We briefly stopped in Bangkok for Saturday and Sunday nights on our way to Cambodia. Bangkok highlights include:
- A scooter crashed into our parked taxi, and our driver drove off without calling the police or taking anyone’s insurance info, much to the shock of our taxi companion (oh honey, you are no longer in North America, where everyone is much more uptight about silly things like police and insurance).
- A hostel staff member giving us directions to go for dinner: “..turn right, then right, then…dark street but .. safety” (he was right, it was a dark little shortcut but very safety).
- Brooke’s birthday! Beautiful, Resourceful, Oracle, Omnipotent, Kind, Easy-going, B.R.O.O.K.E. Or: Banzai, Recalcitrant, Oxidizable, Ovoviviparous, Katabatic, Eleemosynary. What did we do for her birthday? We slept in, wandered, ate cake and ice cream, wandered, spoke to a lovely Thai man who knew all about Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper but was unimpressed with his own country, wandered, got caught in a rainstorm, wandered back, had a nap, ate pizza, watched Jumanji.
On Monday, we got on an early bus to Siem Reap, Cambodia. This bus company made crossing the Thailand-Cambodia border easy by having the bus attendant do most of the visa processing for you. I was immediately swooning over our Cambodian bus attendant (unfortunately I never got his name): “Hallo ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please, ladies and gentlemen. Today, ladies and gentlemen we are going to Cambodia, yeah? If everything goes smoothly today ladies and gentlemen, we will have a great bus ride into Cambodia ladies and gentlemen, yeah?” We gave him our passports and visa photos, and he organized and filled out our visa forms. When we got to the border, he was all business: “OK ladies and gentlemen I will now leave the bus for a quick 15 minutes, ladies and gentlemen, to process your visa forms, yeah? When I return ladies and gentlemen we will all leave the bus and go through the border together ladies and gentlemen yeah?” he then left the bus, and scurried/ran full speed across the dirt road down a random street (we weren’t in front of any official border buildings or gate, the bus had pulled over randomly), with our passports and visa forms bundled under one arm. I remember half thinking “wow, that’s a professional”, and half “..this could potentially be the thing that goes very wrong”. But he came back with our passports and we sailed through the border.
My first impression of Cambodia, through the bus window, was that it is very pretty. Long orangey/red soil roads lined with trees covered with dangling bright yellow flowers. I also thought Cambodia seemed poorer than Thailand, although that could have been influenced by all the reading I’d been doing on their political history.
I would have liked to stay in Siem Reap or the surrounding region for longer. There was a lot more to do than I was aware of, like exploring the floating villages of Tonlé Sap Lake or Kulen Mountain. But, due to our time crunch, exploring Angkor Wat was our main goal. Angkor was the megacity of the Khmer Empire, in use from approximately the 9th to 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is a temple, built for King Suryavarman (12th century), and is the largest religious monument in the world. There are tons of other Angkor ruins to explore on top of Angkor Wat.
We decided to commit to the temple fatigue and heat exhaustion of exploring Angkor with a one day pass. We went to Pre Rup for sunset, then Angkor Wat for sunrise the next morning, Ta Prohm (aka the Lara Croft Tomb Raider temple), Bayon temple (aka the smiling Buddha temple), and the southern entrance to Angkor Thom. Again, I was so smitten with our tour guide (whose name I’ve also forgotten). “Now when we get into Angkor Wat please stay together. There are a lot a lot of western tourists, and you all look the same. So if you get separated I won’t be able to find you.” “You’re from Canada? Ohh I know Canada. I like Justin Bieber”. “Miss Canada, let’s go!”
Angkor Wat itself is huge. And the surrounding ruins cover a huge area. When you’ve seen a lot of ruins, especially in one day, after a while they all start to look the same. So in this case it was the number of ruins over such a large area that got me. The size of it and knowing you’re only seeing a small section of the larger complex makes it feel that much more impressive, grand, and ancient.
Thursday we did a bike tour, run by Cambodian university students, of the area surrounding Siem Reap. I was extremely excited to get on a bike, and my enthusiasm was harshly punished. We rode all over the countryside, mostly on very bumpy dirt roads, and my mountain seat was like sitting on wood. I thought mountain bikes had springs! I thought their seats would be comfier! I thought the bike would basically do the riding for me!
Despite me expending a lot of effort to hover over the seat and simultaneously not cry out every time I failed at that, the tour was really interesting. We biked to three business/homes in the Siem Reap countryside: a basket weaver, a rice wine maker, and a piggy bank maker. I don’t know what to call any of these businesses.. it can’t be “factory” or “facility” because each “enterprise” (?) was inside a family’s 1 – 2 room house. Wooden beds would be on one side of the house, and the product was made on the other. Sometimes there would be an extra room to store materials. The whole family participated in each business, while the really young kids played and ran around their parents.
We rode up to our last stop just as about 50 large piggy banks (large as in a little bigger than a watermelon) were being strapped onto a scooter to be brought to a market. There were pig, penguin, cow, horse, rooster, minion, and angry bird piggy banks, among others. It was an impressive operation, all made by hand, but definitely left me wondering… are massive penguin piggy banks an art native to this region? What a random countryside business.
On Friday, we took a long and stuffy bus ride to Phnom Penh. Lucky for me, I was sitting beside a Cambodian gentleman who could not wait to be best friends. I was shown pictures of him at Angkor Wat, pictures of him sitting on a bench, pictures of rolls of silk, and pictures of chickens. I’m still not sure if these were his chickens, chickens he’d seen, or if he just really liked chickens (he spoke almost zero English). Despite getting rather tired of having his cellphone, and once a wooden bracelet he insisted I smell, shoved in my face every time I stopped pretending to be sleeping, I was a little hurt that he barely said goodbye when he got off the bus. I had watched multiple terrible music videos by a Canadian singing in Khmer for his benefit. I thought we were friends.
We were only there for two days, and didn’t see much of the city, but I liked Phnom Penh. Maybe it was the badass vibe we got the first night. Brooke took me for a walk to shake off the bus ride, and we found ourselves walking for 30 minutes towards rave lights and blaring music. I don’t know what I expected, but we ended up at an outdoor water dj music festival. Set in a large parking lot, there were fences about 7 feet tall around the stage and concert area, outside of which, people stood on scooters pulled up right to the fence to watch the show. Other scooters were parked further back, with people just listening to the music. Some had brought their small children. Scooters were always coming and going. It was like a weird meld of biker gang, drive in, and rave. Touché Phnom Penh, touché. You’ve got sass.
The main reason we were in Phnom Penh was to visit the Tuol Sleung Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields. These memorials document some of the horrific crimes the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodians while in power from 1975 to 1979. I know how much everyone loves to learn about crimes against humanity, especially genocide, so I encourage you to read about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. The memorials were both beautifully done and horrific. Definitely go to see both. Each tell a different piece of the story, which is important to know. On top of the incredibly heavy and moving experiences of both the genocide museum and the killing fields, I was also deeply moved by other surrounding occurrences. Sucks that there were two Cambodian kids begging for money through the fence at the back of the Killing Fields property. Sucks that our tuk tuk driver, after he’d taken us to see both genocide memorials, asked if we wanted to go to the shooting range as one last sightseeing activity. Sucks that most attendees to both memorials are foreign, and that apparently Cambodian youth don’t know very much about their own tragic history. But, it is great that so many westerners come to learn about the genocide. Great that people leave bracelets on the poles marking the mass graves as an offering to pay their respects.
On Sunday, we ended our first, and very memorable, week in Cambodia in true Brooke and Maggie travel fashion: wandering around the city, past some beautiful temples and gardens, and the royal palace, with our only hard goal being to find a Dairy Queen for a mango and sticky rice blizzard.
Next stop: Kep, Cambodia.
Love,
Maggie (and Brooke)
Morocco 2 Mongolia 