Ludwig's Odyssey: July 2015

Cambodia is a strange country. It seems to us that it has lost its identity and looking to its richer neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam as inspiration. I suppose our view is only one from a fleeting visit so we may be doing the country an injustice. Certainly the Khmer Rouge had a massive influence on how the country has developed in the past 40 years. Not since India have we seen such evident poverty. Our bus journeys from the border of Vietnam to Phnom Penh, from Phnom Penh to Battambang and from Battambang to Siem Reap offered views of mostly wooden traditional huts that people live in, as well as endless paddy fields. We’ve seen a lot of paddy fields on our travels so far but none more so in Cambodia, another remnant from the Khmer Rouge era when the population was forced to work the land. The people can be charming and friendly but you always get the feeling they are trying to scam another $1 or $2 out of you, I suppose it is to be expected from such a poor country. All in, Cambodia has turned out to be a bit more expensive than we thought, not so much for accommodation and food, but just to be a tourist and to visit places and get taken around in Tuk Tuks.

So we arrived in Phnom Penh after an easy seven hour bus journey from HCMC and booked ourselves into a lovely room, by far the biggest room we have had on our travels with a bathroom that was as big as some of the rooms we’ve stayed in in the past! We were greeted by towels shaped as monkeys (we’ve had swans, flowers and squids too!).

We decided to try a place to have some food and chill out as we heard they had happy hour beers for $0.50 (well most places in Cambodia do but we didn’t know that at the time). We sat on a table next to some really nice guys, who for want of a better expression where expats from Canada, Australia and Ireland. All three of them had somehow found their way to Phnom Penh and sort of not moved on for a few months. Personally, we couldn’t see why you want to live there as there isn’t much to do but they were happy enough and who are we to judge. We had a good night with them, Paul and Jerry the Australian and Irish man invited us to another bar where we got hustled at pool by the local girls! All good fun and we enjoyed their company, they were good down to earth people. We saw them again for the subsequent two nights we stayed in the capital city and it was nice to share experiences on travelling.

We visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, we paid our entry fee which wasn’t the cheapest and only after found out that we couldn’t see much if anything of the Royal Palace due to an official engagement of some sort, scammed! The Silver Pagoda was nice enough but had we not visited this at all, I don’t think we would have missed much so we were a bit annoyed but laughed it off as a ‘welcome to Cambodia’ scam. The same day we also visited Wat Phnom which is the oldest temple site and where the city gets its name from. Penh, a lady founded the first temple on this site which is the only hill (Phnom) in the city. So Phnom Penh means Penh’s Hill. This was a much nicer experience and we also had to take cover inside for 30 mins during a heavy downpour. On the way back we smelt something bad, looked up and there was a tree full of fruit bats, amazing sight.

The following day, we had the inevitable ‘miserable’ day as we visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek with an audio tour which was really well done and informative followed by a visit to S21 or Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Those poor poor people, whatever did they do to deserve such a horrible fate. We don’t really want to spell out what happened there as it is quite gruesome but if you are interested, there is plenty of info on the web about the atrocities.

Although we would say, we get the feeling that had we visited these places some twenty years back, they probably would have been more shocking but It is strange how we have been desensitised to such brutality, there is so much death and destruction on the media these days that seeing skeletal remains and pictures of the dead has become common place.

So to bring back some joy, we met up with Claire, a friend we had met back in Goa (she’s the one on the boat with us, the very last photo). We have been on very different routes and countries but somehow ended up in Phnom Penh at the same time. We had a good catchup, enjoyed a few beers and were hustled by a very cute eight year old girl into buying some bracelets from her. This little girl’s english was really good and she was so street wise, imagine your eight year old doing the same, I think not!

Arising early, we left PP on the bus for a seven hour journey to Battambang.

No sooner had we got off the bus than we arranged with our tuk tuk driver to take us to the bat cave for sunset. We quickly checked in to our hotel for the next couple of nights and were taken out of town, some 12-15km to a small mountain range where this bat cave was.

Wow! We saw so many bats, we watched for around one hour whilst all the bats exited the cave, there must have been millions of them, the Asian Wrinkle-Lipped variety apparently. They made beautiful murmurations as the sun came down and it was worth the journey to Battambang for this alone.

Battambang is the second largest city in Cambodia but it certainly didn’t feel like a big place, it was a quick and easy walk around to see the old colonial buildings on the riverside. Battambang didn’t have much to offer really but we did have fun on the “Bamboo Train”.

I’m plagiarising the lonely planet and other internet sources here:

The bamboo train runs from O Dambong, (4km south of Battambang) to O Sra Lav, via half an hour of clicks and clacks along warped, misaligned rails and vertiginous bridges left by the French.

Each bamboo train (known in Khmer as a norry) consists of a 3m long wood frame, covered lengthwise with slats made of ultra-light bamboo, that rests on two detachable axles with wheels, the aft one connected by fan belts to a 6HP gasoline engine, which cruises along at about 15km/h

The genius of the system is that it offers a brilliant solution to the most ineluctable problem faced on any single-track line: what to do when two trains going opposite directions meet. In the case of bamboo trains, the answer is simple: one car is quickly disassembled and set on the ground beside the tracks so the other can pass. The rule is that whichever car has fewer passengers has to cede priority.

It was very silly and possibly a little dangerous but good fun all the same and apparently may be stopped in the future so I guess we were lucky to experience it.

We left Battambang the next day and headed to Siem Reap. Let’s be honest this is the real reason people come to Cambodia, to visit the temples of Angkor.

We checked in to a nice place which had a free fish spa not too far from the main drag called ‘pub’ street...

We did visit this pub street on our first night expecting to see lots of drunken backpackers but it was surprisingly calm and actually there were more families enjoying their evening meals. The beer was cheap so we did some good people watching.

The following morning, we hired bikes and set off early to go and visit some of the temples. We bought a three day pass as we knew we would need more than one day to enjoy all the major sites as they are spread out over quite a big distance, in fact by the end of the first day, we had cycled 42km!

We should explain, for those who haven’t been, it’s not just Angkor Wat that you come to visit, there are many temples of all shapes and sizes (see the map below to get an understanding).

On the first day, we started off in the Angkor Thom complex and we visited; Bayon with all it’s amazing faces, Baphuon which had views from the top, Phimeanakas and the Terraces of the Elephants and also of the Leper King. We made our way north out of Angkor Thom complex and headed to Preah Khan which would turn out to be our favourite. Just as we got into this temple it rained hard for about 20 minutes so that kept the crowds away which always makes for a better experience. This temple isn’t on the main circuit and hasn’t been renovated as much as the others so its ruinous state made it feel more authentic to us and there were the classic Tung trees growing through the stones of the temple which makes for great photos as all the roots envelope themselves. After staying at this temple for quite some time, we moved on to see the next temple down the road called Neak Pean. We got off our bikes and entered into what we thought was it. Walking around however, we noticed the similarities between this temple and the one we had just visited, it didn’t dawn on us until about 10 minutes later that we were in fact still in Preah Khan! We had entered into this temple again but by a different gate!!! Silly idiots that we are.. In our defence this temple complex was vast and did sprawl over an area of some 5sq kilometres.

We then finally visited Neak Pean which was an anti-climax, followed by Ta Som which is a small scale version of Preah Khan and finally Pre Rup which was a Hindu temple so the architecture was quite different to the other mainly Buddhist temples we had seen. The views from up high were good here too. We made the long cycle back and were quite exhausted by the time we had arrived back..

The following day, we didn’t get up quite so early (we weren’t really interested in seeing the temples during sunrise as most people seem to be) and visited Banteay Kdei which was poorly made truth be told, then Ta Prohm which is the famous temple for tree roots eating their way at the stones. Ta Prohm is going through renovations and has been ‘touristed up’ to make it safe for the hoards of Asian tourists that flock here now, so much so that there is a route for visiting the place and you get shouted out if you go the wrong way around, ridiculous! The filming of Tomb Raider has had an affect on it’s popularity and this did affect our enjoyment somewhat. It was too crowded and it somehow felt unauthentic, we had expected to enjoy this one but we much preferred Preah Khan for the experience although we did manage to get some good photos as we were ‘naughty’ and went into places you’re not supposed too.

We then made our way to the famous one, Angkor Wat. Wow this place is huge. It took us about eight minutes to walk over the two causeways to get to the centre of this complex. It’s so big and bold, it’s more of a fortress than a building dedicated to religion. The most striking aspect is the Bas-Reliefs galleries that go all the way around the temple, an area 1sq Kilometre, so much work has gone into them and you can’t imagine how many people or how long it must have taken to carve.

We felt somewhat ‘templed out’ by the end of day two. We had given some thought to visiting some other temples quite far out such as Banteay Srei the following day but as we have had the luxury of seeing very similar ones in India at Khajuraho and we had already seen the best temples, we decided to not do too much for the next couple of days before we took our flight to Bangkok.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at Angkor although Wend kept saying that “it was so different when I was here sixteen years ago”! She was lucky to have been here then and have the place virtually to herself, it’s certainly got more crowded since.

Our Lasting Memories of Cambodia:

Temples of course.

Bats!

Paddy Fields.

Old Traditional wooden houses.

Beef Lok Lak, we ate this quite a lot, nothing too amazing but it came with a lovely lime sauce which made a change from all the soy and chill sauces we’d been eating in Vietnam.

Cambodian People’s Party Signs everywhere.

Phnom Penh