On the 2nd we checked out of the Green Banana. It was an okay guesthouse, but really nothing special. It was more that we had read such good things about the Palm Garden Lodge and decided we really wanted to stay there. The tuktuk driver this time was a good guy and took us to the right place, which we were surprised to see was quite a ways down a very red dirt road. The lodge was much more special than the previous place, and came with lots of smiles, a glass of orange juice, and a fruit basket. Much better. After putting our stuff away we walked back down the red dirt road looking for food. The buildings were much more rural than in the center of the city, and spaced further apart. But it was a busy road, with a steady trickle of traffic (mostly motorbikes) heading back and forth. There wasn't much in the way of food so we stopped into the first restaurant we saw. Good food. We had some sort of soup. We noticed a girl walking around in PJs there, although it was after noon. Full-length Pj's and thick socks. She looked quite comfortable despite the blazing heat. That afternoon we were treated to a lovely rain storm, complete with huge cracks of thunder and ferocious winds. Chuck sat on the veranda area enjoying the rain while I took a nap. It was still raining when I woke up and joined him. It continued for another hour after that. The ground was a soppy mess and there were a bunch of little frogs jumping about in the water. Chuck had befriended one of the young guys who worked at the hotel while I was sleeping, so we lightly chatted with him as we watched the rain fall. He said he had learned that thunder is made when two clouds crash into each other. Chuck and I looked at each other for a moment before responding. We were both trying to figure out exactly what to say to that. The exact physics of thunder are a bit hard to explain to someone who is living under the assumption that it comes from crashing clouds. Chuck did his best, though, talking about charged particles and opposites attracting, etc. And I don't want to give anyone the impression that I'm implying he was a dumb guy, either. He just wasn't given the opportunity to have an education like those of us in America or Europe. I found it a reflection on the Cambodian government rather than his IQ. Besides, I wouldn't have been able to accurately explain the thunder phenomenon myself. And he knew that the frogs hopping around were edible if one wanted to eat them. I didn't know that! He was just equipped with a different set of information than Chuck or me. He also told us that when the first rains of the year come, children are told not to play in the puddles and rainwater. Apparently all the pollution that has been gathering during the previous dry spell is trapped in the puddles, making toxic little pools. He said that a lot of chickens die during the first rains. But it's all washed away over the next few downpours making it safe enough that at least you won't die or grow a third eye. We tried to go to a karaoke BBQ for dinner, but apparently they don't know what that is. We read online that karaoke BBQ (which is just what it sounds - eating BBQ while watching karaoke) is all over the place, but everyone we asked was clueless. Our first tuktuk ride dropped us off outside a fancy-shmancy BBQ joint that had puppet shows or something. We decided against that and walked up and down the street, but didn't find anything like a karaoke restaurant. This led us to our second tuktuk which drove us back across town to the street our hotel was on and dropped us off outside a strange, colorfully lit building. I dashed inside to check it out quickly while Chuck waited with the tuktuk and was immediately creeped out. It was slightly maze-like and I had to walk down a few hallways just to get to the main lobby, the scent of perfume getting stronger as I went. Poking my head around the dimly lit corner I was faced with 20 beautiful women, dressed up as if they were going to a cocktail party, waiting around and looking bored. My first thought was that we had been taken us to some strange brothel, but upon further reflection it might actually have been a karaoke place. I have heard that you can hire a girl to come to your karaoke room (you have your own personal room to sing in at nice karaoke bars in Asia) to sing and have fun with you. They were probably those girls. Karaoke girls. But it was still a really strange sight, so I turned right around and went back to the waiting tuktuk. We gave up at that point and decided to just go back to the area we had eaten at the night before. We found a BBQ place (no karaoke) that offered a combo of kangaroo, ostrich, snake, and crocodile. It wasn't that good, but it was BBQ. After dinner we ended up back at the place we had eaten at the night before, eating free popcorn and having some drinks. Oh, and fighting off the vendor-children. The same ones from the night before.
We were craving something more authentic on the 3rd, so we headed into town looking for a place where locals were eating. We ended up at a busy little street cart in the market with pre-cooked selections of food. The rain blessed us with it's presence while we ate our fish head, veggies, and sweet diaper sausages (that is not their actual name, but one I gave them because they tasted like what I imagine a candied diaper would taste like). Since the rain was still doing its thing once we had finished, we walked around the covered market ignoring the offers and demands for us to buy shirts or scarves. I did end up getting a cute little coin-purse to replace my cumbersome money belt that I had stopped using. I didn't even bother haggling for it because it was $1. I know, I know, so pricey. Once the rain let up enough we walked through the touristy streets of the city, where all the Western bars and restaurants are. The beer in Siem Reap is super cheap and many restaurants offer $0.50 draft beers. So, that's just what we did. We sat and had hot tea and luke-cold beers for much of the afternoon, watching the tourists, beggars, street carts, and tuktuk drivers going about their day. One interesting sight was that of a small, toned, very muscular man towing a cart of odd and ends with a speaker blaring dance music. He stopped on the road outside our restaurant and set up a metal hoop ringed with knives at 4 or 5 feet off the ground. He did a lot of walking back and forth, making false running starts, and checking his mat before he finally did run and leap through the hoop, head first, tucking into a ball as he hit the ground and rolled back onto his feet. Then he came around asking for tips from people. I went ahead and gave him some money. He was kinda cool. My favorite encounter of the day was with some young girls who were out trying to sell bunches of bracelets for $1. When I say young, I mean 7 or 8 year olds. The girls were some of the most annoying child vendors, but Chuck managed to get them interested in something other than selling for almost 10 minutes. Somehow he managed to get them interested in math problems. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but they were trying to figure out what 4 x 2 was, and 10 x 10 and 10 + 10, etc. They seemed to have the addition and subtraction down, but multiplication and especially division seemed to be quite a bit more difficult. It started out as one girl, but after a few minutes she had two other girls by her side, all three with their heads bent together trying to figure out what the answers were. It was neat to see. As soon as the lesson was over their genuine smiles faded into fake ones and they pressed us once again to buy their bracelets, which we did not do. Before heading back to the hotel for the night we made an agreement with one of the numerous tuktuk drivers hanging around, for him to pick us up at 5:00 AM the next morning to go to the Angkor Wat.
As it usually does, 5:00 AM rolled around way too soon on the 4th. Our tuktuk was already there by the time we groggily strolled out of our hotel and into the dark morning. He drove us to the Angkor Wat ticket office, where we had our photo taken and actually printed onto the ticket. Then he dropped us off outside the main temple and went to wait with all the other tuktuk drivers for our return. The whole point of waking so early in the morning was to see the sunrise from Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, that ended up being less than spectacular. On the bright side though, it was cooler than it would have been during the afternoon hours. After the anticlimactic sunrise we walked around the huge temple looking at the carvings and structure and wondering what it must have been like back in its heyday. It took us a few hours to go through the place so we were hungry once finished. We had some mediocre noodles at one of the many food stands next to the temple and were bugged by vendors the entire time. If I told them "No thanks" then they wouldn't go away. If I ignored them, they wouldn't go away. There was no winning. We were glad to be leaving them behind as we went back to find our tuktuk driver. It was hard to find him though, since there were so many tuktuks parked together. And then the fact that the poor guy was fast asleep when we found him didn't help. A fellow tuktuk driver woke him for us as we stood around looking awkward because we felt badly about disturbing him. He was good natured about being woken up, and even looked a bit sheepish at having been so soundly asleep. He drove us to the next big temple called Bayon, where we climbed up to the top and back down. It wasn't nearly as big as the previous site so we only took 30 minutes to wander around. The last stop was at my favorite temple called Te Phrom. It had been left as it was when first discovered, halfway crumbled with trees growing out of it. This gave it a fantastic sense of ancient history that had been swallowed by the inevitable march of time and mother nature. The trees that had broken their way through the walls and begun to swallow the temple were the main contributors to the atmosphere. It would have been more mysterious if the site wasn't swarmed with masses of tourists, though. Te Phrom seemed to be the most popular temple at the complex. We met back up with our tuktuk driver after about an hour there. It was only 11:00 AM and we were already finished with Angkor Wat. That meant there was still time to enjoy the free breakfast at our hotel. And after that we took a nap. We were so tired. The afternoon brought buckets of rain and we once again sat on the veranda enjoying the show. This time we were joined by one of the young women who worked at the hotel. Chuck asked her what she thought of my lip ring. She giggled and said that on Cambodian girls it is a gangster thing. Hah! I thought that was pretty hilarious. She ended up inviting us to have dinner with her and some of the other hotel people that evening. We joined them but only had a bit of food. We didn't want to eat their whole dinner. After eating we sat around watching Animal Planet - some show about monkeys where they named one Romeo and the other Juliet and made their every move into some sappy love story. It was pretty ridiculous. One of the Cambodian guys seemed to think it was hilarious and I had to agree. During the commercials they would describe a concept and then ask what the English word for that concept was. One such concept had something to do with when a mother favors one child over another and whether that's a fair thing for her to do. Or something like that. Unfortunately I couldn't help them out because I don't think we have an equivalent concept in English. This made me wonder if sibling rivalry, or favoring of one child over another is a common and important aspect of Cambodian society. I was going to mention the cliche example of how in Eskimo languages they have a bunch of different words for snow because snow is a crucial part of their life and culture, but I just looked it up on Wikipedia and read that it's all an urban legend. That English has the same number of words for snow. So nevermind on that comparison. Myth busted!
The 5th was a day for relaxing and getting some work done. That means that I blogged all day. We wandered out into the disorienting heat for an hour or two for lunch, which turned out to be pretty good despite our concerns to the contrary. Siem Reap is such a tourist town that it's hard to find the good places where the locals eat. Even though the restaurant we ended up at wasn't catering to locals, it was still good food. That evening we had dinner with the hotel staff again. This time we contributed $5 to help cover the cost of making more food. We had some dried fish, BBQ chicken, sour soup with fish (one of the girls who worked there proudly announced that she had made it), fish amok (a delicious Cambodian specialty), and rice. Dinner wasn't as conversational as the previous night because new guests kept arriving while we were eating, causing the staff to have to get up and check them in and all that. Despite having eaten with them, we went out a while later for some more food. We ate at a promising street cart stall that turned out to be a big disappointment. Not only was the food bland and oily, but there were a lot of beggar girls bugging us. Not the kind who were trying to sell bracelets or books. Just straight up beggars. They hovered around us for about 5 minutes before one of the girls began to count my freckles. I could feel her finger gently poking my shoulder as she counted. It was really quite odd. The final straw was when another one reached across our table for whatever reason. I suddenly got fed up and said "Go, go go," as I shooed them off with an annoyed wave of my hands. I was surprised when they actually left. Responding to beggars or touts at all - negative or positive - tends to give them hope and they stick around. I guess I seemed agitated enough that they decided it was best to go elsewhere.
We left Siem Reap for Phnom Penh on the 6th. We were picked up from our hotel by a small, cramped mini bus at around noon. I was grateful when they dropped us off at the bus station because the thought of having to travel all the way to Phnom Penh in that tiny van was very depressing. Our official bus was a big, AC'd bus - much better. We grabbed a few unhealthy snacks from the stalls set up around the bus station before finally taking off for our next destination.
As usual, a marvellous read. I love the way you tell of how you feel and your interactions with people. Also the stuff about the puddles and chickens. Not just boring touristy stuff - Thanks.
ReplyDeleteMom
Thanks Mom! Yes, I felt like we had a lot of interesting interactions with the people in Siem Reap, despite it being such a little tourist trap.
ReplyDeleteAlways nice to hear your feedback :-)