Siem Reap

So, after our epic bus journey we spent 4 nights in Siem Reap at a very good hotel/guest house called Earthwalkers. For $10 each we got an ensuite a/c room, breakfast included, and the place had a nice swimming pool. It was about 1km out of the centre - but hell who cares, we had a pool :D and the staff were very friendly and helpful. Having a fairly limited time (and the first night being spent relaxing and recovering from the taxi ride) we decided we'd spend our first day walking around Siem Reap, the second at Angkor, and third on a boat trip tour. Siem Reap was a very nice place to walk around, with two good markets, one very touristy but quite dead and a bit lacking in atmosphere, the other selling local and tourist items. The latter was much nicer if with a few more shouts of 'hello sirrrrr. You buy something. I give you good price'. We think that making english not tonal proves quite hard for some Cambodians, so the high tone in questions turns very whiney for most, which gets a touch grating after a while. There was also a very touristy but very nice night market which we went to once. The park in Siem Reap is lovely, and although the streets and in particular the restaurant streets are lovely to walk round, the amount of Western restaurants is somewhat annoying. Khemer food is fantastic, so to have offerings of (bad) pizza, and english breakfasts as the sole choice in quite a number of places was pretty galling. i particularly enjoyed that in the (Western, and only) mal in town, the sign outside the pizza place read 'you can almost taste it' - a sentiment I can well believe.

To get out to Angkor we hired a tuk tuk for the day ($15). He picked us up at 5am so that we were at Angkor temple itself for sunrise. This was something of an anticlimax due to the cloud coverage - however, once the crowds who had gathered for similar purposes had disapated to other Wats it was remarkably quiet. I won't say much about the day really, because I think the pictures will do it much better. It was well worth the $20 day ticket (steep though that is in Cambodia) and I hope that the temples are preserved, and the site is improved itself over the next few years.

The final day we went on a river boat. Now I know some advocates of the Rough Guides series. However, they're wrong. The way the maps are organised is annoying. They omit useful information (like prices). i like how lonely planet organise eating places by type (Western, Thai, etc.) Anyway, on this occasion the problem was that it implied we could go to the lake, and walk around, and perhaps see some floating village from there, and hire a boat for $10 per hour. Instead we were taken by our tuk tuk driver (same bloke, $10 this time) to a ticket office which charged $20 each to go on a long boat from the river - because you cannot get to the lake via road at this time of year (thanks rough guide). $20 is A LOT of money in Cambodia, particularly for a 1.5 hour boat ride. Fantastic though it, and the journey by tuk tuk to the river were in terms of views, and seeing how people live, I'm skeptical as to the value of the trip really. My other problem with this trip was that on our return to the docking place, the boat went past a floating school (it moves over a period to teach different kids). I thought we'd get away with not going in, but the guide was very insistent that the boat driver should circle back and take us in. Now interesting though it was to see this room, which can (apparently) take up to 60 pupils, (it had about 15 in there then and the teacher) i feel the same about this as I do about going in to an orphanage as a tourist - it isn't appropriate, I wouldn't give money directly through that means, and I don't have skills to offer, which essentially makes the trip voyeuristic at best. Incidentally, in phnom penh we've been offered trips to orphanages...oh dear :s.