Cambodia

* Disclaimer – I apologize for the length of this post, but it really was that incredible! *

For my last weekend in Singapore, I set out to explore the jungles of Cambodia.  Yes, it’s true; I spent a weekend exploring the ruins of the ancient temples of Angkor outside of Siem Reap, Cambodia!  This was the trip I had been most anticipating and was most excited about.  I had heard that the Angkor temples were amazing, even in ruins, and I can’t foresee another opportunity to travel back to Cambodia in the near future.  So, at 6am on Friday morning (after getting taxis at 4.30am, running through the airport, and almost missing our flight) the seven of us – Team Hardcore – set out for Siem Reap.

The Kingdom of Cambodia, in case you don’t know, is a small country in Southeast Asia nestled between Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.  You have probably heard of it in relation to the Khmer Rouge, which, according to my Lonely Planet, is ‘one of the most heinous revolutions the world has ever seen.’  Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed some two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.  When the Vietnamese invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, they fled into the jungles of Cambodia and maintained a guerilla war throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.  The UN intervened in about 1991, and UN-administered elections took place in 1993.  Peace was unstable, and successive governments continued to be overthrown.  However, the country has been much more peaceful and stable since the end of what my guide referred to as the ‘civil war’ in 1998 (the year of the death of Pol Pot and the end of the Khmer Rouge).  Tourism is beginning to come back to the country slowly but steadily.  It is dangerous to be outside of the two main cities, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and tourists are safest when escorted by guides and drivers (especially since the country is still full of landmines planted by the Khmer Rouge).

It is with all of this that we headed into Siem Reap earlier this weekend.  Whew!

Knowing that we were entering a third-world country, I had arranged our entire trip before leaving Singapore.  I had arranged for a guide and driver for the weekend and accommodation in a hotel near the city center.  Our guide had put together an itinerary for our weekend, and we had asked around and researched whatever else we wanted to do.  So, when we got off the plane in Siem Reap, my main worry was being able to find enough cash to buy my tourist visa.  (I didn’t have enough cash when leaving Singapore, and as we almost missed our flight anyways, I didn’t have time to get money in the Singapore airport.)

Cambodian money was very interesting.  Their currency is the riel, but it is so devalued that the government uses US dollars!  The current exchange rate is roughly 4000 riel to 1 USD.  When you take money out of an ATM, you get USD, and everyone is paid in USD.  The locals all use USD.  The only time a riel is used is when giving change.  Cambodians do not use US change, so if you are supposed to receive US$1.50, they will give you a dollar bill and 2000 riel.  I didn’t expect to use USD at any point in Southeast Asia, so it was odd to be pulling dollars out of a Cambodian ATM.  One funny story was that, because I have been living in New Zealand, I haven’t seen some of the newer colored bills, and when I expressed my surprise when I saw one, the guide was like, ‘What?  We have had those for several years!’

And that brings me back to the guide and our first morning in the airport.  Two GT students had gone to Siem Reap two weekends before, and they had a guide that they recommended to us.  His name was Hot Hoeum, but he went by his nickname, Milky.  He was a very good guide.  He had incredible English and was very knowledgeable about everyplace we visited.  It also seemed like he knew just about everyone in Cambodia!  Everywhere we went he knew someone or knew someone who knew someone there.  He was a very good guide.

After meeting us at the airport, he took us to breakfast near our hotel at Molly Malone’s (an Irish pub that made me miss being in Wellington) and then to our hotel to be checked in.  We wasted no time after this getting to the temples.  First, we had to pay $40 for a two-day pass for access to all of the temples, but after that we never had to stop and buy more tickets.  They’re also pretty cool souvenirs.

Our first stop was the temple city of Angkor Thom.  This place was huge!  It is a complex of temples surrounded by a wall and a moat.  We specifically visited the south gate, Bayon, Baphoun, the Royal Palace, the Terrace of Elephants, and Preah Khan.  I have never done anything like this before.  When you enter in any of the gates, you walk across a causeway over a moat (now empty and used for rice paddies) that is lined with statues of demons on the right and gods on the left.  The Bayon temple has a total of 216 faces on all of its towers watching over all of the visitors (or subjects in the past).  The Terrace of Elephants is a 300m-long platform upon which the king may have entertained guests or watched sporting matches.  

These temples were built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and they are now laying in ruin.  They were the ancient capitals of the Khmer Kingdom, but they were abandoned for centuries and only rediscovered in the 1800s.  When the French colonized Cambodia, they started restoring some of the temples, but civil unrest in the late 1900s (such as the Khmer Rouge) prevented many temples from being completed.  Work is being done again, but many of the plans have been lost.  In order to restore the temples, they must be taken apart piece by piece, numbered, and put back together again using no mortar (the bricks all just fit together).  During the Khmer Rouge period, plans and maps of numbered bricks were lost, so some of the temples are now giant jigsaw puzzles.  

Even with all of this ruin, they were incredible sights to see.  I have never experienced being around something so old or been walking through so much ruin.  The buildings are made of sandstone, which is a soft rock, so that contributes to the breakdown of the temples.  However, even with erosion, neglect, and now human interference, many of the elaborate carvings have survived.  Angkor Wat, the temple that we visited in the afternoon, is widely recognized for its 800m-long series of reliefs, the most famous of which is the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.  Everything is carved from bottom to top.  These temples were different from the temples in Bangkok.  In Bangkok, the temples were covered in gold and metal; in Angkor, everything is stone.  All of the carvings were done in stone.  One of the coolest things about Angkor Wat was climbing up the stairs to the central temple.  The stairs were incredible treacherous - not even wide enough for your feet to be sideways, very narrow, and on a 70 degree angle with no handrail or help of any kind – but it was worth it in the end to be above the rest of the temple complex.  Most of us made the climb, and luckily there were stairs on a 50 degree angle with a handrail to clamber down, although they were just as narrow as the first set.

After these two temples, we were absolutely exhausted.  It took us all day to tour just these two; that’s how enormous they are!  We were also soaked in sweat.  It was much hotter than I anticipated in Cambodia.  I was expecting temperatures like Singapore, but this was the hottest climate I have ever experienced in my entire life.  The actual high hovered around 95F, and that doesn’t take into account the scorching sun, humidity, or the fact that we were trekking around in the jungle and climbing temples.  We were exhausted!  That evening, after returning to the hotel, we napped, showered, and then went to go bargain at the local markets.  We were excited about purchasing souvenirs in Cambodia, and we are all getting a little better at talking down prices.  We all came back with some incredible souvenirs.  I picked up some decorative pillow cases for my new living room and some t-shirts, and some people got a lot more than that.  We were able to make some great deals.  After all of our bargaining, we were extremely hungry, so we headed back to Molly Malone’s for some good food and good drink.  None of us made it past 10.30, and in my room we fell asleep within 5 minutes of getting to the room!

It was a good thing that we got so much sleep because our next day was just as full as our first.  After breakfast at the hotel, we headed out of Siem Reap to catch a boat to the floating village.  This is a village of mainly Vietnamese refugees, although about 30% of the population is Cambodian.  The Vietnamese refugees do not have Cambodia citizenship, so they don’t pay taxes, but they also cannot buy land.  Therefore, they all live on little boats on the biggest lake in Southeast Asia.  This lake is 2500m2 during the dry season but swells to 12500m2 during the rainy season.  These people have no country, no land, nothing, and yet it is a village of about 7000 people.  They buy food and goods from a market ship that rows around to the different boats and make money by fishing.  On the drive there, we saw so much poverty, people living in houses that weren’t anything more than bamboo shacks up on stilts.  Our guide said that they were made that was to be easily mobile so that when the rains come and the lake swells they pick up their houses and move farther inland.  Whenever we got close to the fishing sanctuary, we would have children clawing at our boat asking for money.  We hadn’t traveled anywhere where begging was that prevalent or had so much poverty.

One thing about traveling around in Cambodia is that no matter where we went, we were surrounded by people, mainly children, asking us to buy things or give them money.  The little girls are especially insistent.  They know a decent amount of English because they are taught by tourists.  Someone had an interesting experience where the little girl asked where we were from, but when someone replied ‘Singapore,’ she said, ‘You lie!  You from America!’  Later, when we said we didn’t have any money, she said, ‘You lie!  You’re American!’  Kevin actually didn’t have any money, and to this the little girl replied, ‘You lie!  You American!  You ask your friends!’  It was pretty crazy.  Some other people had girls who, when they found out we were from America, began listing off states and capitals.  They were incredibly insistent.

That afternoon we headed back to the temples in the heat of the day.  Our first stop was Banteay Srei.  It lies about 25km northeast of the other main temples, so it was out of our way, but it is unusual in that it was made of red sandstone instead of the softer gray like the other temples.  It is also much older, being completed in 967.  That makes it over 1000 years old!  The carvings are even more intricate than the other temples, if you can believe that, and its modern name means ‘Citadel of the Women’ or ‘Citadel of Beauty.’  This is because of the intricacy of the carvings and the pink sandstone.

After leaving here, we drove back in towards the main temples to visit Ta Prohm.  Now, you may not have heard of any of the others, but you have probably heard of this one (even if you don’t know it).  Ta Prohm is famous most recently for being the film set for Tomb Raider and Two Brothers, and it looks like it fell out of Indiana Jones (according to my guidebook – and personal experience).  Unlike the other grand temples, this one is much smaller, but the corridors and windows are more intricate and winding.  The most interesting feature, however, are the trees.  For many years, all of these temples were overrun by the jungle, and that has caused much decay (roots getting between the bricks and expanding, thus knocking down walls).  Now, however, if you removed some of the trees, they are so intertwined with the walls that the entire structure would crumble.  These trees have the most amazing root systems of anything that I have ever seen (and I have seen some big trees).  We’re talking roots systems above ground that are about two to three times my height!  We took some great pictures at this temple as it was the most ruined of them all (having been abandoned to the jungle and not been restored).

We took lots of action shots and many with us scattered around the ruins, but my favorite one deserves its own paragraph.  We were scattered among the root system of a particularly large tree at Ta Prohm, and after we took our picture (before we could move), an Asian lady came running up to us and asked us if she could take her picture with us just like that.  We did, and after she said that her son was obsessed with the Power Rangers and that we looked just like them with all of our different colors!  It was pretty funny, and for the rest of the time after that we took ‘Power Ranger’ pictures.

After Ta Prohm, we went to our last temple, Phnom Bakheng.  We were exhausted by this point already and overheated, and we pulled up to what we would consider a vertical wall of rock and dirt!  Atop a rather large mountain (even worse than Wellington hills!) is a temple designed to look like the mythical Mt. Meru.  We managed to trek up the giant practically-vertical hill (and no one slipped in the process), and once we got to the top we found that we had to climb even more stairs like the treacherous ones at Angkor Wat.  Once we got to the very top, though, we found an amazing sight – you could see all over the countryside and even to Angkor Wat in the distance.  It was pretty incredible, and a perfect way to end our day at the temples.  It’s supposed to be a good place to watch the sun set, but we were an hour too early and running low on time, so we satisfied ourselves with having made it up and down with no problems.

That night Milky recommended that we see a show, and we thought it was a great idea.  The show included a buffet dinner, and it was a traditional Cambodian dancing show.  It was an hour long, and the costumes and dances were incredible.  The dancing is a lot like other Asian dancing, focused on telling a story and the movement of the head, feet, and hands.  We were very impressed.  After dinner, we walked back down the main road to our hotel, stopping along the way for a bit more shopping.

The next morning, it was up bright and early to get to the airport.  It was absolutely pouring when we woke up, but we were very lucky that that was the only rain of the weekend as it is the beginning of the rainy season now.  It cleared up while we were waiting to board, so there weren’t any issues with takeoff.  I was very happy at the airport because I collect stamps to put in my passport, and I hadn’t been able to find any in the city, but they had some in duty free.  Amazing!  It was the perfect end to a perfect weekend trekking through the jungle of Cambodia.  And we all made it out alive!

Oh, and we’re all healthy enough right now, but I’ll let you know if any of us come down with malaria, dengue fever, or some kind of ancient Cambodian disease that had lain dormant for centuries in the temples.