The Good and Bad of Cambodia

Siem Reap is the home of the Angkor Temples, the largest temple complex in the world. With so much hype around this place, we were sure it would disappoint us; fortunately this would not be the case!

Our time in Siem Reap started off by us trying to find accommodations. We arrived during the last weekend of Chinese New Year celebration, so the whole town of Siem Reap was packed and mostly booked. We drove around for over an hour with our tuk-tuk driver trying to find somewhere to stay. Luckily, after searching over 20 guesthouses, we were able to find an amazing place, near the city centre with some really helpful and friendly staff.

Siem Reap is a huge tourist town; never the less we still enjoyed it a lot. We were at the point in our trip were we happy to come across some western food and some touristy bars. 

We even came across some Quebec comfort food, poutine, it turns out it was the best poutine in all of Cambodia!

We decided to visit the Angkor temples over two days. The site is so large, you could easily be there for a week, but we knew after two days, we would have had enough. We also made the decision to drive between the temples via tuk-tuk. It’s a lot faster this way, and since it’s so damn hot, we figured it might be a bit more enjoyable than going via bicycle. We used the same tuk-tuk driver that had driven us around to find a hotel. He was a young, not the best driver, and really annoying as he was always trying to sell us stuff. John nicknamed him Bozo, but AJ changed it to Bingo as it sounded nicer.

Our first day with Bingo had us taking the large tour of Angkor so we could visit all the ‘small’ temples. The large tour is about 25KM long and had us visiting six different temple complexes. One temple complex could be upwards of one kilometre long. It was an amazing day; since these are the ‘small’ temples there aren’t nearly as many tourists which makes it much more relaxing. 

Kids are all around the temples selling postcards and other trinkets. This little saleswoman was completely fascinated by John's white eyebrow!

The second day had us starting at quarter to five in the morning so we could catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat, the biggest and most famous of all the Angkor Temples. There were tons of people, but the sunrise and morning were still pretty excellent. 

We stopped for breakfast after visiting Angkor Wat, but that wasn’t nearly as excellent; AJ ended up finding mouse poop in her soup. A shitty way to start the day, lol.

Next was the Bayon temple, which has tons of giant pillars with Buddha faces on all four sides of the pillar. 

     

While visiting this temple, we ran into a huge spider. The second photo shows him beside John's hand, it was at least 25cm wide!

      

We also got to visit the Ta Prohm Temple, which is more commonly known as the Tomb Raider temple since the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie was filmed there. It’s pretty amazing to see how hundreds of years ago humans cut down the forest so they could build this giant temple, and now hundreds of years later the forest is taking back the land and growing right over the temple. It’s really impressive.

    

Here are some of our favourite photos from the Angkor Temples:

Bingo drove us back to our hotel, tried one last time to sell us another tour and when we refused again, it seemed like he had figured it out. He then tried to learn a bit about Canada from us; he wanted to know if his prices were good, so he asked how much we would pay for a Tuk-Tuk ride in Canada. AJ explained to him that there aren’t any Tuk-Tuks in Canada. If only we had a picture of his face, it was like his whole world ended, he just couldn’t believe it. John explained he uses a bicycle, the bus or the metro to get around. He didn’t know what the metro was, so that was also an interesting conversation. We said it was like a train that goes underground, but he didn’t understand. We tried to say it’s like the trains they have in Thailand. He understood that we have trains from Canada to Thailand. And Bingo was his name…

With two days of temple watching in the extreme heat under our belts, it was time to chill in Siem Reap. We hit up the cheap massages on the street, 3$ for a 30-minute foot massage and they throw in a free beer. Hard to beat!

We also went to a couple of bars, tried a bucket of red bull and vodka… AJ didn’t feel so hot the next day.

Finally, on our last day in Siem Reap, we took a tour to visit Kampong Pluk, an entire village built on really, really high stilts. It’s the dry season now, but when the monsoons come, it must be pretty nuts if your house needs to be this high!

   

We also got to stop off at a crocodile farm along the way. They use the meet for food and the skin for some fancy purses and shoes... 

From Siem Reap we took a 7-hour bus to get to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Cambodia has a very bloody history, and this history is pretty recent. There was fighting into the early 90’s, but the worst of the massacre was in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power. They wanted to create an agrarian society that was completely self-sufficient. Everyone would work in the fields farming and this would be the only thing people would do.

They completely emptied out all the cities and sent people to live in the countryside in work camps. All intellectuals, teachers, political opposition anyone they deemed a risk to this ‘movement’ or anyone who had any ‘Western’ influence was killed. If you wore glasses or had a watch you were considered an elite and could be killed. The Khmer Rouge killed approximately three out of eight million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979; either through murder, starvation or disease. (John read an amazing book called “First they Killed my Father” AJ has it in French, it’s called, “D’abord ils ont tué mon père”, we also watched a very good movie called, “The Killing Fields” with John Malcovich if you’re interested in learning a little about what happened). 

Many prisoners were brought to a former school in Phnom Penh that is now called S21, for Secret Prison 21. Out of the 17,000 prisoners brought to this prison, only 7 are known to have survived. Also in Phnom Penh, there is what is known as the killing fields. This is where many prisoners were brought to be killed. Mass graves were found all over this place. The list of horrible and gruesome things that were done at the killing fields goes on and on. Even today, every year during the rainy season the earth gets washed away and bone fragments, teeth and clothes rise out of the soil. We could see the clothes protruding form the soil as we walked around the site. A pagoda has been built at this site to pay respect to those who died here. The pagoda is full of the bones and skulls of the now emptied mass graves.

Both these sites are open for tourists to visit so that we can learn more about what has happened. We took one of these tours, and while it was very tastefully presented and interesting to learn about, it was definitely a very sad day. We took no pictures of either of these sites.

We finished our day by visiting the King’s Palace. Since he died recently, large parts of the palace were closed off to visiting tourists, but we never the less saw some cool things and enjoyed the site. There were Buddhas everywhere, even a 90Khg solid gold Buddha covered in over 2000 diamonds.

   

Besides the above, Phnom Penh isn't really that interesting. Its a big city, with some strangely rich people for such a poor country. Corruption is a big problem in Cambodia; during our three weeks in Cambodia, we saw very few people who owned cars, how many Lexus' can you spot in this photo... 

They also built a huge mini palace right beside the real palace as a site for prayer during the King’s cremation. This entire site was put up in 100 days. Pretty impressive!

After Phnom Penh, we made out way to our final destination in Cambodia, Kratie. during our 8 hour bus ride we stopped at a couple of road side stops for bathroom breaks and snacks. For those who were hungry, there were lots of fried crickets, beetles and spiders to fill your belly!

   

Kratie is just a couple of hours away from Laos and right beside the Mekong River. We stopped here for one reason, and one reason only, we wanted to see the rare Irrawaddy River Dolphins. We took a morning boat out onto the Mekong and, luckily for us, we saw the Dolphins. They came out of the water about 15 times, they were hard to see as they wouldn’t come out for very long, but it was pretty cool never the less.

    

From here, we are off to Laos. More on that to come in our next blog! 

What could Koh Rong?

So we made it to Cambodia on February 1^st. We crossed over from Vietnam, which meant we needed to cross the border by foot, with our bus waiting for us on the other side. The border was a bit of a free for all. You need to have a passport photo and proof of your vaccinations before you can enter Cambodia, but if you don't have this (as was the case for the proof of vaccines for us) you need to pay 1$ to the border guard and all is good. As well, when it comes time to return the passports, they just hand a stack of passports to someone in line and let them sort it out for the entire bus load of people. Not very professional, but hey, it worked!

    

With three weeks to visit Cambodia, we were looking forward to making the best of it! We started by spending a couple of days in Kampot. Kampot’s claim to fame is its pepper; apparently the best pepper in the world comes from Kampot. Let’s hope we can get the pound of pepper we are carrying around with us over the border to Canada!

    

John didn’t get to see too much of Kampot as he was out with a bit of food poisoning, but AJ made the best of her time by biking around the village and checking out the local sites.

When John felt a little better, we took a quick tour of the area where we saw the local salt fields where they dry out sea water to make sea salt. It’s so hot that the water just evaporates and they are left with tons of salt. We also visited the famous pepper plantations.

From there we caught a bus to Sihanoukville. Famous for its gorgeous beach and amazing nightlife, we only got to live half the experience. When we arrived in Cambodia, the King of Cambodia had been dead for almost 100 days. By the time we made it to Sihanoukville it had been 100 days, which meant that they would be having his cremation ceremony in the capital city, Phnom Penh. During this time, there was a ban on all celebration and music throughout the country. All this to say, when we made it to the amazing party town of Sihanoukville, none of the bars were allowed to play music. Lets just say, no music in a bar makes for a pretty boring bar.

Never the less, we made the best out of our time there. We enjoyed the beaches and chill atmosphere. We biked around the area and found some nice beaches a little way out, and we enjoyed the cheap 1$ beers everywhere we went.

    

On our last day in Sihanoukville we decided to check out the party boat that brings tourists to Koh Rong Samloem Island. Its basically a day trip to an island that is about 2 hours off shore. 

We got a small break on the way to the island for a quick swim. 

Little did we know that this island would be the most beautiful place we had ever seen. When we arrived we couldn’t believe it. Perfect, flour like, white sand. Beach that goes on forever and crystal clear warm water. We immediately fell in love with the place, figured out how we could stay on the island and told them we would be back the next day as soon as we checked out of our hotel in Sihanoukville.

   

We had to shuffle our schedule around a little, but boy was it worth it! We slept in an open air dorm that was basically a really comfortable mattress covered with a bug net, that’s it. Our view was the perfect sand beach and beautiful ocean. And all this for $7.50 per night for the both of us. Amazing!

    

Oh, did we mention that this perfect island, that was the nicest place we had ever seen, was also covered with adorable puppies!

On our second night on Koh Rong (as in what could Koh Rong?) we met a nice couple from Quebec. She was French Canadian and he was Cambodian, but had been living in Montreal for over 15 years. Well, it turned out the girl was an OT just like AJ, and the guy asked John if he had studied engineering at Concordia in 2004, because he thought John looked familiar (must have been the white eyebrow). Small world, isn’t it!

We also saw this boat on our way to the island. Turns out there is a sail boat inside this boat. It belongs to some Russian Billionaire... tough life! 

We enjoyed out time on the island by relaxing and reading by day, and partying by night. Lion was our host :)

     

When our time in paradise was over, we made our way to Battambang, in the north west part of the country. We would only spend two days here as we only wanted to stop briefly before we made our way to Siem Reap to see the amazing Angkor Temples.

Battambang was great to us. We visited the temples in the surrounding areas, took a Khmer cooking class, supported the local circus run by former street kids and tried out the amazing bamboo train.

The temples were a great taste of what we would eventually see in Siem Reap, while the cooking class wasn’t as good as our other ones, but never the less nice to learn some of the local dishes. The circus was a class act! We were proud to here two kids had been accepted to train with the Cirque du Soleil in Montreal! 

   

The bamboo train was a fun discovery for us. We didn’t know what it was. It turns out its an old train line that the locals have found a way to use in order to transport things from one village to the next. The basically build a simple bamboo platform, attach a motor, and there you have it, a bamboo train. Now they use this to give tourists a good ride.

Finally, we have to mention our hotel room in Battambang. We got very lucky. The hotel  we asked our tuk-tuk driver to bring us to was closed for construction. He mentioned that the owner was building a new hotel down the street so we asked if we could check it out. Well, it turns out the rooms weren't all finished yet, but two were. There was no internet, phone or tv, but we really didnt care. He asked us for 30$ a night, AJ counter offered 20$ and he said ok, since we would be his first ever customers. Wow, were we lucky. We've never stayed in a place as nice as this... ever! 

   

That's it for now. Next we are off to Siem Reap to see the Angkor Temples! 

Vietnam Summary Video

Check out our video on our time in Vietnam: 

Wrapping up Vietnam

It’s been a while since our last blog; we’ve been on the move a lot, internet hasn’t always been available and we’ve been having too much fun to sit down and write this damn thing!

Anyways, when we last left off we were about to begin our Easy Rider tour with our guide Hau. Three days of motor biking covering over 600 KM of beautiful Vietnamese countryside and mountains, it was amazing! Anne-Julie road on the back of Hau’s bike, while John followed behind on his own bike. It turns out that despite John not being a great car driver, he’s pretty damn good on two-wheels.

Hau would constantly stop on the side of the road to chat with locals working in the fields so he could explain what the day-to-day life of most Vietnamese people was like. We saw so many things it’s hard to name them all. Some of our highlights include picking peanuts on the side of the road with some really nice farmers,

watching weasels make Weasel Coffee and then having Anne-Julie try it (the Weasels eat the coffee beans, their digestive system is supposed to do something good to the beans, the weasel waste is then collected, the beans are pulled out and cleaned and voila… Weasel Coffee @ $300/Kg)

       

Seeing silkworms at a silkworm farm (aka some guys house), then going to a silk factory and watching them turn the cocoons into silk thread and then the thread into scarves

    

    

Driving up to the sand dunes near Mui Né and being in awe at the giant desert that appears out of nowhere, and then John’s failed attempt at sliding down the sand dune

    

And then, the simple majesty of scenery that we got to take in as we made our way into the mountain town of Dalat on our second day. It was incredible to go from some really warm weather in the lowlands to conifer forests and giant lakes as we climbed in altitude.

    

Our tour ended in Mui Né, a nice beach town five hours north of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC aka Saigon). The beach was really nice; it was filled with kite surfers, which was pretty cool to watch. We ran into our German friends yet again in this place, which made for yet another fun night!

From Mui Né we made our way to HCMC. We both really enjoyed our brief time in HCMC. We were only there for three days, but they were pretty packed and lots of fun. We spent our first day taking in some of the sites, including the local market and War Museum. The War Museum was a really intense place to visit. We didn’t take any photos, it just didn’t feel right. The pictures are very graphic, and while the museum is quite one sided, it never the less gets the message across that the whole Vietnam War was just awful. Why it happened everyone has their opinion, but no one will argue that the things that happened there, and are so clearly depicted in this museum, should have never happened anywhere.

We spent our evening have drinks with our German friends yet again, but this time we were lucky enough to also be joined by an Irish couple and a Spanish couple we had also met on our tour of Halong Bay. Turns out that tour was great for us as we met the nicest people and we kept meeting each other all the way throughout our time in Vietnam.

    

Drinking in Saigon is really fun, easy and cheap (the trinity of drinking). You basically head to the corner store (dépaneur) and there are tons of small plastic chairs lined up outside with small tables. And people just sit in front of the store and drink $0.60 beers, all night long. This is where we met our friends every night we were in HCMC. What is so fun is that there are tons of stores doing this on both sides of the street, so there are hundreds of people just hanging out and meeting each other. What an amazing time we had!

While in HCMC we also took in a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels. These tunnels were made so the North Vietnamese could get supplies in and out of the south and so they could fight/flee the American attacks. There were hundreds of KMs of tunnels underground during the war. Today, tourists can visit this area and see tunnels and old booby traps that were made during the war.

There is one original tunnel that tourists can go into, and a second larger tunnel that has been made a little bigger and has lights for tourists to go through. John tried both, while AJ abstained from both.

The first tunnel John went into was the original sized tunnel. It was only about 15M long, but it was tiny and dark, pitch black. John started by walking in a squatted position, but the tunnel got smaller and then there was a traffic jam about 5M into the tunnel as a girl a couple of people in front of him in the tunnel stopped moving as she got too scared.

At this point it is completely black, you can’t see your own hand in front of your face, and it’s starting to get hot and a little claustrophobic. He had to wait for five minutes until someone could pass a light from the back of the tunnel to the front. There is really only one way out of the tunnel, they have closed off all the other tunnels branching off from this original tunnel; however, when you are in there, with no light, you can only lead with your hands. So when you feel where an old tunnel used to turn off, you still think you can go left or right, only when you go a little further do you realize its blocked off. This fear of going the wrong way while 15M under ground was enough to have the girl stop dead in her tracks and wait for a light. Once things got moving again, it had been a good five minutes we were stuck underground and it was getting really hot. We started crawling again, John on his hands and knees as he was too big to squat. Then came the last 3 M where he had to crawl through on his stomach so he could make it out. When he did make it out he was completely covered in dirt and sweat. It was quite an experience to be down there, it really made you feel for the people who were living and hiding down there during a war, it must have been really difficult.

We also saw some amazing booby traps that the Vietnamese made to kill American soldiers. They were really ingenious, and for the most part, all made of bamboo. We were also explained that the Vietnamese would were their sandals one way when attacking the Americans, and would then turn their sandals around the other way when leaving so that all their footprints would be pointing as if they never left. Crazy stuff!

    

From HCMC we took a two-day tour of the Mekong Delta and visited the floating markets. Floating markets are usually for wholesalers to sell to people who will then sell the fruit and vegetables in town. It was quite a sight to see as boats filled to the brim were floating around selling to other boats.

   

We also so a crocodile farm, John paid $0.50 so he could feed the crocs some old liver.

   

From here we knew we only had a couple of days left in Vietnam, so we decided to make the best of it and we headed to Phu Quoc Island in the very south of Vietnam right beside Cambodia. We spend three days here on this gorgeous island. We saw what we believed to be the most amazing beach ever while touring the island on motorbike.

     

We checked out the local pearl farm, it was still pretty cool to see how they made the pearls. 

We also had a chance to visit the fish sauce factory, which really was not worth it, but we were lucky enough to get lost along the way and we ended up asking a local family who was celebrating a funeral anniversary which way to go. Instead of telling us, they insisted we sit with them and have some beers and food. After a couple of beers, photos and some weird dancing, we were off to the fish sauce factory with some proper directions. Good times in Phu Quoc!

   

Next destination… Cambodia! 

Lots more photos here: