Langkawi to Cambodia
21st May to 26th May 2008
Shihanoukville,, Cambodia

The approach to the airport at Siem Reap was over flat flooded rice paddies and Tonle Sap lake. The wet season has just begun and the amount of water lying around would constitute an emergency in New Zealand. I now can see that Cambodia is really one flat rice paddy and all the water is needed for bumper rice production. Amongst the rice are vast ponds growing all sorts of vegetables including water lilies which are used for soup. Cambodians, I am told eat anything and every thing that moves, the market places support that. Snails, fresh water fish of all types, frogs, crispy fried crickets, as well as greens that I think should just be enjoying life in a garden somewhere. Tarantulas are supposedly a favourite, we haven't seen them on a menu yet but I have seen a recipe for fried tarantulas including how to kill them and remove the fangs. Apparently you first catch one then hold it firmly down with your fingers until it dies being careful not to get near its fangs of course! Putting aside the strange food , the Cambodian dishes we have tried have been fantastic, lovely subtle flavours with not too much chilli. Amok pork has been my favourite so far. Although I must say anything pork is our favourite at the moment, being back in a Bhuddist country is like a breath of fresh air. Not literally of course as there is always a
sprinkling of agricultural smells, even ( especially) in the cities. The bright robes of the monks wandering the streets, zapping along on motorbikes, squashed into taxis and quietly collecting alms in the early morning gives a calming friendly air to any place.

In 5 days in Cambodia we have seen the best and worst of this country's history. At Siem Reap we spent two days wandering Angkor Wat and the many temples of the surrounding area. The temples, although crumbling ruins some with trees growing from them, are still an amazing record of the glories of the early Khmer rulers as far back as the 9th Century. The huge sandstone and rock constructions , in my opinion rival the pyramids. The complexity of the buildings the beautiful carvings and frescos that adorn the stone are a must see during any trip to SE Asia.
Two million visitors a year visit the Angkor Wat area, we were expecting crowds and were pleasantly surprised.
The wet season has just begun so the visitor number to the area has dropped, there has been little rain so far. On our first day temple touring through the outer temples we were often the only tourists there, which was good and bad. We had the ruins to ourselves, no strangers in our photos, but outside the gates was another story. The kids selling anything from 10 postcards for a dollar( counted out 1 to 10 in English then for every no thank you, we got them counted in another language) to ridiculously cheap Lonely Planet Guide books only had us to target. The outer temple sellers were quite pleasant and happy bunch, the whining and poor me attitude of the kids and adults on our second day around the bigger temples of Bayon and Angkor Wat became very annoying and it was easy to harden our hearts to their pleas to buy. By the second afternoon as we approached Angkor Wat there were more tourists but also more touts and hawkers. The Wat itself was a peaceful haven from the outside melee. I must say though there were not as many outright beggars at Siem Reap or around the temples as I had been told.
On our third day we wandered around Siem Reap visited the market and generally recovered from the miles walked and hundreds of steps climbed on the previous two days. In Siem Reap it was a bit harder to ignore the land mine victims either selling something or begging. I bought a book off a disabled book seller. Both his hands had been blown off with a land mine but he could still lift books out of his basket and shuffle them back in order after his customers had rifled through them. Cambodians are good at bargaining but I couldn't bargain with a disabled book seller whose books were already extremely well priced. I could have bought all the Lonely Planet guides(2008 versions) for SE Asia cheaper than the Chinese one we bought in Thailand.

The youngsters selling postcards and souvenirs on the street mainly have excellent English and once they find out your nationality they rattle off the population, prime minister and capital city. They want to earn the money but are also keen to practice their English. Good English means a job in the growing tourist industry when they leave school. School finishes at 1pm so there is plenty of time to get out to hassle the tourists for that extra dollar or two. One young man also gave us his opinion of our PM, "your PM is Helen Clarke, but she is not so pretty. You have a woman PM who looks like a man" Sorry Helen!!

A 6 hour bus trip to Phnom Phen took us past many more rice fields, hoses on stilts and water buffaloes munching on huge haystacks. The bus pulled into the station only about 5 lots of foreigners needing tuk tuks to hotels but about 30 tuk tuk drivers all competing for our attention. we luckily chose a nice man call Along who took us to a good hotel and then met us the next day for a tour of the Choeung Ek killing fields and the Tuol Sleng museum. These two sites document the worst period of the Cambodian history. The violent destruction of fellow Cambodians by the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 is quite incomprehensible. Young Woman and men photographed before being tortured at Tuol Sleng then taken to their violent deaths at Choeung Ek. The memorial housing hundreds of skulls at the killing fields is very moving. When we went to the museum which used to be a high school, photos of young men and woman, the same age as we were then, stared out at us. We realized then that we had not seen many Cambodian people our age, a generation lost. Alan was in Cambodia for a few days in 1971, Phnom Phen was a nice city then and it is again, today a bit rough around the edges but not too bad. I wonder how much better it could have been with that lost generation.

Late in the afternoon we found the Foreign Correspondents Club, a must visit in Phnom Phen. We sat on the balcony watching the river traffic, Cambodians enjoying an evening stroll, an elephant negotiating the rush hour traffic, its handler strolling along behind and enjoyed a beer or two to wash away the dust and taste of the day.

This morning we got on another bus and headed for the beach side resort town of Shihanoukville, 230 kms south of the capital. Yes Cambodia does have a coast line with some fine white sandy beaches. Alan came here on his trip in '71, we are off to look up the hotel he stayed in then, it was the only one here then. Today hotels and guest houses are spread throughout the town and along the beach. We strolled along the beach this afternoon Cambodian families were enjoying their seaside visit and for once they were the ones being accosted by the ladies selling chilli prawns, peanuts and smelly durian.