2 days in siem reap and its fairly overwhelming for a small third world place. mostly what i've been struck by is garbage and pollution and heat, also beautiful temples and wonderful people.
it took me a total of 29 hours to get here from tasmania. sambo was waiting at the airport for me and took me to the golden mango in his tuk tuk, where i immediately found shanti and sol in the pool. its so wonderful to have travel buddies again!
the golden mango is a little far from town so sambo dropped us off for lunch, we wandered around a bit, pablo got a haircut, and shanti and i stopped at one of the dozens of foot massage places for a half hour of wonderfulness ($1 for 15 minutes!). the main streets have chairs set up everywhere, small women yelling 'foot massage lady?' there are also giant tanks of pedicure fish, sit on the wooden plank, dangle your feet, the fish will nibble off your dead skin while you drink a beer. no thanks.
i had scheduled a full body khmer massage, pretty much the same as a thai massage, for the evening. this was my third foot and leg massage of the day, I'm not sure why i thought that was a good idea. but it was only $6 per hour so why not. in total i spent $20 for 2 hours of massage. since its too hot to run outside maybe i'll just keep in shape this way, isn't that what they do for paraplegics?
tuesday was our first day at angkor. we hired sambo to drive us around and what crazy traffic there is here. there is a line down the middle of the main road but its really just a suggestion, people drive buses, trucks, cars, motorcycles, tuk tuks, bicycles everywhere in every direction, people walking as well. it was a little weird at first but after observation it made sense. just keep moving and everything will be alright, if you stop you're screwed. it was very common to see cars and trucks coming straight at us on the wrong side of the road but everyone gives way and allows others to get where they're going, very polite. horns are only used to let someone know that you're there. it looks like a free for all but its perfectly choreographed if you've been driving here all your life.
crossing the street on foot was fun, real life frogger. there's no point in looking both ways, it'll only scare you. just take a deep breath, step out when there's a small space, and keep moving at an even pace. don't panic and you'll get through no matter how much traffic there is.
angkor is about 15 minutes outside of siem reap. the first temple we visited was angkor wat, the largest religious building in the world. and it was massive, an entire complex of buildings surround it, with a moat around it all. the walls were completely filled with carvings depicting battles and history and so much more. i couldn't possibly do it justice so just google it.
you could climb the main temple but when i got in line with pablo i was turned away. i had worn what i thought of as a modest outfit, considering what i'd been wearing at the beach for the past few months, but too much leg was showing. and too much arm. so i got to sit and watch with sol while pablo climbed to the top, then shanti. no big deal, though, there are ruins everywhere, that one just happened to be further above ground.
it took about 2 hours to see a small portion of angkor wat, then time to find sambo and move on. the tuk tuk drivers all parked in the shade to wait for their tourists, some listen to music, some played a crazy version of hackeysack, but most had a hammock that attached in the back and they napped their time away. the tuk tuks here are 4 person carts with a shade roof bolted to the back of motorcycles.
our next stop was bayon, known for the 216 faces carved in the stone looking down at you. if there was just one correct definition for surreal this might be it. google it. we did a downwind run of this one with sambo picking us up on the opposite side.
our final stop for the morning was ta prohm, known to most people as the tomb raider temple. the cambodian scenes were filmed here and it was every bit as amazing as it looked on tv. giant trees were growing over the ruins of the temples and the scene was quite dramatic. it was really hard to get any good pictures because of the massive amounts of people, there was always someone somewhere. or a dozen someones somewhere. no matter, it was cool.
the openings (i don't think 'windows' conveys the exact image) in the temples were spooky. they were made so precisely, with the corridors exact duplicates, that i thought at first they were mirrors. but then someone on the other side would move and i'd realize i wasn't looking at us. extremely freaky.
it was around 1pm at this point and steamy hot. we were puddles of sweat. i don't know how sol made it through but he did great. he loved climbing the rocks and his favorite saying of the day was 'broke house'.
it really pains me that i can't begin to describe angkor wat. everything about the place was magical, the stones everywhere from efforts at rebuilding, the carvings, the statues, the forests, the extreme dirtiness of my feet, the shear size of the complex. we bought 3 day passes but we'll only get to see a tiny fraction of the ruins if we spent all of our time doing nothing else.
after ta prohm we headed back to the hotel to swim and eat and recover until our sunset hike.
i'm going to take a moment here to describe my current situation before i continue. we switched to a hotel closer to town center today, we arrived at about 12:15 to find out that the power is down on this block until 5:30. no a/c, no fan, no light, nothing. i'm laying in bed naked, sweating, in almost total dark because my room is near the road so the windows are blacked, i had to use my waterproof phone to figure out how to take a cold shower. we were going to do more temples this afternoon but cancelled on sambo because sol was so hot he projectile vomited out his nose. thankfully, he's been asleep for the past 2 hours (and shanti and i snuck out to get our feet rubbed again). its too hot to do anything.
and i think this is where i'll leave it for now, there's an hour till the power comes back on and i'm going to find the pool (i'm only sitting here sweating b/c i feel guilty i haven't updated in 2 days). if there was a bar with air conditioning that's where i'd be. but there isn't.
postscript: 5pm no power, 6pm, 'yes, it'll be on in half an hour', poor sol vomited again and had diarrhea 3 times (once in the pool, oops, poor guy), showers by candlelite, we went up to the roof and spotted a 'mall', it had mild air conditioning but nothing good to eat. still no power at our hotel. walked, sweated, swore, as every other block in town had lites. we found an internet restaurant with a/c, had dinner until sol needed to come home, and as we left the entire city lost power. siem reap lit only by headlites. the full cambodian experience.
biggest surprise of the nite, as we turned the corner, our block was the only one that had lites! how's that for awesome, they were blowing out the candles as we walked in. first things first, charge all my toys for the next time it happens.
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| shanti and sol at ta prohm |
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