Day 4 – Thursday 1st January – Temples

Day 4 of the holiday and day 3 and the final day of the temples tour. We were a bit dubious about having another day of looking at temples, but decided that it would be worth while because they are all further out than the first two days temples so it would give us a chance to see more of the Cambodian country side and also to give us more of a feel for how people live outside the main centres.

The first thing we came across after leaving the Anglor Way area was a Project village. Project Villages are sponsored by people from overseas. The overseas sponsors give money for building the house, or drilling a well or some other thing. As you went past the houses, there were signs outside saying who the sponsor was or were and what country they came from. The people in this project village create handcrafts, which are then sold in the markets of Siem Reap and in the temples.

Our first temple for the day was Banteay Samre. The children obviously get up very early this far out because we were accosted by children as soon as we got out of the car. Today soods were books and colourful bamboo decorations – kind of like origami animals. During the course of the conversation with one little girl, she learnt my name was David and insisted that “you buy from me when you come back sir”. As we walked down the path towards the temple, we crossed over a rope and that was obviously the demarcation line and the children weren’t allowed to step over it. They stood on the rope as we walked on calling out “you buy from me Mr David”.

Banteay Samre is an excellent temple and well worth the trip. Firstly, it is in an excellent state of repair and secondly it is quite different from any of the other temples we had seen. Within the exterior walls there used to be a moat, which has been drained and is now just grass. The temple complex itself is a long flat one, although what I haven’t mentioned yet is that even the flat temples have little raised chapels all the way through them, so even in a flat temple you are still climbing up and down stairs every 20 or 30 metres. I assume that because of the internal moat that everything else within the temple itself was very compressed, so buildings that you would normally expect to be nicely spaced out were crammed in together, so that as you came down 1 lot of stairs, you took 1 step before starting to climb back up the next set of stairs to the next little chapel area.

As we left the temple and passed the rope that the children weren’t allowed to cross, we were again inundated with children and the little girl who I’d talked to on the way in hadn’t forgotten my name, so hassled me all the way back to the car. I didn’t want any of her little decorations (as they were bamboo and probably wouldn’t be allowed back into NZ) , but she was quite sweet, so I gave her a dollar for a photo. This was obviously the jackpot for her and she high tailed it back to her mother to show her her profits for two minutes work.

Banteay Sre was the next temple and this one was very small and compact. It was made of red stone, that several other temples had been created out of. Considering that this temple was the furthest away from Siem Reap of all the temples we’d visited, we were surprised that it was absolutely crowded with people. Although it is a small temple, it still have remnants of its internal moat and this was good to show one of the pit falls of having a heavy stone temple on a small island inside a moat, as many of the wall were collapsing into the moat. The decoration on the walls of the temples was however beautifully preserved. I’ve put up a photo of Anne outside the toilets at Banteay Sre, as the public toilets at the temple sites in Cambodia have been one of the many pleasant surprises. Having been in all sorts of long drop or worse toilets in other parts of Asia, having proper flush toilets that smell nice and are even in a nice location was a real bonus for us.

Kbal Spean was our next stop and this was something of a surprise to us because it isn’t a temple and it isn’t flat, or even layered. It’s a 1500m track up an at times challenging climb up to a waterfall. The waterfall itself isn’t impressive, it’s the carving on the rocks in the waterfall that is impressive. There are a number of scenes carved into the rocks at the top of the waterfall and then as you walk back down beside the river, there is one section where the rocks right across the river bed have been carved in the shape of pancakes. Some parts of the walk were so steep and rocky that they’d put stair cases in so that you can safely negotiate your way up the rock faces. The rest of the time it’s either a flat track, or in some places you have to clamber up over rocks. Of course coming back down I ended up falling on my arse on one of the steep stairs and slid down about three of them, which looked a bit undignified. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt myself, but I did feel a bit of a plonker. Cambodia in the dry season is very dusty and it was the dust on the stairs that I slipped on.

As today is our final day of visiting the temples, we decided that we would visit Angkor Wat for a second time to spend more time around the outside of the temple. We did a walk out to one of the outer gates, which was a nice alternative to the main attraction, as there was absolutely no one else around, apart from some monkeys who didn’t hassle us, although they did nearly get some fruit off one woman who didn’t see one of them stalking her. The monkeys aren’t a problem and there seems to be only a few of them. Certainly we didn’t see any of them on our first trip and they seem to keep themselves to the forest on the outskirts of the temple complex.

Dinner again was in town near the night market. I asked the Tuk Tuk driver how much the fare into town was and one of his mates called out “still $2 – same same as last night”. The food was excellent, but the service wasn’t great and we had to wait an hour to get any food. The restaurant was staffed completely by singular tasking males, none of whom seemed to have serving the customers as their task of focus. Never mind when it arrived, it was as I said very good.

Being a day late, I managed to stay up to almost midnight typing up the blog and loading up photos. The internet in Siem Reap is pretty slow and I have to load the photos up two at a time, so it takes a long time. I’m writing this post in Phnom Phen and have just loaded up 28 photos in the time it would take me to load up two in Siem Reap.