Siem Reap and Battabong

It's 4:46 pm and I'm sitting on a stone wall in a small village outside Battambang, Cambodia waiting for a million fruit bats to come streaming out of the cliff face in front of me. There's a giant Buddha head carved into the mountain to my left, but if I even think about climbing up there I know I'll miss the big event, so I think I'll stay put. Besides it's HOT and humid here - I create small puddles wherever I go!

Spent the last 5 days in Siem Reap, in northwestern Cambodia, home to Angkor Wat and many other incredibly intact, awe-inspiring temples beginning from the 10th century. SPECTACULAR sites - my favorite being Bayon (picture attached) which contains 54 towers adorned with 216 gigantic faces, all bearing an uncanny likeness to the God-King who commissioned the temple! Angkor Wat, for me, was one of those places- like The Taj Mahal in Agra, Machu Picchu in Peru, Sukhothai and Ayuthaya in Thailand - that has you pinching yourself just to make sure you really are looking at the real thing.

Cambodia is hard to describe - as all these countries are when I'm just breezing through them a few weeks at a time. It's very easy to travel here - great and cheap bus routes, friendly people who love to chat, amazing food (again!), so much to see and do, its a cultural feast really - and so desperately poor.

I've been struggling with the gap between haves and have- nots many times during my travels, but never more so than here. So many families have so little (to my Western eyes), despite the efforts (it seems) of many NGOs operating in the country. I've opened my wallet far more in Cambodia than in other places to buy things I really don't want or need, or to make outright donations (when's the last time you carried a 50 kg bag of rice to a street-side school?!) because of the people who are asking - mostly children and elderly or disabled people. Apparently, according to all the tourist advice and online giving websites - sometimes this is the wrong thing to do - unless you're directly paying for goods or services which I try to do most of the time, but I'm a bit of a Softie, so of course I sometimes buy from the children too and then wonder why they're not in school - they all tell me they only go to school half of each day. Bottom line: it's really hard to say "No" or "No Thank You" a hundred times a day when I have so much compared to entire families struggling to get by on $1-$2 a day. Supposedly. I dont know that for sure - it's just what I've been told and what I've seen for myself in some of the 3 homes and 2 villages I've visited this week.

I certainly do admire Cambodians - these karaoke crazy people with their big welcoming smiles. They are definitely entrepreneurs who also know when to hit the hammock and relax! Apparently its really hot for them too - they're just not showing it like we tourists do.

Nature Update: The bats have left the Bat Cave! There must have been a million of them. I watched them for 40 minutes and they were still streaming out of there when I left - a thick black ribbon across the sky. They return every nite at 3:30 a.m. after feasting on insects. Mr. Han, my tuk-tuk driver told me that the locals like these "insect bats" roasted with oil, lemon, garlic, pepper and salt. Apparently, it's a different recipe for the larger fruit bats - which should be fried with lemongrass! Better yet, make a porridge out of them with ginger!

And don't forget about the blood - which is added to rice wine for extra zing. Seems it's easier to use fruit bat blood these days than cobra blood - which is too hard to find. I love these recipe tips! I just hope they don't make the menu in my Khmer cooking class....