Angkor, Siem Reap

Hello from Siem Reap,

We have had marvelous time in Cambodia over the past couple of days, so it is surprising to remember that it all started quite terribly. The bus from Bangkok was horrible. We were lied to and cheated repeatedly during our seventeen hour trip aboard the infamous "scam bus," despite promises from our "travel agent" that our bus was not the infamous tourist-trap-mobile. The trip could have taken eight hours (and tens of dollars less) had it not been for the multiple two to three hour long rest stops at associated cafes and alleged government-enforced rest stops. In themselves these rest stops would have only been nuisances, but upon reaching the Cambodian border-town of Poipet, the paved Thai road degraded into an unpaved dirt path with meter-long potholes, nude, running children and dust tornadoes that required us to cover our faces for the entire six-hour trip, while private taxis zoomed by in air-conditioned heaven. It should therefore come as no surprise how shocked we were when when we hit the city of Siem Reap where the dirt path suddenly became a lit, four-lane paved road with new five-star hotels. We had arrived at last and had we not had sore legs, we would have knelt to kiss the earth. We treated ourselves to a ten-dollar-a-night double and slept our sorrows away - every moment thereafter has been wonderful.

Siem Reap is the gateway town to Angkor, home of the gorgeous temple of Angkor Wat. The temples of Angkor are independent complexes built by the kings of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to 15th centuries to commemorate themselves, their family members , a deity or their own achievements (or so we've been told - the objectives of many temples are still hotly debated and explanations are often vague and multiple-choice, for example, "This temple is either for Vishnu, Shiva, Avalokiteshvara or the King's mother"). The complexes are spread over a couple hundred square kilometers and are covered in mostly Hindu, and often Buddhist, motifs making many temples very similar to those we have seen in India. We wondered through the temples by tuk-tuk (motorbike-led carts) and by van for over twenty-five hours, visiting the jungle river-carvings of Kbal Spear, the sixty-four, four-faced towers of Bayon, multiple temples covered in canopy with trees growing from the ancient towers, and of course, the famous temple complex of Angkor Wat which made for an amazing sunrise (click here for a couple of our pictures).

Being in Cambodia has been a wonderful and unexpected treat for us. The people we have met here are by far the nicest and most kind-hearted we have found on our trip and arguably that we have ever met. From the poor, begging street children to the business owners and people we have met on the streets, every smile is met with a smile, easy laughter, and very positive energy. It is an absolute tragedy that this country lived through hell for the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. From 1975 until the Vietnamese invasion of 1978, the Maoist government of the Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between two and three million people out of the total population of eight million and, needless to say, destroyed the country's economy by emptying the cities (ordering mass evacuations), and abolishing monetary transactions. The guerrilla warfare and extortion that followed their fall led to the laying of millions of land-mines throughout the countryside and to a debilitated country. It is only in this century that the country has started to rebound and change is happening at breakneck speed. Land prices in Siem Reap are doubling every couple of years, droves of Japanese and Chinese tourists flood the country, and there is a palpable feeling of development in the air. We can't help but feel that after being held down for fifty years, Cambodia is rushing to recapture lost time and bring back happier days and its people are, without a doubt, the key to likely success.

Tomorrow we are flying to Luang Prabang in Laos, and we will write more from there in a couple of days.We miss you all and hope to hear from you soon