Bonjour du Cambodge

One day of Bangkok was enough. The next morning we hopped a quick flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia, the town right outside Angkor Wat. Siem Reap's only claim to fame and the only reason why the town has 90,000 residents is solely because of the temples, and therefore, everything in this area of Cambodia is built around taking tourist dollars. US dollars to be exact. From the moment we stepped off our plane things got interesting. The official currency of Cambodia is the Riel, however, at 4,000 Riel to a dollar, the Riel isn't used very much. Even at the government level. Our visas were to be paid in US Dollars. Two dollars extra if you did not bring a passport photo of yourself (nevermind that everyone gets a photo taken in immigration.) Five dollars extra if you applied for your visa online. We mistakenly stopped at the Currency Exchange counter to get some Riel, but we were preceded by a group of Spaniards exchanging a significant amount of Euro into Riel. I'm pretty sure that the sum total of the Reil they received was around 300 million. The stack of bills was a good five inches high.

At the airport, we then took a taxi to town (3 km away, $7 ride) were we are pretty sure our cabbie received a commission from the hotel he dropped us off at. We specifically requested a different hotel, but he refused to take us, saying that it was run by expats and therefore was more expensive than it needed to be due to some tax that may or may not have been real. But, that said, the hotel we ended up staying at was beautiful and had a georgeous balcony. Though, due to the excessive heat and mosquitos, we really didn't spend much time out there.

The following day was our first day in the Angkor park. We rented bikes at our hotel (advertised at $2/person, real price $3/person) and headed off down the frenetic streets of Siem Reap. There is only one traffic rule in Cambodia: look out for number one. While it appears that in general, you are supposed to drive on the right side of the road, that is not always the case. On many occassions we encountered cars headed straight toward us, or had to dodge people, scooters, and tuk-tuks. It's a miracle there aren't more traffic accidents in Cambodia.

Look closely, here we are biking down a surprizing deserted section of road in Siem Reap.

Another quirk of Cambodia is that although nearly all the streets have names, and are marked on the maps as such, (with only one major difference- Pub Street and Bar Street are the same street), none of the street names are actually marked. Not in Khmer, not in English, not at all. So, we got slightly lost and ended up at the river that runs through town. Apparently, we had arrived in Cambodia just as the Water Festival was kicking off, a celebration of the full moon in November. Never did get a straight answer as to why it's a water festival if it's celebrating the moon, but regardless, the festival was pretty fun. Here's a shot we got of a practice race that morning before the big race that evening.

We finally made it to the park, about 5 or 6 km away from our hotel and got our tickets. (Price for 3 days for foreigners: $40; Price for Cambodians, those of Cambodian decent, or any one else who may pass for Cambodian: free.)

Our first order of business was to check out Angkor Wat, the most famous of the Angkor temples. It's the single largest religious monument (by acreage) in the world, and built circa 1100AD.

We saw monkies!And Spiedr Man! (Not to be confused with Spider Man).

Here are some views from inside Angkor Wat:

After Angkor Wat, we decided to go for a little walk, thinking that the next monuments were not that far away. After buying the book halfway through our journey, we came to find out that the next temples were about 3 or 4 km away. Jason would like to point out that it wasn't his poor map reading abilities, but the map was infact substandard and not to scale. All in all, it wasn't a very long hike, but time-consuming and hot. We did find some interesting things on our little hike, though:

A rice paddy with a Cambodian working the field.

A cemetary outside a local pagoda.

We finally made it out to the next monument, Prasat Kravan:

Then we went to Sra Srang. There we met some Cambodian girls playing by the side of the lake. They quickly informed us that in USA there are 300 million people, four quarters, one hundred pennies, our president is Bill Clinton, and there are more people in Cambodia than in USA. Three out of five is not bad. I guess. This was a common sales pitch that we encountered on througout Cambodia by kids peddling everything from water, tee shirts, guide books, etc. The next best sales pitch we got was a kid promising that he would stay and bother us until we bought a book from him. (We'll get to the best Thai sales pitch later....)