Day 64 30th jan

Today we tentatively wake up.... Still not sure of the damage inflicted from last night.... But despite Shirees insatiable appetite all is well....

It's the Chinese

New Year today and the Tuk Tuk drivers see it as an opportunity to add a few dollars to the bill, so I've got one hungry Shiree on one side of me and a Tuk Tuk rider on the other asking for 3 dollars instead of the normal 2 for the trip into town..... I'm thinking to myself... This can only end badly.... Shirees got a real bee in her bonnet about being ripped off already.... Specially by Tuk Tuk riders, and she's hungry, which will not get remedied until a price is agreed for the ride into town.... I felt the Tuk Tuk riders imminent pain when he gave his price of 3 dollars.... I've received the stare he just experienced...... Needless to say, Shirees "look" said a thousand words..... All in fluent Cambodian and within 10 seconds we are traveling down the road in his tuk tuk for the agreed price of 2 dollars....

We arrive in central Siem Reap and wonder the market again.... It's a labyrinth of narrow little passage ways and nothing appears in the same place twice.... I stand to watch the "food section" in full swing.... It's ever so interesting, but I do pity the fish... There kept alive as long as possible, and have chunks cut from them whilst alive.... There then chucked, still flapping back into a bucket of water where they remain until another chunk is removed. Some fish are clearly thinker skinned than others and require a couple of good chops with the knife to break through the scales where as others just get sliced open like there butter....

Produce arrives all the time by motorbike... Trailer loads of pineapples, or huge blocks of ice to keep the fish cold.... It's all transported by bike.

It's another hot day so we retire for a drink in a modern looking building furnished mainly in white... It has a section of seating where you remove your shoes and sit up on a long raised bed like platform or there's a normal seating area..... We are only here for liquid and both order a berry fruit juice.... They look and taste great, but my god do they ever leave a lot of seeds in your teeth.... From here we locate an Internet cafe and organise ourselves for the next leg of our journey..... We fly into Kuala Lumpa tomorrow and needed to get boarding passes sorted.....

Then Shiree needed feeding again..... We end up at a restaurant selling pizza.... Shiree is not normally a pizza eater but had been talking about pretty much nothing else since finishing her breakfast.. I'm not really feeling hungry, but notice a chicken curry that's served in a bamboo leaf bowl.... It wasn't very big so I order this.... It tasted fantastic and contained a bucket load of chicken..... Yum Yum !!

From here it's back for a afternoon snooze for Shiree whilst I blog write my finger to the bone.....

We are going to see the Cambodian circus performance tonight and leave with enough time to hopefully secure ourselves a good seat in the "free seating" area... The circus is held in a traditional fabric circular circus tent which is smaller than the circus tents we have at home... This all sunrises me, I thought it was held within a theatre.... The advantage of the small circular tent wrapped stage is that wherever your sat, visibility should be know issue..

We are one of the first to enter and select our seat carefully... As time ticks by and more and more people enter space becomes tighter and tighter, and we become more and more grateful of our early arrival time...

The show is brilliant.... It's largely acrobatic and is performed entirely by people who have come from families that live in some kind of hardship..... The organisation was formed as a direct result of Eight refugees from the Khmer Rouge era who were helped by Art Therapy while in a Red Cross Camp in the border regions in the 1980s. They were so moved by this treatment they later founded the organisation behind the Cambodian circus with an objective of helping the disadvantaged with arts therapy themselves whilst offering a formal education to people who would never of received schooling without there help....

The performers have obviously put considerable effort and training into there performances, there strength, coordination, trust and energy level is exceptional..... The show has a basic storyline about over coming fears and ghosts are used as the fear subject..... The video clip attached at the bottom of this page didn't do the performance any justice at all.....

After the show we walk into town for a meal.... Shiree bought some shoes earlier in the day at the market and had decided tonight was a good night to wear them.... But she also had her ever present clumsy hat on..... Within 5 mins of leaving the circus she'd caught them on something and broken one..... This I found very funny..... It made a flapping sound as it hit the pavement and required Shiree to lift her foot higher as she walked... Sometimes the shoe would be under here foot, sometimes on the side as she walked. It was very very funny..... But Shiree did not think so...... At all !

Ha Ha.... Funny !!..... It kept me amused all night....

We ended up eating in pretty much the first place we passed on our way into town as Shiree was not enjoying the walk.....

We eat in an Italian restaurant with was absolutely lovely.... The food was great, and very reasonably priced too..... If we had found this place earlier in our stay we'd of returned. The seating area was located under a large wooden pagoda which has bamboo trees growing up through it and orchids everywhere... They where all in full colourful flower with multiple flower heads per stem and were hung from the pagoda all over the resultant... The strange thing about them though was that they were not in pots.... The long clean roofs just dangled beneath them in thin air completely free of any mud.... You can only assume that there removed each night and placed in water till the following morning.....?

From here it was a Tuk Tuk ride back with our last two dollars.... We are now out of money, bar what we'd agreed to pay tomorrow's Tuk Tuk driver to get us to the airport....

http://www.pharecambodiancircus.org/blog/uniquely-cambodian-daringly-modern-the-video/