Holiday in Cambodia: More pictures of Angkor Wat

To go back a little bit, I earlier posted updates about Cambodia, a country which isn’t terribly expensive to get to and which has direct flights from Shanghai and which is totally amazing and which basically everyone should visit.

However, my visit to the Angkor Wat temple complex was touched by truly terrible weather. For all but a few hours, it was dark dark dark and grey. The pictures from my digital camera just weren’t up to snuff. I finally got the negatives from my film camera digitized, and I was happier with those pictures. So, I’ll take this opportunity to post a few more pictures from Siem Reap and the area around Angkor Wat.











I encourage everyone to hop into the nearest jet and fly right over!

Holiday in Cambodia: Sleepwalking the Mekong

After visiting Siam Reap and the Angkor Wat, I rode a small wooden boat to the city of Battambang. I was taken by surprise: I basically didn't know anything about the Mekong or the people who live on it, and found the journey completely fascinating. The Mekong is a river that also flows through Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In Cambodia, the water level varies immensely depending on the time of the year, routinely flooding vast areas in shallow water. So small villages and houses are built on stilts, or more commonly floats, to accommodate the change in water level.



While the river was pretty continuously populated, there were parts that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely no land anywhere in site. There was a fair amount of green from brush and trees and water-plants, but no solid land at all, the only place to set foot would be the small groups of floating houses.



In fact, there were small boats just for the livestock to live on. Usually this was chicken, although I saw pigs as well, with special floating pigpens.



As could be imagined, there were boats everywhere, usually just small hand-paddled canoes. While it may not look it from the small picture up top, the boat to Battambang was about half tourists, half river people. Our boat didn't dock for these river people, or even come to a full stop. Instead, their family would pull up a canoe alongside the boat, and they then hopped overboard. It all happened surprisingly quickly.



It's impossible for me to fully imagine living like this. For one thing, there's not going to be much to eat besides fish, and maybe water-vegetables? Actually there were a number of trader-boats going up the river, selling oil, bananas, and basic staples – it can be seen a little in the following picture:



Also, life there must be so immensely boring. Basically every single kid waved at our boat as it passed by, there was a lot of mutual gawking going on. I imagine that larger boats passing by is about as eventful as things get:



The river changed character as it got closer to Battambang, narrowing substantially. Much of this area was the center of village life, with small shacks on both sides of the river.



There were still constant small boats going from one side to the other, and a lot of people in boats were net-fishing or going about other business:



So, that's an amazing journey that everybody should do sometime in their life. Battambang itself isn't a highlight of Cambodia, and basically the whole town is lights out by 8:30 pm, but there's things to enjoy. For one, a few nice temples:



And there's a very interesting wet market, in the center of town, they also sell snack foods and the blended fruit drinks I love. After a positive experience in Chiang Mai with a one-day cooking school, I tried one again, from a restaurant called The Smoking Pot – it wasn't nearly as good a school, but it gave a fun chance to explore the market, and I'd recommend it. Here's some vegetables, very colorful:



And here's a lady skinning frogs, for our class! The secret is to cut the head off first, then just peel the skin back.




That's all I'll have to say about Cambodia for now, but visiting was a great experience. I really hope to go back and explore the country more thoroughly.

Holiday in Cambodia: Angkor Wat

While I wasn't in Cambodia for as long as I'd have liked, of course I had to visit Angkor – with the famous stone temples that are the only remnant of the sprawling capital city of the powerful Khmer Empire, from a thousand years ago. It was a bizarre but interesting bus ride from the capital city of Phnom Penh. Two lanes the whole way through, the road seemed to be some kind of center to Cambodian village life – it passed through village centers, frequently punctuated by wedding ceremonies held directly against the road. Also noteable were all the water buffaloes, even directly across the river from Phnom Penh's city center. There were occasional rest-stops, which were just big dirt fields with local bazaars set up, for all the busses.



I won't have much to say about the actual temple complexes. They were stone and beautiful. The scale of it all was crazy - in particular, the central Angkor Wat is amazingly large, and furthermore is surrounded by a quarter-mile-wide moat. They're located somewhat apart from each other, maybe a five minute to half-hour drive from one to the next. The thing to do is to rent a tuk-tuk driver for the day. Anyway, here's a few favorite pictures – it was really dark and grey for most of my time there, which certainly didn't help for photographing old stone temples that tended to be dark and grey.







Siam Reap is a city nearby to all these temples, it's evolved as the jumping-off point. It's obviously a total tourist spot, and usually I hate that sort of thing, but maybe having been in Shanghai for so long I appreciated the conveniences – there were great import groceries, foreign bookstores, foreigner bars, and a selection of both foreign and Cambodian restaurants, aimed at clueless foreigners. One I went to had a free dance show. I'm sure it was totally cheesy if you knew anything about Cambodian dance, but as a casual tourist I enjoyed it.

Holiday in Cambodia: Phnom Penh

While I live in third-world China, and had previously been visiting third-world Thailand, Phnom Penh was an immediate third-world shock. While the small airport was really quite modern, clean, and efficient, the drive to the city proper, and my hotel, took me on a bumpy garbage-lined road through a progression of small dirty shacks. It felt like being back in the shantytowns of Bombay, granted with about one tenth the population density.

That may sound superficial or ugly, but it's honest. While I ended up very much enjoying both the city and the country, it was in spite of all the garbage, the poor infrastructure, and the aggressive touts. Those negatives are at the beginning of this update, and similarly they were the first thing that stood out about the city, but really the rest of my impressions of the city were much more positive. The city center is relatively compact, and although of course the reasons are tragic, a lot of the old French colonial buildings are still standing, they're beautiful:



I'm not one to shop, and all I bought for myself was a couple travel necessities and Sinn Sisamouth CDs, but really the market bazaars of Phnom Penh are a lot of fun. There's a number about town, with a bunch of smaller competing stalls inside. Different markets sell different products, and are open at different times, and there's both outdoor and indoor markets. It doesn't seem very efficient, but they're heavily used by the local population, merchants will bargain fairly with foreigners, and some of the markets are interesting locations of their own right, like the old art deco stadium that's now the Central Market.



Phnom Penh seemed to be maybe 25% Chinese – most hotels and small businesses were Chinese-owned. Surprisingly enough, they usually spoke Mandarin Chinese – I say surprisingly, because Mandarin is a Beijing-government-invented language, Chinese emigration pre-dates its (still only partial) implementation, and I'm not aware of any other foreign Chinese communities that speak it. I used to have a Chinese-Cambodian friend, and she told me that as a child in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, she wasn't allowed to speak Chinese at all, even in private – maybe afterwards, the local Chinese re-learnt Mandarin?

Despite some misgivings, I ate Cambodian street food, and I ended up falling totally in love with it. It's better than the street food in China, or maybe even Thailand. Here's two of my favorites: barbequed pork skewers, eaten alongside French bread (sweetened with condensed milk) and lightly pickled radishes. It may sound weird, but if they had them in Shanghai, I'd eat them every day of the week!



Secondly, while I understand fruit shakes are basically a tourist thing in most of SE Asia, in Cambodia everybody drank them: fresh fruit, blended with sweetener and ice. What made Cambodia's stand out from the crowd was the fresh tropical fruit, but also the secret ingredient: raw egg! In fairness, I used to make Juliuses as a kid with raw egg white, it's basically the same thing. Many places didn't give raw eggs to foreigners, so I made a point of going to local-style places and then asking for them specifically.



Part of what contributes to Phnom Penh's strong colonial flavor is that foreign NGOs are everywhere in Cambodia, and these foreigners dominate the local economy. It can seem that what visible economy does exist, is either just a step above being a flea market, or services foreigner's various needs. That goes alongside low import taxes, and there's a huge amount of very good foreign restaurants and import grocery stores and the like, in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. They're far, far better and cheaper than anything available in Shanghai, and I varied between local style restaurants and foreigner restaurants. There's also similarly shoddy copyright protection, but with a looser control on the published word, and so Phnom Penh's foreigner areas have bookstores full of English novels, both second-hand and Xeroxed.

What else? There were several temples and the King's palace. Impressive, although I admit I found them to be a less-impressive take on similar structures in Bangkok – even though Phnom Penh's were often the original model.



Just walking the streets was interesting, there was a lot of activity. Motorcycle taxis and tuk-tuks were easily available for a dollar or two (literally – Cambodia uses American money) and they all spoke English, so I could just walk around until I got tired of walking or lost my way, then hail a taxi back. On the downside, in central areas people would yell “hello, taxi” at me every few seconds.

I thought the Tuol Sleng Museum, at a former school that had been converted into a processing station for the genocide of Cambodia's Cultural Revolution, was an interesting and illuminating site:



All in all Phnom Penh was a low-key but interesting and inexpensive city. I don't know if it's a destination of itself, but as part of a larger exploration of Cambodia or SE Asia, it's definitely worth having a look around.