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!