Exporing Angkor, Cambodia (8/12-8/15)
I actually didn't even know about this place until I got here when more than a few people asked me if I had any plans to visit it. After a bit of research I found out that it was it was an area in Cambodia that had a collection of temples about 900 years old that were rediscoverred slightly over 100 years ago by a Frenchman. I started doing a bit more research on where exactly in Cambodia it is, how to get there, and what we needed to cross the border and still be able to come back to Thailand. When I first asked everyone if they would want to go there was about 6 of us, but by the time we actually left we had a group of 9.
We ended up meeting at 4:30am near one of the parks to catch a private bus that locals took to go to the tax-free casinos between the borders with the help of our friend Kanitta, who is a local. It took a little bit longer than expected to cross the border because not everyone had gotten their Cambodian visas or their re-entry visa for Thailand yet. Anyhow, after we did we had some cars and a guide waiting for us to drive us around with the pre-planning of Kanitta, once again, who also booked our guide for the ruins on Friday and Saturday. After about an hour on an paved road we stopped for lunch and continued on a dirt road for another couple hours. From what I have heard, there are only has 2 paved highways in the entire country. Well, the dirt road wasn't that bad because I had only slept 4 hours the night before and 2 more hours on the bus so I was ready for some more nap time. My nap was interrupted when we had to make a pit stop because we got a flat tire, but besides that I slept quite soundly all the way to Siem Reap (the nearest town to the Angkor area).
The first day we just checked out a couple places before finding a place to stay and then went to a temple on a hill to watch the sunset as a suggestion from our guide. Apparantly, it definately was not an original idea because there was well over 100 people there doing the same thing. Unfortunately, since it was monsoon season it was too cloudy and there wasn't much of a sunset anyhow. I still managed to sneak in a couple cool pictures that didn't have any people so I wasn't to disappointed.
The next day we saw some of the ruins and we learned that the French only discoverred Angkor Thom (the city of Angkor) while Angkor Wat was always being used as a Buddhist temple (converted from a Hindu temple somewhere around 1300 AD). We also learned that all the Cambodian kings until the last one were all Hindu, but the last one who was Buddhist built slightly more temples than all his predecessors so there are slightly more Buddhist temples than Hindu ones. Still, I noticed that most of the ones we went to were Hindu. Throughout the day we were barraged with kids aged 5 to 10 at all our stops when we were getting on or off our van trying to sell us photocopied books or postcards for a very cheap price. Most of the books (about angkor wat, cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, or lonely planet books) went for about $2 to $3, but the book I wanted had some nice pictures and the photocopies really didn't do it justice so I think i will hold off until I get home and buy it from Amazon.
In the evening we went to a dinner show that had Apsara dancers and a buffet, but it was a tourist trap as usualy with a pretty mediocre show and mostly cold food (some of it was actually fresh though). After the show we went to a club that was recommended to us but it looked really sleazy and it was completely empty when we went so we went to a place called FCC Angkor which was a cool restaurant/bar with nice outdoor seating and cool 1970's styled hollywood architecture. We hung out there for a bit before walking home to go to bed early since we were planning on watching the sunrise over Angkor Wat in the morning and we had to ready to go by 5am.
Surprisingly, we managed to make it out to the sunset (once again, not at all an original idea because it was coverred in hordes of tourists), but the morning clouds once again hid the sun so there wasn't much of a sunrise. We spent the rest of the morning trying to get some energy for the day with a good breakfast and coffee and then set out to see some more temples and ruins. The main ruin we saw today was the famous one featured on the movie Tomb Raider, but there was another smaller one that had virtually no visitors that I really liked. The cool thing about the Ta Phroem (the one from Tomb Raider) was that it is the only temple that was left unalterred and coverred in vegetation. The rest of them were coverred in vegetation, but in an effort to restore it to its original state, all the vegetation had to be removed. This one was left in the original state when re-discoverred over a hundred years ago after about 500 years of isolation in the middle of the jungle.
After lunch we went to a park in the city relax for a bit because we all were quite tired from waking up early and walking around all day. The park looked really nice, but it was quite a strange park because the trees were coverred with hundreds and hundreds of bats. The grass was coverred with some sort of insect that looked like a spider but it only had six legs so I had no idea what it was. And from all the bats in the trees, we discoverred that we were sitting in grass that was coverred with all the droppings. Some of the local kids shot down one of the bats with a sling shot and all of the bats went flying around the park making all sorts of noise. It felt so out of place to see so many bats and funky insects in a normal park with green grass and nice trees that I felt like I was in the twilight zone or something. Anyhow, after that I decided I would rather go for a walk in the city than hang out in the freaky park. After the park we went to see the floating village by boat. It was interesting to see, but extremely sad as well because they all live in extremely empoverished conditions. They are mostly illegal immigrants from vietnam who are unable to own land so they live on boats. Its hard to imagine what their life in Vietnam was like if living where they were living now is better for them. It wasn't so much seeing people living impoverished that made me feel strange because I had seen poverty like that before and I know it exists in many places... It was the fact that we paid to see them like they are a tourist attaction or animals in a zoo while we take our pictures of them. After going there we were all quiet most of the way back because none of us really knew what to say.
Anyhow, we all went back and got ready to see a classical musical performance by some Swiss doctors at the free hospital that they organized for Cambodian children, but it was cancelled for personal reasons so we just had dinner and went to a bar called the laundry bar. It was a pretty cool bar that we all hung out and danced in until about 3:30. Well, some left earlier but we left at 3:30. Antione, the biggest surprise to me, stayed there until 4:30 or so. He is always a surprise to me because he looks so innocent but parties harder than any of us. Anyhow, the next day was a little rough because we were all tired from the dancing and with the bumpy road and sunlight sleeping really wasn't quite possible in the 4 hour van ride back to the border on the dirt road. Nobody else really talked either because we all were exhausted from dancing the night before. Oh well, had to party at least one night in cambodia, right?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home