Siem Reap & Phnom Penh: 30 March - 6 April 2011

We decided to fly from Vientiane, Laos to Siem Reap, Cambodia to save two days on bus travel and to give us a bit of extra time before we meet our friend Chris (aka Nutski) in Ho Chi Minh City on 12 April.

Siem Reap is very highly geared toward tourism, more so than we expected. The airport is sleek and modern, the road into town wide and smooth and lined with top-end hotels catering for the masses of visitors who come here to see Angkor Wat and the other temples; everything is in English and priced in dollars and all of the cash-points in the town centre seem to dispense dollars as opposed to the local currency. We took a guest-house near the centre of town, an area teeming with restaurants, bars, markets and travel agents. There's even a road dubbed 'Pub Street' filled with eateries and cocktail bars.

We spent the first day chilling out after our early morning flight - a couple of cheap beers and reasonably priced glasses of wine (for a change!) and I (Dan) had a savage haircut (won't have to worry about that again for a while!) and tried one of the many fish foot-massage places that are seemingly on every street corner. I'd been pondering trying it and the offer of a free beer tipped the balance. Sue chickened out though and watched and laughed as I slowly overcame the ticklish sensations of small fishing eating my feet..

The next two days were spent at the temples and ruins of the Angkor Historical Park which starts 5km north of Siem Reap. Angkor Wat was the first place we visited and being the most famous, was also the busiest with hordes of people (mainly cute little Cambodian kids) outside trying to sell you postcards, hats, maps, books, cold drinks, etc. Fortunately the hawking was relatively well controlled inside and once we were across the wide moat and through the external wall of the larger than expected complex, the people dispersed and we were able to look around unhassled.

Angkor Wat is very impressive, the building itself is well preserved (although there was ongoing conservation work underway which blighted a couple of our photos) and is set in a massive square of forest surrounded by the moat. Suitably impressed, we continued on our chosen route round the main sites in the southern part of the park.

One thing we had not really appreciated was the scale of the place, not just of Angkor Wat, but of the historical park as a whole. Although Angkor Wat is the biggest and best preserved of the sights, it's only a small part of the Angkor park and one of many palaces and temples in various states of ruin. Fortunately we had hired a tuk-tuk for the whole day and decided against cycling in the heat! Places that stood out include the Bayon complex, where large stone faces (Budha images) are carved into the walls and towers and Ta Prohm, where the jungle is slowly taking over the temple and trees are growing out of the walls of the building itself, some of them seeming to defy gravity. Angelina Jolie fans will also recognise this from one of the scenes of the Tomb Raider film.

That night we had a very nice dinner with Becky & Joe, an American couple who had been on our boat down the Mekong in Laos and whom we had bumped into since in various places. It's probably worth coming here for the curries alone - delicious!

We spent another full day in the park visiting the northern sites, the furthest one being some 40km north of Angkor Wat and a good 45 minutes in a tuk-tuk. We watched the countryside slide past wondering how much stuff and how many people Cambodians can fit on a small motorbike, or motorbike and trailer. Some examples on this short trip alone: a full-grown live pig strapped belly-up across the back of a bike presumably on the way to market; a basket-full of piglets on another bike; bikes pulling trailers with 10-12 people on them or stacked high with bags of rice. The northern temples were a lot more peaceful, the one-day tours probably focusing on the southern sights, so it was a nice way to round out our time here.

Our last day was spent lounging around - a couple of hours by the small pool at our guest-house and a trip to the night-market before an early start to catch the bus to Phnom Penh, the capital city, the next morning. After a convoluted start (2 buses to get us to the bus station before we actually got on our bus to Phnom Penh) and the subsequent delay, we set off. This part of Cambodia is remarkably flat and the scenery out the window was largely dry rice paddies awaiting the rains, criss-crossed with irrigation systems and studded with palm trees and interspersed with small towns and villages of wooden huts and buildings on concrete stilts. The journey was supposed to take 5 hours, but took about 7, probably not helped by the bus crew making a few bucks on the side by picking up/dropping locals en route (some with mopeds which were stuffed into the luggage compartment). We checked into a pretty nice hotel in time for a shower and dinner.

Phnom Penh has a very different feel than Siem Reap - a big, bustling Asian city, loads of bikes and busy roads and far less 'touristy', although you can still pay in dollars pretty much everywhere. We're getting pretty good at nonchalantly stepping of the curb into the path of dozens of oncoming vehicles in order to cross the road..!

We set about learning a bit more about the recent history of the country and started at the National Museum, just down the road from our hotel, which was a bit disappointing and basically a collection of Buddhist statues from across the country, many of which taken from the sites we'd visited at Angkor. We paid a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, which detailed the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era in a dignified but candid and uncensored manner.

The Tuol Sleng site was originally a school, converted into a detention, interrogation and torture facility where confessions were extracted from people before they were sent to Choeung Ek (one of many sites throughout the country known as the 'killing fields') to be executed with spades, hoes, or any other instrument to hand and buried in shallow, mass graves. Harrowing stuff. More human remains are still being discovered, coming to the surface after the rains, and we didn't realise that the criminal investigations were still ongoing either - the Khmer Rouge officer in command of the Tuol Sleng facility was only sentenced in June of last year and others are still awaiting trial and sentencing. You may remember the pictures from the news of skulls and bones laid out on tables and benches next to the exhumed graves; they are still there, but now arranged within a 30 metre high memorial tower. We're lucky to live where and when we do.

On a lighter note, we had a good last evening in Cambodia, splashing out on dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club on the river-front, where the journalists used to hang out during the troubled times and with good views over the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers. We're booked on another boat tomorrow, taking us from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc, just across the Vietnam border and into the Mekong Delta region. A pretty big milestone for us as this whole trip grew out of a wish to visit Vietnam!

Next update will probably come from Saigon!

Stay well,

Dan & Sue