We arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia on 16th July. Although fearing the worst about getting our visas on arrival, we were pleasantly surprised at how slick the process was. We handed over the short application form with $20 and our passport to the first official. The form then passed along a line of about 8 officials finally reaching a guy who handed the passport back with the duly completed visa therein. It was as simple as that. There was even an ATM in the small airport but it did seem a little strange that it dispensed US dollars but it turns out they are as widely accepted as the local currency of Riels.

After a good start, we were expecting a nightmare taxi transfer to a guest house/hotel in town. After handing over the standard $7, our taxi driver departed the airport......air conditioning on full....bliss. The driver spoke really good English, was really friendly and drove with a big smile on his face. It was looking like the locals were even friendlier than those we met in Laos or Thailand. As we hadn’t booked a room in a hotel our taxi driver took us to a couple of hotels that were in our guide book. We found one called the Bopha Angkor Hotel which was set in a courtyard around a lush central garden with a reasonable sized swimming pool. We bartered a good price and decided to stay there.

Once checked in, we chilled out around the pool area on the hammocks/sunloungers for a couple of hours followed by some nice Khmer lunch at the hotel’s restaurant. The Khmer style beef curry was a triumph especially when washed down with the local Angkor beer. The waitress serving us was very sweet and gave us a lovely smile like everyone else we saw whilst travelling from the airport to the hotel. She told us that her husband is a tuk-tuk driver and if we need one to let her know.

During the evening we walked into town which only took approx 5 minutes, we found the busiest street called Pub Street with blaring music, crowds of tourists, hordes of raggedy children and hawkers. We went for a drink in the Red Piano Bar which is well known and then moved on to have some great food in a Khmer Restaurant. Whilst eating dinner, we noticed the young girls dressed up looking for business. Saying this, they are very discreet about it as there are police both ends of the street. It seems that Cambodia is trying to clamp down on this.....even more so with the underage sex trade. Fortunately, we didn’t see any Gary Glitter types with young kids but there were some young girls (adults) with white men who were old enough to be their dads and, in a number of cases, their granddads. It wasn’t as bad as Thailand though however there seems to be a common theme across SE Asia.

We visited another bar called Temple Club and sat outside and had a couple of beers (at $0.50 each you can’t go wrong). Whilst sitting there we saw the 3 American girls again!! We didn’t expect to see them this time due to Siem Reap being a reasonable size town. They joined us for a few drinks and then they decided to move on inside and hit the dance floor. They came back outside not long after and said it was too sleazy! The usual story; sad old men flashing their cash to the young local women.

The next morning, we had breakfast and were served by the same young waitress as the day before. We took the opportunity to ask her to speak to her husband as we needed a tuk-tuk for the day to take us to the temples. Her husband charged us $12 for the day which was good for us and a reasonable day’s wage for him.

Firstly, the tuk-tuk driver took us to purchase a 3-day ticket to visit the temples at $40 each (it turned out to be the right option as the US$20 1-day option would not have been long enough). We then visited Angkor Wat, which is the largest religious building in the world. It is considered as one of the seven greatest man-made wonders of the world and it certainly deserved the tag. It was pretty impressive. However, we took our photos with mixed emotions. UNESCO had started to restore parts of the structure, which was good to see but this meant that parts of the structure were covered with scaffolding and green tarpaulin. It didn’t stop Mark from frantically clicking the camera at anything that moved......and thinking about it......anything that didn’t move. In spite of the restoration work, it was one of the highlights of our trip to Cambodia. We continued in the tuk-tuk around a number of other temples (Ta Kaeo, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei and Prasat Kravan) and the temple circuit for our first full day was completed.

We were taken back to the hotel so we could get showered quickly so we could get to the Children’s Hospital (Kantha Bopha) as our driver said there was a free concert we could watch. We arrived about 10 minutes late as he had gotten the start time a little wrong. We entered the little auditorium expecting to see lots of children singing and dancing but were a little perplexed to see one man sitting on the stage with a cello!!! Neither of us had actually checked what the concert format was and had assumed it would be a show put on by the children. Wrong. It turned out to be Dr Beat “Beatocello” Richner playing works of Bach on his cello. Lisa was stifling a laugh and a smile while Mark was a little intrigued with what the evening would hold. It soon became clear that no one else was coming onto the stage.

It turns out that Dr Richner is from Europe (either Germany or Switzerland) but has been working at the hospital for the last 35 or so years. In fact, he has selflessly devoted his life to helping the children of Cambodia by initially having the hospital built and continuing to solicit donations to support the hospital’s day-to-day costs. The government only provides 3% of the running cost. As the Director he spoke about his work at this humanitarian hospital in between his renditions. He explained that most of the children arrive suffering from treatable diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Prior to Dr Richner building the hospital most would have died as the children’s healthcare was woefully inadequate. People laughed when he told them his vision of building a hospital giving free healthcare to children. He proved everyone wrong.

He has a passion for his work and music. This culminates with him performing concerts twice weekly to raise money to provide the care for the children. We watched a movie on how he decided to have this hospital built to provide care for the sick children. This is the first children’s hospital to be built in Siem Reap and since then another 4 have been built across Cambodia. As the concert finished, Mark and others jumped to their feet to give him a standing ovation. It was astonishing to think that this one man raises tens of millions of US$ every year to keep the hospital running, which means he also has to travel the world cap-in-hand for donations. He is a doctor at the hospital but it is not a job or money that drives him but a mission to beat the corruption in the country, to pay staff good wages and to save as many lives as possible. This man is a living legend and we don’t use these words lightly. If anyone reading this visits Siem Reap, go to the hospital and see the concert. We promise that you will be so moved by his efforts. We made a donation and bought his book which we will read on the flight to New Zealand.

After visiting the hospital and feeling very sad for the problems faced in Cambodia we decided to go into town for a drink. We went into a bar called Mikey Bar which, to be honest, wasn’t the greatest bar. We met a lovely 24 year old Cambodian girl who we got chatting to all evening. She explained to us that she finds it hard to live in Cambodia as she doesn’t earn much money a month. She told us she only earns US$40 a month for working in the bar 7 days a week from 7pm until early hours. What makes things worse is that she pays US$20 a month for accommodation outside of town and US$30 to travel to and from work as she cannot afford a moped. So she is already US$10 in the red before considering food, drink, clothes, toiletries, make-up etc. We then realised how difficult it must be for many of the local people and felt really heartbroken to hear this. To make up for the extra money needed, she has to resort to other means, which means that she may be working until the next morning if she meets a client. She was very embarrassed to admit this. She doesn’t want to do this but has no other way of making enough money to live. We found her very interesting to talk to all night. As we departed, we planted a US$50 note in her hand. It was with mixed emotions as we did not want her to feel like we gave her charity but hoped it would help a little.

Day 2 of the temple tour started in much the same vein as the 1st. This time we went to the larger Angkor Thom temple complex within which is the mighty impressive “Bayon”, which is its centrepiece. It’s an eerie and majestic temple with huge carved faces of an ethereal god king but this temple is the most loved (this was Mark’s favourite temple). Other temples had their own charm (including Preah Khan, Neak Sam, and Ta Som). In some cases, huge trees had grown next to, on and even around the temples. In the case of the latter, it was difficult to judge whether the tree was causing the temple to fall down or holding it up.

In keeping with the prior day, we were constantly harassed by Cambodian children, and to be fair a number of adults, asking for us to buy their postcards, shawls, snacks etc. They are very persistent and don’t go away when you tell them “no, thank you” or “we are not interested”. We kept hearing the sound of “one dollar, one dollar”. It became very annoying. Some of the children were really nice and would chat but others would just follow you around, occasionally grabbing your leg, not letting up. Then there were the food and drink vendors. A meeting with them would go something like this. We would stop at the temple in the tuk-tuk and jump out. As we looked around the vendors would charge over trying to get us to buy something. At one temple, Mark wanted a can of Coke and looked at the makeshift restaurants with around a dozen different women shouting “come here”, “choose me”, “buy here”. They then come running over with their menus. It’s like the Cambodian restaurant Olympics......the 100 yard lunch menu dash. They were all pretty quick out of the blocks. I guess the low season means things are tougher as the tourist numbers are much lower. That results in the persistent requests to buy this and that. Had we bought from everyone, we would have had to have chartered our own plane just to get the postcards back!!!

We did laugh at one temple, when a girl was trying to sell bracelets. After telling her we were not interested a couple of times, she asked a question about English grammar, which seemed a little strange. Then she asked another. It turns out she was stuck with her English homework so we ended up giving her a little English lesson. She was one of the many people we met that we would have loved to travel back to the UK with us.

The day finished with us going to Tonle Sap Lake, where there are two distinct communities living in floating boat villages. The Vietnamese were on the right as we approached with the Cambodian floating village on the left. We disembarked from our boat at the Vietnamese floating village and went to a floating bar where there was a crocodile pit, a catfish pit, small fish farm and snakes. Within a few seconds of being asked if he wanted the python round his neck “for a dollar”, Mark was holding the 6 foot reptile. Lisa took about half an hour of convincing before holding it. Within half a second, she was shouting “get him off, get him off, I don’t like it” but not before a couple of photos were taken (have a look at the blog photo album for Siem Reap – it’s pretty clear that Lisa is not at home with snakes!!!). Ultimately, we got some great photos during the day and went home worn out.

After being all “templed out”, we decided that the following morning we would chill out around the pool. We felt shattered after all of the walking in such hot weather so the day off from temples was most welcomed. Unfortunately, the sun wasn’t out that much today but still it was good to have a swim. The evening was completed with dinner and a few drinks. We started at the Dead Fish Tower bar, which would have been better named had they dropped the “Fish Tower” part. After moving one a few times, we were ready for some shut eye.

The next day the tuk-tuk driver had suggested going further afield to see a waterfall, some carvings, and another temple called Banteay Srei (which turned out to be Lisa’s favourite). It seemed like a good idea so we were off again. The US$20 per person ticket for the waterfall was not included within the 3-day ticket (Banteay Srei, the temple of women, was though), so we handed over some more cash and then arrived at the bottom of a mountain after passing kilometre after kilometre of fields with the occasional rice field, wooden house and water buffalo. At the bottom of the mountain, our driver unhitched the tuk-tuk from his motorbike and Lisa jumped aboard. His uncle was there to meet us on another motorbike, which Mark travelled on for the 20-minute ride up the mountain. While it was hot when we got there, we declined the chance to jump into the waterfall for a swim. We then moved on to see a carving in the water, a reclining Buddha statue carved into the mountain, some other rocks that had some legends attached to them and another temple. After saying goodbye to the tuk-tuk driver’s uncle we headed back to town. It was getting pretty dark but we still had time to accept our driver’s kind offer of meeting his family at their home (how could we refuse when he was wearing a Manchester United football shirt – clearly a man of good taste).

We saw his wife (who worked at our hotel), met his little boy and the rest of their family; four generations to be precise. It was so nice to be invited back to meet the family and to see how they live (the cold can of Coke also went down well). Their house is made out of wood which was very open but large enough for all the family.....and there were a few. Outside, they had a vegetable patch where they grow their own vegetables for selling on and also for their own use. Also outside were chickens and a goat! We enjoyed the time spent here and took some photos of the family for our album before saying our goodbyes.

This particular night was the night that Mark decided to eat Red Ants! He ordered Beef with Red Ants.......a local delicacy. He got stuck into his meal licking his lips whilst I was cringing. Was the food good I asked? According to him, the ants were crunchy but the beef was good! I am not sure if he was telling the truth but he did finish the plate. I think Mark is now on a mission to eat the weirdest food possible. The subject of eating a tarantula also surfaced again!!!

The next day, we were checking out and getting a night bus to the capital, Phnom Penh. Mark decided to get a tuk-tuk into town in the morning to find a print shop so that he could get the photos of the family we met the prior day printed. He had planned to have one of the photos (of the whole family) enlarged and framed as we didn’t see one when visiting their house. When we gave the photos along with the one we had framed to the girl in our hotel, she was taken back and didn’t know what to say. She was at the end of her shift and she came to say goodbye. She was really surprised and very grateful when we presented her with the gift. An hour and half later she returned to the hotel with her husband (the tuk-tuk driver) and presented us with a handbag and a little fork set used for corn-on-the-cob with Angkor Wat engraved on it. This was a real surprise and we were touched by their act of generosity. We said a final farewell knowing we were very sad to say goodbye to each other. Email addresses were exchanged so we will keep in touch.

Later that evening, we sat in the hotel waiting for the transfer into town so we could catch the bus. When we got there Mark decided to go to the supermarket to get a few nibbles and drinks for the journey. As he walked to the end of the street, he realised we were near Mikey’s bar. The girl we had gotten to know in there rushed over, threw her arms around Mark and was really upset to hear that we were leaving. Lisa then went to the bar to see the girl when Mark got back to the coach (fully stocked up). The girl was very sad and tearful when Lisa arrived (she doesn’t see much of her family who live the other side of the country and it seemed that she saw Lisa as a sister). It’s difficult to explain how quickly you build up a bond with the locals as it doesn’t seem to happen the same way elsewhere. Anyway, Lisa returned to the coach sad. As we were about to depart we saw the girl waving to us from beside the coach with tears streaming down her face. She had come to say another goodbye. Lisa jumped out to give her a comforting hug knowing that we had to move on. As we moved off, we sat on the coach in silence. Another local had touched our hearts and we knew there would be many more to come. There is just something so warm and enchanting about the Cambodian people.

We hope that the journey to Phnom Penh would be a sedate affair so we could grab some sleep. We will give you the next update soon!!! In the meantime, take care all.