The Slitherants: Cambodia, Siem Reap

Siem Riep…So after the sobering experiences of the killing fields and the shambles that is Phnom Penh it was once again onto the bus for the trip up to Siem Riep. Siem Riep is most probably the richest town in Cambodia as it has the good fortune of being located a few kilometers away from the giant temple structures that make up Angkor Wat. The town itself has a mixture of classy resort type accommodation and all the usual stock standard budget guest-houses. Guess which kind we stayed in?? Well at least where we stayed had nice clean rooms, a garden bar/restaurant type area and a lovely French couple that ran the place.

In spite of its proximity to the temples poverty is still very much the reality for many of the town’s inhabitants and this led to some interesting encounters. One boy who was trying to sell books on the town’s main tourist drag of ‘Pub Street’ got really annoyed with us when we refused to buy a book from him. As we were having a quiet bit of lunch he came along, tried to sell us a book then demanded to know why we wouldn’t buy one. No amount of us trying to placate him seemed to work and he got angrier and angrier. After a while he stormed off only to come by periodically and stand behind us saying things like ‘stupid man, stupid woman, f**k you…’ and on and on. In the end I told him straight to just piss off or he’d get a boot up the arse but it’s hard to stay mad when you think about the mental image of some rich foreign tourist abusing a child street hawker! No doubt I probably wouldn’t have been very popular but jeez, give us a break, I was just trying to have snack in peace.

Other times women would thrust their babies into your face and ask for money, or blokes who had obviously lost one or more limbs to landmines would hit us up, pretty grim stuff. You can’t help feel sad for some of the locals as they really have got it tough but it’s simply not possible to give them all money as much as you might like to. We had basically decided that after Siem Riep we would be moving on from Cambodia as it was a bit of a depressing place. It wasn’t all bad though and the average non-beggar locals were pretty cool. Take our tuk-tuk driver that drove us around Angkor Wat for example. ‘Muong’ was a top bloke and gave us a fantastic tour of the temples and the surrounding countryside but I’ll come back to him later.

First I have to discuss the temples which are what everyone comes to Siem Riep for in the first place. If you’re like me then you might have a small idea as to what to expect but the reality is much greater than I ever would have expected. We opted to do the sunrise tour which means we had to be up at 4:30am to meet our tuk-tuk driver who drove us out there in our own personal ride. As the world cup has been on recently I have been having quite a few late nights watching the games (especially the All Whites, well done again boys) so I was pretty bloody tired before we even got in the tuk-tuk to head out to the temples. As the whole temple complex covers a leg-shattering twenty six square miles I knew I was in trouble. Coupled with that is the fact that after about 9am it is so stiflingly hot that even the flies take siestas.

Having said that we made it out to the main Angkor Wat temple that you might have seen on the telly or something like that. This is the main draw card and there were a lot of other tourists out there all standing around waiting with baited breath and camera in hand for the sun to come up. The beauty of this part of the world is that if there’s money to be made from any situation then there will be an eager local on-hand to exploit it. So within minutes of arrival at the sunrise spot a lady approached me with the offer of a nice comfy chair and a hot cup of coffee for the grand sum of one dollar! ‘Bollocks to the temple’ I thought as my weary backside edged its way toward my chair and the kind lady promptly tottered off to set about making me my coffee. Stoked! This temple spotting carry on might be alright after all.

The sunrise did look pretty cool over the main temple itself from the comfort of my chair but all too soon it was time to begin the trudge around the exterior and interior of this giant stone structure. The temples were mainly built around the 11th and 12th century and I must say they certainly knew what they were doing back then. The stone has all been carved into different pictures and images that tell stories and look very beautiful but it is the sheer size of the place that got me. Every stone, and there must be literally hundreds of thousands of them across all the temples are intricately carved and assembled to make these amazing structures. The coolest ones I thought were probably the gates to the other main temple site of ‘Angkor Thom’. These were like four giant faces made out of stone, each one facing either North, South, East or West. The faces were huge and just seemed to ‘loom’ out of the stone as they towered above you. Very cool. Angkor Thom has about twenty temples to walk in and around and the best one is called, actually I can’t remember what it’s called but it was pretty amazing with loads of intricately carved towers and faces poking out everywhere. Hopefully the photos do this place justice. There were temples for the kings and even one for a bloke they called ‘the Leper King’. There were also temples where the jungle had grown over the actual structures and now formed part of the temples themselves. Not just like a few weeds either but actual enormous trees that were easily twenty metres tall or more. The kind of tree that would give the average Kauri a run for its money.

We tarried wearily from one temple to the next but I must say I was struggling a bit. The tuk-tuk driver just laughed when he saw me traipsing back towards the tuk-tuk before informing me that we were off to another one. At one stage we drove 40km’s out to another temple which looked a lot like all the other ones but I must say it was pretty impressive. The sun was beginning to melt both of us but there was still more temples to see and the driver was even talking about sticking around for the ‘sunset viewing’ experience. Sunrise to sunset?? You’ve got to be kidding me, I don’t care if these things are ten million years old, I just wasn’t going to make it. It’s hard when you’re at a place for only one day so you want to see as much as possible but at the same time its 38 degrees and you’re buggered from walking around and lack of sleep. By about 4pm and after 11 hours of temple viewing I was completely knackered so I thought stuff this lets go home! All in all it was a great day but you’d have to be some kind of evil masochistic temple lover to want to go back again the next day. So yeah, amazing place but the sheer scale of it is what gets you in the end, there’s just too much to see.

Our tuk-tuk driver had told us about a great $3 all you can eat BBQ place and as he’d been such a great driver and tour guide we thought we’d shout him a feed. He brought his little brother with him as he had done the driving during the day while Muong gave us the info on all the places we visited. The place turned out to be an awesome restaurant and we had a great time feasting on BBQ chicken, pork, beef and seafood. For three bucks this has to be the best value place I’ve ever eaten! The funny part was our driver Muong who looked like a skinny little bloke who would barely weigh 50kg’s soaking wet, proceeded to pack away enough food to make a long haul truck driver blush. He easily outdid me and both Kate and I sat back as this bloke polished off plate after plate of BBQ meat. We were pissing ourselves by this stage but he just kept going!! A truly great effort and how that restaurant still managed to make money after giving away that much food I’ll never know. As probably not too many of the customers take the driver out for a feed Muong was very grateful and I think we have made a friend for life there now. Muong was a great driver so it was more than worth it to take him and his brother out as although $3 may mean nothing to us it’s probably still more than most of the locals can afford to throw away on a meal.

Before I finish up with Siem Riep I have to mention a place called the X-bar. This is a roof top bar in the main town that has, of all things, a skateboard half-pipe ramp on the roof! The bar is three stories up and then from there you go up another flight of stairs to the very top and there’s the ramp! An Aussie guy named Carlo runs this place and for whatever reason had the idea of building this thing and I must say he’s done an excellent job. The view from the top of the ramp is pretty awesome and you can see right across the whole town. You wouldn’t want to lose your board over the edge though but luckily they have nets in place to avoid that sort of thing. A friend of ours we had met in Vietnam also made it to Siem Riep and as he’s a fellow skater we had a jam there a couple times. You could buy beers at the bar for a buck and then skate the roof up top, perfect! Of all the places we have been to this would have been just about the last place I expected to have something to skate. It just goes to show how you should never be caught anywhere without your board as you just never know. Come to think of it I have had some pretty random skates in some very unexpected places across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and now Cambodia. Wherever you go though, as any skater knows, if you show the locals some respect and you’re not a dick then skaters will always hook you up. We had some fun at this place and another place down the road that sold two cocktails for two dollars. The girls sure do lap those ones up! But with two for one drinks on every beer as well the boys were more than happy too.

We had decided to head from Siem Riep to Bangkok direct by bus due to time and visa constraints so it was with the promise of loads of ‘genuine fake’ shopping to do that we loaded up and left Cambodia behind. I never thought I’d arrive in Thailand and go ‘wow, this place is really clean and the locals seem so wealthy’. But after two weeks in Cambodia, Bangkok looked like just about the most high-tech and advanced city I had ever seen in my life! We have already written about Bangkok in the past so I don’t see it as necessary to devote another blog entry to the city again. Suffice to say we shopped hard, got a whole heap of sweet clothes and shoes etc which have all been safely bundled up and sent on to await our arrival in the UK. From Bangkok we have now travelled up to Chang Mai were I sit surrounded by young drunken Irish backpackers getting on the piss in the hostel pool. Fantastic stuff. From here we are travelling up to the Thai-Laos border where we intend to take a two day boat trip into Laos on the Mekong River. I will pick the blog up again after this time. By now, after five months in South East Asia we are both looking forward to getting out of this region and over into China for the long trip up to North East Asia, South Korea and Japan. Hard to believe we still have ‘only’ three months left to go. Bring it on! Will Laos be just another backpacker grovel-dive or will the slow-boat along the Mekong be just what we need to recharge before we cross into the vastness and ancient culture of China? Find out next time. ‘Til Then.

Photos of the Wats surrounding Angkor Wat.

We saw around 30 wats and temples so here is just a few pictures I have selected.