Ho Chi Min to Phnom Penh
After wading with our luggage across the partially submerged gangplank, a larger motorized boat then took us (there were about 20 in our party) upriver along the Mekong for three hours until we reached a floating hotel – a large houseboat with a dozen rooms on the lower deck and a open air cafe/bar on the upper deck. We settled for the night across from the lights of the town of Chau Doc, where the local New Year's Eve party was underway at the village's “ritzy” waterfront restaurant (see Blog #13, Holidays in Vietnam, Part 1). The highlight of the night, following midnight toasts, was bearing witness to a sole fire-lit paper lantern, rising above the town and flickering its wishes into the moonlit night sky.
On January 1, we crossed the border into Cambodia by “slow boat” - not meaning it was much slower than the “fast” boat, it turned out, but meaning that we had to wait for it for an extra two hours at the border station, and that instead of padded seats and hammocks, it had only hard benches. After many (5 or 6) hours, during which we passed stilt houses, rice paddies, fishing skiffs and water buffalo in numbers too great to count, we sidled up to shore and transferred to two vans which took us the remaining 45 minutes into Phnom Penh.
Landing at the Capital Guesthouse, conveniently located on the same corner as the bus station, a cafe and an ATM, we had dinner and bought tickets for the six hour bus to Siam Reap the next day, then settled in for the night – never once having to cross the street in the traffic madness that is Phnom Penh.
Siam Reap and Angkor Wat
The bus from Phnom Penh to Siam Reap was comfortable and friendly, filled mostly with Cambodians returning from shopping trips to Phnom Penh or visiting family in and around Siam Reap. We were given pieces of tart green mango in chili powder to taste by a woman traveling with her three sisters, and Colin passed the time entertaining the two toddlers sharing a seat in front of us while their mother snoozed. The one other Westerner on the bus was a Canadian, who invited us to join her for dinner. We threw in our lot together to find a room when we arrived, Colin and I landing the last room at a budget guest house called Red Lodge, and she at a similar place next door. Dropping our bags, we headed out to “Pub Street” in backpacker central a few blocks away to scout for a restaurant, and discovered the most perfect “village” of Cambodian and international cafes, live street music, and craft booths spilling over from the nearby Night Market.
We chose a Cambodian restaurant with a free traditional dance performance on the upper deck, and discovered “amok” - a local coconut fish curry thickened with egg – delish!
Awakening on our first morning in Siam Reap, we decided to move slow and get the lay of the land. Two blocks from our hotel, Artisans d'Angkor ran training workshops for traditional arts, including metalwork, silk painting, and wood carving. The workshops are open to the public, where you can watch the artisans at work and purchase the finished work in the on-site fair trade crafts outlet. In the afternoon, we headed north for our first view of Angkor Wat.
To get to Angkor Wat, you hire a tuk-tuk and driver for a “short” or “long” tour, depending on the distance you plan to go. Once hired, you have your transport for the day – the driver takes you where you want to go and waits for you to go to the next temple and/or back to town when you are done. Entering the temple area, you pass through the national-park-style control gate, buy your entry ticket (one or three day or one week pass), and proceed along a stately tree-lined boulevard until reaching the edge of an enormous moat – and catching your first glimpse of the outer temples of Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is itself only the largest of the dozens of temples scattered over many acres and connected by a series of roads and rough paths.
Some of the temples have been painstakingly restored, while others are overgrown and their structures collapsed under the weight of centuries of vegetation. Angkor Wat is, individually, the most impressive of the temples and is also the best restored. Despite this, there is nearly no limit to where visitors can go – nearly the entire temple complex is open to unrestricted exploration, allowing you to find nooks and crannies where you can escape the crowds and enjoy a quiet moment to be overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, despite the thousands of visitors the temple receives each day.
Outside of the main temple, a line of food and crafts stalls provides a place to grab a cold drink, a meal, or an assortment of local crafts and/or cheap souvenirs. After a few hours exploring the temples, we found ourselves at one of the cafe stalls cooling off with a drink as the heat of the day began to dissipate. Several children of the stall owners came by with small items to sell, but stayed to quiz Colin on his name, his age, and where he was from.
Colin was happy to be drawn into jumping rope and climbing trees, and we stayed through sunset while he played with a half dozen of the kids. As we finally left, one of the kids – a twelve year old girl who had initially mistaken Colin for another girl – repeatedly called out after him “Can I love you!?” Despite his embarrassment, we decided that after seeing some of the other temples, we would have to come back to the outer courtyard of Angkor Wat to see them again. We crossed back over the moat, climbed into our tuk-tuk and headed back into town. That evening, we watched a beautifully filmed video about Angkor Wat at the hotel restaurant across the street, and planned where we wanted to go the next day....
The second day, we decided we wanted to guide to help us better understand what we were seeing – good in theory, but not so great in execution. Our hired guide climbed into our tuk-tuk with us and we headed to our chosen temple complex – Wat Thom, one of the most extensive, which we figured would take us a whole day to properly explore.
Wat Thom is famous for the faces carved at the top of dozens of its temple spires, and is surrounded by numerous ancillary structures like the Elephant and Leper Terraces. Our guide was enthusiastic, but long-winded – I started to lose focus as the morning passed and Colin was practically crawling out of his skin. We had to repeatedly drag our guide into the shade while he gave us long background stories on each feature – all of which were in the blazing hot sun – and my efforts to “guide the guide” as to what we wanted, how much and for how long, were pointedly ignored. After a couple of hours, we finally made a stop for a cool drink, and ordered some food to stretch out the time. I was considering dismissing the guide, and trying to figure out how to do it diplomatically, when he returned to collect us and had apparently had an epiphany – despite the fact that he didn't seem to be able to adapt his guiding routine to the needs of an 11 year old boy, he did realize that we weren't happy, and suggested that we go swimming for the afternoon instead.
We'd seen a fair amount of Wat Thom already, and under the circumstances it sounded like not a bad idea at all. So we hopped back in the tuk-tuk and went to the West Baray, an enormous impounded lake. Our guide led us down a boat ramp, around a bend and then over a rickety bamboo walkway along the water's edge. The walkway followed a line of thatch-covered shelters, slung with hammocks and occupied nearly entirely by locals.
We settled into one, a woman brought Colin an inner tube, and Colin and our guide jumped into the lake. When they got out, the guide ordered some food, and two women with a small grill and a half dozen squid came over and cooked them up whole over the flame. We dipped them in hot sauce, and ate – they were fantastic! After a couple of hours of lounging, swimming and eating, we decided that since we were already halfway there, we'd continue on up the road to the second Artisans d'Angkor workshop, where the silk-making and weaving workshops were housed. The afternoon was saved, and we had a couple of great experiences we would have otherwise missed. We decided on no guide the next day, however! We asked our driver, a very kindly elderly man with an extremely warm smile, if he would drive us again for our third and last visit to the temples.
The next morning our driver was waiting, and Colin and I headed out to the temple we were both most excited to see – Ta Phrom.
Ta Phrom is still largely overgrown, and much of it is crumbling, but it is astounding. It looks like something out of an Indiana Jones film, and for good reason – several of the jungle ruin scenes were actually filmed onsite. The overgrowth also meant that there was more shade, and we happily scrambled around for a few hours before the midday heat became overwhelming. Back in town, we rested up before heading back to Siam Reap's Pub Street for a Cambodian cooking class.
Colin wanted to learn how to make the fabulous fish amok we had had our first night, and we also selected green mango salad, a sweet green bean dessert, and a few other dishes – four each – for our menus. Colin wound up doing both his work and mine (not that he minded) because my back finally gave out – three days of clambering around the ruins at Angkor Wat had taken me down. I sat and drank wine and watched, while Colin was a whirling dervish around the kitchen, cooking for both of us and delighting the two women who were teaching the class. The end result: delicious! We followed it with a Khmer (traditional Cambodian) massage, and spent the rest of the evening wandering around the vibrant Night Market, until Colin was so tired he was weaving and tripping. I decided Id better get him back and to bed before people mistook my 11 year old son for a staggering drunk.
We boarded a return bus to Phnom Penh the next morning, after a last stop at the Artisan d'Angkor crafts shop so Colin could choose his memento of Siam Reap (a small silver plated elephant box). We had left our large bags at the Nice Guest House in Phnom Penh, a sister-hotel to the Capital and just a few doors down, so settled in for one more night on the same corner that had comprised our entire first visit, but this time we grabbed a tuk-tuk to take us to the waterfront. The Grand Palace sits across a road and a wide expanse of royal lawn from the river, making a dramatic backdrop for the sunset. Colin finally found his roasted grasshoppers at a roadside cart, and was steeling himself for a sample, when a police vehicle chased the (apparently) unlicensed vendor away, as fast as it was possible to pedal a bike cart weighed down by heavy vats of grasshoppers, grubs and assorted insect snacks.
Denied his crickets, and much to my relief, we settled instead for a dinner of Spanish tapas on a restaurant balcony overlooking the river. The food was so good we ate there three times in as many days, returning for lunch each of our next two days in the city.We also enjoyed the rare opportunity to cook for ourselves. Our last night in Phnom Penh we spent couchsurfing at the apartment of an American expat who lives above an Irish Pub across from the Royal Palace.
We woke the morning before heading to her place, managed to cross the street without the aid of a tuk-tuk for the first time (!) and delved into the depths of the Rousso Market, in search of ingredients to take to Mariam's, our host. After several circuits through the covered interior of the market, and a few wrong turns resulting in wading through masses of chicken feathers and offal, we emerged victorious with fresh fish, lemon grass, garlic, onion, tomatoes, and rice.
We had another wonderful couchsurfing experience, cooking a fish stew for Mariam and her third couchsurfing guest, trailing along as her guests to her favorite Cambodian dance club, and sleeping on her enclosed outdoor patio overlooking the palace – nice!
On our last day, after a last lunch of tapas, we loaded ourselves and our gear into our last tuk-tuk in Cambodia, and headed for the airport. By evening we'd be in Bangkok, and ready to start another chapter....
