(3/1/2007-10/1/2007)
To start our first full day in Cambodia, Sally and I went to the Laos embassy to get our visas for Laos (pronounced "Lao") as we would be entering at an unofficial border crossing so couldn't get them on arrival. That done we had bubble tea (fruit flavoured cold tea with sorghum ball "bubbles" - I had plum, a mistake as it was disgustingly sweet) in a very strange posh looking bar with blacked out windows, then went to the internet for a bit before having more bubble tea, this time from a street stall where we could only choose the flavour by the colour of the powder in the jars, but luckily I managed to get mango which was much better than the fancy one. At some point I also bought myself a new hat to replace my black cap with red star from Vietnam that I'd managed to leave on the bus when we arrived in Cambodia, a kind of cowboy/explorer's hat, like the ones the VietCong had.
Once we finished these we decided to go to Tuol Sleng, the torture museum in the former school that was used as a prison by the Khmer Rouge. It was pretty depressing and sad, most of it left as it was when the regime fell, along with some photo exhibits, although some of the captions rather disturbed this sombre atmosphere, particularly the summary of the life of one of the victims, an actor who apparently appeared in the films "When The Frog Cries, The Girl Panics" and "Tomato With Dried Fish Men". We followed this up the next day with a visit to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, where the prisoners were taken once they'd been tortured to be executed, although generally not with bullets but with the butt of a rifle. The main exhibit is a tower in which the thousand or so skulls that they dug up are on display as a monument to remember the victims, with labels saying how old the people each group of skulls belonged to were. Then you wander around past the trenches they were dug out of, and in the ground there are rags, apparently the blindfolds they wore, sticking out of the ground, an occasional pile of bones and signs on trees saying "the magic tree: where microphones were hung to drown the cries of the dying" and "this tree was used a tool to kill babies". All pretty grim stuff, but apparently our driver who took us there in a tuc-tuc (the kind of motorised rickshaws they have everywhere) didn't think so as he asked us just after we left if we wanted to go to the shooting range. And I still don't really understand the Khmer Rouge. I mean, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, May, Ho Chi Minh, and others, all did things according to a certain twisted logic, that were horrific, but where really just modern versions of Roman Emperors and other scumbags. But the Khmer Rouge seemed to have no logic and were actually completely insane.
From Phnom Penh it took us a whole day to get to Siem Reap, the City near the famous Temples of Angkor Wat, so there was no point going to the temples that day. The next day we took a tuc-tuc to the ticket booths and got three day tickets, then walked the few remaining kilometres, past a cool big spider whose web I almost walked into, to Angkor Wat itself. There are about 60 temples in the area, but this is one of the most famous, on a square island on a square lake, a huge palace like complex with those three rounded spire things. It was great to wander around a temple that famous that, unlike in China, and like at My Son, had not only not been obviously restored except to keep it from collapsing, but looked like it had only just been cut out of the jungle. Tucked in little dark corners of the temple were shrines still in use today, giving the impression that it was a religion in it's dying throes (although sadly, it probably isn't). Once we'd wandered around that for long enough we continued up the road, finding one of the smaller temples just off it, which was completely free of other tourists, then got a motorbike taxi back (just the one bike for both of us and the driver: if people there can fit a family of four or five on one then so can we). In the evening we had amok, a Cambodian speciality of fish curry steamed in banana leaves, which was delicious, each bought a hammock and a krama, the thin scarves they have there and in Vietnam (which the VietCong used to blend in with the population - mine was in the same colours as they had, blue and white, while Sally got a black and red one), and then got some cans of Black Panther Stout, a local beer with a great name and the slogan "Feel The Power Of The Black Panther!"
Day two amongst the temples we began with a tuc-tuc ride to Angkor Thom, which used to be a holy city with many temples, surrounded by a moat like Angkor Wat but much bigger, and in the centre is Bayon, a rather chaotic temple covered in faces of Buddha. Other temples there included one which French archaeologists had taken apart, recording where each stone went and the Khmer Rouge then destroyed these records, so it is being slowly put back together, and the Terrace of Elephants, a raised platform decorated with carvings of many-headed elephants and wars using elephants and so on. The were also some little local girls playing the hilarious game of "throw rocks and sticks at the wasps nest until they try and attack, then run away giggling." Then leaving along the North Bridge, which like the southern one was decorated with people pulling on a serpent's tale, an image that comes from Hindu mythology apparently, we came to an old academy, Preah Khan, which was the first temple we saw with huge trees growing out of it, the roots wrapping around walls and through stones, which looked very Indiana Jones. From there we were given a free motorbike ride as far as Angkor Wat by a friendly worker, from where we could get motorbike taxis back to the City. For our last day we decided to rent a tuc-tuc for the whole day, something we'd avoided until then as we didn't want to see too many temples and get "templed out" as we had in China. We decided to only see two that day, Ta Prohm, which had apparently been used to shoot the Tomb Raider film, and Ta Som, both less crammed with tourists and full of trees growing over the ruins. He we met lots of kids trying to sell us postcards for "only one dollar", and one little girl could count to ten in about ten different languages when we prompted her. To celebrate having finished the temples, we had "crumble pie" at our hotel, but unfortunately it turned out to be banana crumble, and Sally hates banana.
The Laos border was technically to the north-eat of Siem Reap, but because the roads are so bad, the only way to get there was to spend one day going south and then another day going north to even get to the border town. After all the night buses in Vietnam, we decided to only take day buses though, which gave us a chance to see the Cambodian countryside (very poor, mostly fields and jungle, nearly all the house were thatched with banana leaves and on stilts) and meant we could actually sleep. Our first stop was Kampong Cham, a crumbling ex-colonial town by a river, where we spent the day drinking, playing Scrabblecards, having fresh coconuts and wandering through a cemetery. Strung Treng was the border town where we had to find some people to share a speedboat up the Mekong once more. Luckily on our bus there was a Cornish guy who looked remarkably like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons, and next to the hotel we found was a café and tour place run by a guy by the name of Mr T, where we met a German guy also wanting to take a boat, so there we could organise a speedboat for only $3 each more than a bus to Laos would cost (so $13), as he already had to send his boat up the river to collect people coming the other way. And that was the end of our holiday in Cambodia. We didn't see many people dressed in black though.
