrepair, so you have to clamber over some ruins in some instances. Having said that, there is still plenty standing and you can climb the multiple levels to different perspectives and get yourself closer to the gods. Academics don’t know the significance of Bayon, but believe the faces have been created in Jayavarman VII’s image, so the smirk is appropriate, given that nobody knows what it’s there for.
Next to Bayon is the Baphuon temple, which, like Angkor Wat you enter over a long causeway. Baphuon is undergoing a massive restoration project, so we weren’t allowed inside, but did get to walk around the back to see the huge reclining Buddha that has been carved into the outer wall of the temple. Restoration of this Buddha was completed a few years ago, but continuing subsidence issues and the fact it probably isn’t very good made recognizing the Buddha something of a challenge for my man’s eyes.
A stop for lunch and then on to Ta Keo temple. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but neither of us really recall what this small temple was like. It’s biggest claim to fame is that it was struck by lightening during construction at which point they all downed tools and never came back to finish it.
Ta Prohm, our next temple suffers from no such obscurity. It is known as the forest temple, not only because it is so far into the jungle, but because the jungle has so completely taken over the actual temple buildings themselves. Trees have sprouted in the walls and roves of the temple and over the centuries have grown into massive trees, with their root systems completely encapsulating the temples. Again a lot of this temple has been reduced to piles of stone, but the beauty of the forest setting and the magnificence of the building that remain made this one of our favourite temples.
With each successive temple we visited, the number of children approaching us to sell us books, postcards, scarves, table cloths and drinks kept growing. Unlike our trip to Vietnam in 1996, the selling in Cambodia is much more less pushy, although that could be a result of us visiting Vietnam much earlier in its development and the Cambodians generally seeming much better off and consequently better fed than the Vietnamese at that time. The easiest thing to do is if you’re “childrened out” for the day was simply to make friendly hand signals, but not to speak and then they would go away. For the rest of the time, if you talk to them, then at least they get to practice their English, as there is a limit to how many scarves and postcards and one person could want.
Banteay Kdei was our second to last temple for the day. This was a long flat temple like Ta Prohm (rather than in vertical layers like Angkor Wat and Bayon) that also like Ta Prohm was also very broken down. That in itself is not hugely important, because you can still get an excellent impression of what the temples were like and what the overall environment was like. Each one was a very pleasant and relaxing walk and armed with our guide book and map, we were able to get a good understanding of the history and importance of each temple.
Although we had had a long day by this stage, we couldn’t help but be impressed with not only the grandeur of the temples, but also the shear number of them that are crammed into such a small area and this was only the first day and we still had two more days of temple visiting ahead of us.
Our final temple for the day was Prasat Kravan, which fortunately was a very small brick temple right beside the road, so we didn’t have to walk too much more, because by the end of the day we were well exhausted and looking forward to a few cold beers at the 5-7pm happy “hour”.
For dinner that night, we stuck with posh nosh and ate at a hotel down the road. We had looked at staying there when we were planning our trip because it’s a training school for young Cambodians and its restaurant got rave reviews on Trip Advisor. We couldn’t get into the hotel, but the restaurant was top notch and right up to the mark of the people who had reviewed it. The 6 hour time difference meant that we again crashed early after a long but rewarding day.
Off for our first day of temple touring today. One ticket covers all the temples and you buy a 3-day pass for $US40 per person. The ticket office is on the way to Angkor Wat (the first temple out of Siem Reap) and when you purchase your ticket, there is a little digital camera connected to the ticket machine that snaps your photo and then prints it on your ticket. All very good for security, fraud and as a souvenir of your visit. The digital photo thing seems all the rage in Asia, as we’d experienced the same thing at Bangkok Airport both on arrival and departure.
Armed with our tickets we headed to Angkor Wat, the Big Kahuna of Cambodian temples and believed to be the largest religious structure in the world. Legend has it that when one of the historic kings died, he took his eldest son to the heavens with him, however, he was turned away (sorry, not sure why – maybe too young, or possibly not dead) but as compensation he was allowed to have one of the heavenly buildings built for him on earth. Being a modest chap and not wanting to piss off the gods, he decided to have the celestial ox stables built as his dwelling on earth and hence we now have Angkor Wat, or what has been described as the 8th wonder of the world.
Anyway, we were dropped off outside “the Ox Stables” and preceded to make our way over the causeway which crosses the very large (190m wide) moat to the entrance to Angkor Wat. The temple complex is a massive rectangle 1.5km x 1.3km with gates at the 4 points of the compass and causeways on the East and West gates. The West Gate is the main entrance and the one that we entered through. Once inside the outer wall, the causeway continues right up to the front of the temple past two small stone buildings (libraries – one on either side of the causeway). One of the pools was full of pink lilies and made the other one look very low rent, until you realized that without the lilies, the empty pool created a perfect reflection of the main temple.
Entry to the Wat is via incredibly steep stone stairs. To make it easier and safer for the huge number of tourists that now visit the temple each year, wooden steps have been created over the stone steps, that are of a much flatter gradient. Because there are so many different points that you can enter the temple it is still easy to find the more vertically challenging original stone steps to clamber in and out of the various levels of the temple.
The temple itself if massive (1025m x 800m) and richly decorated with beautiful bas-reliefs (stone carvings). They depict a varied and vast array of battles between armies, heaven and hell, gods and demons, good and evil and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is apparently (according to Lonely Planet for one) the most famous of the carvings and depicts 88 Asuras (devils) and 92 Devas (goddesses) churning the sea to extract the elixir of immortality.
As I said, the temple is built on a number of layers and we clambered up and down these, marveling at the engineering, the craftsmanship, the magnitude and magnificence of it all and wandered through the grounds for almost 3 hours before returning to our driver and on to the next great temple – Bayon, which is contained in the Angkor Thom temple complex.
Angkor Thom (Great City) is actually a bigger temple complex (some 10sq kms) than Angkor Wat, but the Bayon, which is the main temple in the complex is much smaller than Angkor Wat. Bayon which is the creation of Jayavarman VII (who seems to have been a prolific temple builder and created many of the temples in the area) is famous for it’s four faced towers. When I say 4 faced, look at the photos – a big smirking face on each side of the tower and there are 54 towers, so 216 faces looking out in four directions. The temple itself is in something of a state of disrepair, so you have to clamber over some ruins in some instances. Having said that, there is still plenty standing and you can climb the multiple levels to different perspectives and get yourself closer to the gods. Academics don’t know the significance of Bayon, but believe the faces have been created in Jayavarman VII’s image, so the smirk is appropriate, given that nobody knows what it’s there for.
Next to Bayon is the Baphuon temple, which, like Angkor Wat you enter over a long causeway. Baphuon is undergoing a massive restoration project, so we weren’t allowed inside, but did get to walk around the back to see the huge reclining Buddha that has been carved into the outer wall of the temple. Restoration of this Buddha was completed a few years ago, but continuing subsidence issues and the fact it probably isn’t very good made recognizing the Buddha something of a challenge for my man’s eyes.
A stop for lunch and then on to Ta Keo temple. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but neither of us really recall what this small temple was like. It’s biggest claim to fame is that it was struck by lightening during construction at which point they all downed tools and never came back to finish it.
Ta Prohm, our next temple suffers from no such obscurity. It is known as the forest temple, not only because it is so far into the jungle, but because the jungle has so completely taken over the actual temple buildings themselves. Trees have sprouted in the walls and roves of the temple and over the centuries have grown into massive trees, with their root systems completely encapsulating the temples. Again a lot of this temple has been reduced to piles of stone, but the beauty of the forest setting and the magnificence of the building that remain made this one of our favourite temples.
With each successive temple we visited, the number of children approaching us to sell us books, postcards, scarves, table cloths and drinks kept growing. Unlike our trip to Vietnam in 1996, the selling in Cambodia is much more less pushy, although that could be a result of us visiting Vietnam much earlier in its development and the Cambodians generally seeming much better off and consequently better fed than the Vietnamese at that time. The easiest thing to do is if you’re “childrened out” for the day was simply to make friendly hand signals, but not to speak and then they would go away. For the rest of the time, if you talk to them, then at least they get to practice their English, as there is a limit to how many scarves and postcards and one person could want.
Banteay Kdei was our second to last temple for the day. This was a long flat temple like Ta Prohm (rather than in vertical layers like Angkor Wat and Bayon) that also like Ta Prohm was also very broken down. That in itself is not hugely important, because you can still get an excellent impression of what the temples were like and what the overall environment was like. Each one was a very pleasant and relaxing walk and armed with our guide book and map, we were able to get a good understanding of the history and importance of each temple.
Although we had had a long day by this stage, we couldn’t help but be impressed with not only the grandeur of the temples, but also the shear number of them that are crammed into such a small area and this was only the first day and we still had two more days of temple visiting ahead of us.
Our final temple for the day was Prasat Kravan, which fortunately was a very small brick temple right beside the road, so we didn’t have to walk too much more, because by the end of the day we were well exhausted and looking forward to a few cold beers at the 5-7pm happy “hour”.
For dinner that night, we stuck with posh nosh and ate at a hotel down the road. We had looked at staying there when we were planning our trip because it’s a training school for young Cambodians and its restaurant got rave reviews on Trip Advisor. We couldn’t get into the hotel, but the restaurant was top notch and right up to the mark of the people who had reviewed it. The 6 hour time difference meant that we again crashed early after a long but rewarding day.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Day 1 – Monday 29th December – Arrival and Floating Village
By 4:30am we were up and well ready to go – the 6 hour time difference between New Zealand and Thailand meant that we were wide awake anyway. An hour to get showered dressed and to the airport for our 5:30am check in time was as always too much time, so we were actually wandering round in the departure lounge have completed “check in formalities” at 5:20am waiting for our flight at 7:30am. The flight to Siem Reap was on an ATR, so a nice slow low flight that lets you see the scenery out the window. As we arrived into Siem Reap, the view out the window showed the ground was saturated – surface flooding and all – and this is supposed to be the dry season.
The Airport at Siem Reap is tiny and reminded me more of an Asian hotel, built in the style of a pagoda and a world away from the magnificent sprawling futuristic steel, glass and concrete structure of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, which we had just left.
We flew to Siem Reap on Bangkok Airways, which is the Thai regional airline. Its planes are all decked out in bright colours depicting beach scenes. When we got off the plane, everybody stood around on the tarmac taking photos of the plane (see link to photos). Once inside the terminal building, the hotel theme continued, with 12 people lined up in uniform at “reception” to greet us. The uniform was of course military and the greeting very formal. Firstly, there were the 3 people who took passports and the $US20 for your visa. Then there were the 7 men who were given the passports to check whether you were to be granted entrance into the Kingdom of Cambodia. Finally there were the two men whose job is was to return your passports. Anne and I being the last people off the plane, but the first to get tired of looking at it were second in the queue for visa applications. Obviously though, New Zealanders are a bit of a novelty because we took the longest to get our passports back and were passed by the rest of the plane, who we think were Chinese. It was a nice interlude however, as it meant our bags were, for once, waiting for us when we finally got through to collect them.
The hotel shuttle which we had so painstakingly organised didn’t show up, so after a brief wait we were informed by the taxi “organiser” that the hotel must have been busy so we should take a taxi, which we did. Our driver into town has now been our driver for the last three days and has taken us round all the temples, so it’s worked out well for us and been a nice little earner for him. He seemed like a very decent young man and told us up front what a driver and car for the day would cost. $US30 for a driver for a day sounded reasonable to us and he’s taken us all over the place, been very informative, dropped us at good places for lunch, so we’ve been very happy with the service we’ve got.
In the afternoon, we arranged with him to pick us up and take us to the floating village at Kampong Phhluk. Our driver advised us that that was the best thing to do, since we didn’t have a full day to visit the temples. Our guide book also recommended it, so he duly collected us at 1pm, after we’d been to the local market to replace our hats, and took us off to the floating village. On our map it was shown as being about 12kms out of town, so just a short trip. That was how it started anyway, but a few ks down the road we turned off the highway and started heading for the lake. After about a kilometer our speed had slowed and we were weaving all over the road to avoid the potholes. A few Ks of that and with no lake or village in site and he pulls off to the side of the road and says “the road is too bumpy from here, so you will go to the lake on scooters.
It was at about this point that we realized that we both didn’t really know what we had gotten ourselves into and here we were out in the middle of nowhere, with a driver we’d just met and now we were being driven off to some indeterminate location on two small scooters by two other people we didn’t know. Oh well, just go with the flow. “She’ll be right mate”. For some reason, by scooter needed a bag of cement placed in the step through well – I guess it was so that we didn’t do wheelies all the way, as I had a significant weight advantage over my driver. So off we went on our scooters down a sandy rutted track for about three kilometers to where the boats were parked.
Now about this lake. It is called Tonlé Sap and is known as the heart beat of Cambodia. The lake is the largest fresh water lake in South East Asia, but the amazing thing about it is that it’s size varies from about 2,500sq km in the dry season to about 13,000sq km during the wet season. During the wet season the water levels in the Mekong delta get so high that the Tonlé Sap river backs up and expands the size of the lake. During the dry season, the river feeds the Mekong Delta, so it’s size contracts – hence the heartbeat – expansion and contraction. As we are here in the dry season, the lake is contracting and so some houses are already out of the water and Kampong Phhluk the town we are visiting is half in and half out.
The boat ride out to the village took about half an hour through a kind of two way boat lane cut in the mangroves. On the way we saw people fishing (the main income earner for the village), repairing nets and clearing weeds from the mangrove swamps. As we approached the town, stilted houses started appearing above the mangroves. They are built on 6m high poles, with ladders up to them. Like most neighbourhoods, the houses came in varying qualities, with the basic ones having thatched sides and roofs up to the most elaborate being made of corrugated iron sides and roofs.
As the village is partly out of the water, we were dropped off at the part of the village that is completely above water. As luck would have it, we were dropped right outside the local school, where the children were playing in the school yard. No sooner were we off the boat than the sales pitch started. This one was different from others we’d experienced in Asia and wasn’t for books, scarves or cans of coke but to buy packets of exercise books and pencils for the school. For $US5 you got a pack of 20 books and a pile of pencils. How could we possibly say no? So Anne and I bought a packet each. As soon as we did that, all the children were called back into the class and Anne and I had to scramble up the ladders (big steps they were) and deliver the books and pencils to the children. They had a neat trick of having less pencils than exercise books, so they tried to sell us more pencils for $US2, but we weren’t buying that, so we went on a tour of the village where one young boy told us all about how they lived and how the men in the village would move out into the lake as it receded and then move back into their houses when the wet season bought the lake back into the village. He spoke very good English and obviously liked practicing on the tourists. While we were there, they were drying shrimps on big flax nets. The houses were quite open because of the heat, so you could see people cooking, washing, talking on their mobile phones and playing with their children.
After leaving the village, we went further out into the mangrove swamp until we got to the main part of the lake, which is obviously huge and stretches all the way to the horizon and beyond. The return journey was the reverse of the way out, except the sun came out, so we got some great photos of the village in the sun. It was when we were getting back on the scooter that I saw my driver hunting round for his bag of cement and putting it in the step-thru that I realized what it was for. Although it was a sandy track, there was only one section of about 10m that I had to leap off and push him through, so it was pretty good. Anne found the scooter section a real highlight and it was something quite unexpected on a day of many surprises.
On the way back into Siem Reap, we stopped and picked up our driver’s Aunt to take her into Siem Reap and because we were so impressed with the trip that he had organised for us, decided that we would use him for the next three days for our tours round the temples.
We dined in the Hotel Restaurant that night, which had superb food, before retiring early for a decent nights sleep. Day one over and two happy campers.
The Airport at Siem Reap is tiny and reminded me more of an Asian hotel, built in the style of a pagoda and a world away from the magnificent sprawling futuristic steel, glass and concrete structure of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, which we had just left.
We flew to Siem Reap on Bangkok Airways, which is the Thai regional airline. Its planes are all decked out in bright colours depicting beach scenes. When we got off the plane, everybody stood around on the tarmac taking photos of the plane (see link to photos). Once inside the terminal building, the hotel theme continued, with 12 people lined up in uniform at “reception” to greet us. The uniform was of course military and the greeting very formal. Firstly, there were the 3 people who took passports and the $US20 for your visa. Then there were the 7 men who were given the passports to check whether you were to be granted entrance into the Kingdom of Cambodia. Finally there were the two men whose job is was to return your passports. Anne and I being the last people off the plane, but the first to get tired of looking at it were second in the queue for visa applications. Obviously though, New Zealanders are a bit of a novelty because we took the longest to get our passports back and were passed by the rest of the plane, who we think were Chinese. It was a nice interlude however, as it meant our bags were, for once, waiting for us when we finally got through to collect them.
The hotel shuttle which we had so painstakingly organised didn’t show up, so after a brief wait we were informed by the taxi “organiser” that the hotel must have been busy so we should take a taxi, which we did. Our driver into town has now been our driver for the last three days and has taken us round all the temples, so it’s worked out well for us and been a nice little earner for him. He seemed like a very decent young man and told us up front what a driver and car for the day would cost. $US30 for a driver for a day sounded reasonable to us and he’s taken us all over the place, been very informative, dropped us at good places for lunch, so we’ve been very happy with the service we’ve got.
In the afternoon, we arranged with him to pick us up and take us to the floating village at Kampong Phhluk. Our driver advised us that that was the best thing to do, since we didn’t have a full day to visit the temples. Our guide book also recommended it, so he duly collected us at 1pm, after we’d been to the local market to replace our hats, and took us off to the floating village. On our map it was shown as being about 12kms out of town, so just a short trip. That was how it started anyway, but a few ks down the road we turned off the highway and started heading for the lake. After about a kilometer our speed had slowed and we were weaving all over the road to avoid the potholes. A few Ks of that and with no lake or village in site and he pulls off to the side of the road and says “the road is too bumpy from here, so you will go to the lake on scooters.
It was at about this point that we realized that we both didn’t really know what we had gotten ourselves into and here we were out in the middle of nowhere, with a driver we’d just met and now we were being driven off to some indeterminate location on two small scooters by two other people we didn’t know. Oh well, just go with the flow. “She’ll be right mate”. For some reason, by scooter needed a bag of cement placed in the step through well – I guess it was so that we didn’t do wheelies all the way, as I had a significant weight advantage over my driver. So off we went on our scooters down a sandy rutted track for about three kilometers to where the boats were parked.
Now about this lake. It is called Tonlé Sap and is known as the heart beat of Cambodia. The lake is the largest fresh water lake in South East Asia, but the amazing thing about it is that it’s size varies from about 2,500sq km in the dry season to about 13,000sq km during the wet season. During the wet season the water levels in the Mekong delta get so high that the Tonlé Sap river backs up and expands the size of the lake. During the dry season, the river feeds the Mekong Delta, so it’s size contracts – hence the heartbeat – expansion and contraction. As we are here in the dry season, the lake is contracting and so some houses are already out of the water and Kampong Phhluk the town we are visiting is half in and half out.
The boat ride out to the village took about half an hour through a kind of two way boat lane cut in the mangroves. On the way we saw people fishing (the main income earner for the village), repairing nets and clearing weeds from the mangrove swamps. As we approached the town, stilted houses started appearing above the mangroves. They are built on 6m high poles, with ladders up to them. Like most neighbourhoods, the houses came in varying qualities, with the basic ones having thatched sides and roofs up to the most elaborate being made of corrugated iron sides and roofs.
As the village is partly out of the water, we were dropped off at the part of the village that is completely above water. As luck would have it, we were dropped right outside the local school, where the children were playing in the school yard. No sooner were we off the boat than the sales pitch started. This one was different from others we’d experienced in Asia and wasn’t for books, scarves or cans of coke but to buy packets of exercise books and pencils for the school. For $US5 you got a pack of 20 books and a pile of pencils. How could we possibly say no? So Anne and I bought a packet each. As soon as we did that, all the children were called back into the class and Anne and I had to scramble up the ladders (big steps they were) and deliver the books and pencils to the children. They had a neat trick of having less pencils than exercise books, so they tried to sell us more pencils for $US2, but we weren’t buying that, so we went on a tour of the village where one young boy told us all about how they lived and how the men in the village would move out into the lake as it receded and then move back into their houses when the wet season bought the lake back into the village. He spoke very good English and obviously liked practicing on the tourists. While we were there, they were drying shrimps on big flax nets. The houses were quite open because of the heat, so you could see people cooking, washing, talking on their mobile phones and playing with their children.
After leaving the village, we went further out into the mangrove swamp until we got to the main part of the lake, which is obviously huge and stretches all the way to the horizon and beyond. The return journey was the reverse of the way out, except the sun came out, so we got some great photos of the village in the sun. It was when we were getting back on the scooter that I saw my driver hunting round for his bag of cement and putting it in the step-thru that I realized what it was for. Although it was a sandy track, there was only one section of about 10m that I had to leap off and push him through, so it was pretty good. Anne found the scooter section a real highlight and it was something quite unexpected on a day of many surprises.
On the way back into Siem Reap, we stopped and picked up our driver’s Aunt to take her into Siem Reap and because we were so impressed with the trip that he had organised for us, decided that we would use him for the next three days for our tours round the temples.
We dined in the Hotel Restaurant that night, which had superb food, before retiring early for a decent nights sleep. Day one over and two happy campers.
Getting to Cambodia
It’s 9pm on Tuesday night, our second day in Cambodia. We’ve been out all day visiting the temples around Siem Reap and are hopefully now over the flight and crazy day getting to Thailand and Cambodia. I’ve taken heaps of photos in just two days and am now starting to upload some of them. Something funny is happening with my PC and it seems to be very slow and the mouse won’t work – very frustrating, particularly when you’re trying to upload photos. Never mind I will try to the achieve the impossible twice – write entertainingly while wanting to hiff this silly PC in the swimming pool and multi-task by loading up photos and writing the blog at the same time.
We spent 4 days in Wanaka having Christmas with Mum and Dad. It was good to catch up with them and have some really relaxing time. We both needed that after a busy and holiday free second half of 2008.
We left Wanaka at 7:30am on Sunday morning (too early) to head to Queenstown airport to fly to Auckland. We had a 4 hour layover, which was just enough time to lose our straw hats which we’ve been traveling with for the last few years. Mine’s an old panama, which I got in the UK 15 years ago, so no great loss, but Anne’s was a very stylish one we got in France a couple of years ago, so it was annoying to lose that.
We flew to Bangkok on Thai Air, who were really good. I’m always getting a hard time for insisting we fly economy class, so I particularly liked there sign on the bulk head at the front on economy which said “Economy class toilets – DOWN THE BACK” down the back was highlighted in red. Put me in my place.
The flight was excellent and on arrival at 9:30pm we cleared customs and headed to the airport Novotel for some sleep before a 4:30 am start to get to the airport for a 5:30am check in for a 7:30 flight to Siem Reap.
We spent 4 days in Wanaka having Christmas with Mum and Dad. It was good to catch up with them and have some really relaxing time. We both needed that after a busy and holiday free second half of 2008.
We left Wanaka at 7:30am on Sunday morning (too early) to head to Queenstown airport to fly to Auckland. We had a 4 hour layover, which was just enough time to lose our straw hats which we’ve been traveling with for the last few years. Mine’s an old panama, which I got in the UK 15 years ago, so no great loss, but Anne’s was a very stylish one we got in France a couple of years ago, so it was annoying to lose that.
We flew to Bangkok on Thai Air, who were really good. I’m always getting a hard time for insisting we fly economy class, so I particularly liked there sign on the bulk head at the front on economy which said “Economy class toilets – DOWN THE BACK” down the back was highlighted in red. Put me in my place.
The flight was excellent and on arrival at 9:30pm we cleared customs and headed to the airport Novotel for some sleep before a 4:30 am start to get to the airport for a 5:30am check in for a 7:30 flight to Siem Reap.
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