Summer '06 Trip Post #5

Day 5: Sunday, July 2 - Cambodia

Today for our second full day of touring Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, we met our guide early in the morning and headed out for a day long tour of various sites. We started out with Ta Prohm, which was completely overgrown with trees and roots. It was an amazing site as the 200-300 year old trees were growing out of the temple and displaying the strength of mother nature. (pic 1, pic2, pic 3) This was also the location where they filmed parts of Tomb Raider, the three of us are pictured to the left is where Angelina Joline stood to film the movie.

Our next site was Banteay Srei but it was farther out away from the main Angkor Wat temples. We took a 45 minute car drive through the countryside to get to this site and the poverty outside the city was very striking. There is no electricity and most live in thatched huts with no toilets. Naked children and dogs walk and play along the road, while the parents are cooking, cleaning or sleeping hammocks. Thanks to the recent influx of NGOs and other health organizations, there is now a greater awareness around malaria and most houses, if you can call them that, have mosquito nets. Foreign organizations have also tried to introduce birth control since there are so many children per family and so much poverty. Most parents take the condoms that are distributed and give them to their children to create balloons and play. Cows, the thinnest you can imagine, along with water buffalo also roam through the rice paddies and fields. It is obvious that any wealth generated from the end of the civil war and the opening to tourism has not reached the countryside. Here our tour guide has stopped to buy some mushrooms on the side of the road for his dinner that night.

The temple was very different from the others. It was a lot smaller and was made more of a red clay rock. The detail work on this temple was incredible. (pic 1, pic 2)

After the temple we had lunch once again at a local establishment and tried some of the various Cambodian specialties. This included sweet and sour fish soup, fried chicken (Cambodian style) and curry. We also learned that Cambodians love to drink Muscle Wine mixed with coconut milk. We bought a bottle and the box is hilarious. The ingredients are reindeer antelers and the box says that drinking the wine will make you grow big and strong. This wine is very strong and the Cambodians often drink a whole bottle just for one person. The guide says this is much better than beer because you don’t get a beer belly!

Our final destination of the day was a boat trip through the floating village on the largest fresh water lake in Southeast Asia. The trip to the lake was also very eye opening. The thatched shacks along the river to the lake were made up of a room about half the size of my bedroom on stilts and that was it. Again there were tons of children running around including toddlers naked wandering on their own. This was probably one of the poorest areas I have seen in my life.

The scene at the “pier” was also quite wild. There were loads of fish coming off the boats and men taking pictures of us, which we would later understand why. We got on a long boat and headed out along the canal to the lake. Alongside the canal were floating houses, women rowing boats called floating markets and small boys casting nets to catch fish. (pic 1, pic 2, pic 3) This community was most amazing as they move their floating houses, restaurants and boats as the lake rises. Each year, they move over 7 kilometers as the water fluctuates. The community surrounding this whole lake covered over 4 provinces in Cambodia and consists of over 1 million people—1 million people floating on the water!! We stopped at one floating fish market, which had a crocodile farm that was both shocking and surreal. Even crazier was when one of the older boys held his brother over the pit in a scene that made Michael Jackson’s balcony episode look completely innocent. (pic 1) As we returned to lakeside we were hounded by little girls who had taken the digital pictures of us before we got on the boat and stuck them onto plates. The pictures were most unflattering and you can see from these pictures of the girls pounding at the window that we did not make any purchases. (pic 1)