Beautiful country side with majestic temples

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Siem Reap

Kinn, Cam, and I took a 3 day package tour of Angkor. We landed into the Siem Reap airport. Our tour guide, Piseth, met us there. The first thing I felt was the serenity of the country side. There were small homes all long roads with lush trees.

After a few minutes of driving, we got to "the strip". The strip is what I call their main street that has most of the new hotels (like the Las Vegas Strip). Our guide said there were ~ 30 hotels in 1998 and now (in 2005), there are ~80 hotels. Most of the hotels are small (relative to Vegas) hotels but gleaming with the look of luxury. Unfortunately, my hotel (City Angkor Hotel) was definitely not extraordinary. It was already 10 years old and it looked date, so a bit disappointing.

2.5 Days of Temples

Our tour included 2.5 days of viewing temples. The temples were built between the years of 500 AD and 1200 AD by various kings. They're Buddhist and Hindu temples. Since Cambodia went through many religious conversions (between Buddhism and Hinduism and back) led by its various kings, many of the temples contains statues of deities from both religions.

The temples we saw were:

(first day)

• Rolous Group
• Preah Ko: 849 A.D.
• Bangkong: 881 A.D.
• Lolei: 893 A.D.
• Angkor Wat:1113-1150 A.D. by King Suryvarman II

(second day)

• Banteay Srey: 967 A.D.
• Pre Rup: 961 A.D.
• Bayon: 1200 A.D.
• Takeo: 1000 A.D.
• Ta Prohm: 1186 A.D.

(third day)

• Preah Khan: 1191 A.D.
• Neak Pean: 1193 A.D.

Our tour guide, Piseth, was great and told us more history about the temples then our brains could take in. There were way too many kings to keep track of. Between the 3 of us, we must have asked our guide 9 times where the Buddha statues were. And each time, he patiently told us that there are no Buddha statues in any of the temples because every time the Hindus came into power, they would clear the temples from any symbols of Buddhism. Buddhism however advocated tolerance and thus did not remove all the signs of Hinduism. But instead they tried to slightly modify the Hindu statues into ones symbolizing Buddhism. Thus, we saw many Hindu statues wrapped with a gold rope and made to look like a Buddha.

The grandest (largest and most decorated) of all the temples is Angkor Wat. It was where the king and the more important people went to pray. Its murals showed important battles of the period. Angkor Thom was also very interesting and it was more about the life of the ordinary people as its murals showed. The murals contained stories about daily lives. What was also very cool to see is how the temples have been over-runned by the trees. Many trees and the temples now have learned to live together.

Though the temples are very impressive, what I really liked were the very wide man made moats that surround the temples. They, along the very beautiful lush trees along the temples, create such a serene setting.

By the time we visited our 12th temple, we were getting a bit tired of temples. We didn't want to spend a whole afternoon to shop, so we decided to take a boat ride along the Tonle Sap Lake.

Tonle Sap Lake

This river trip was about seeing floating houses along the river and lake. The houses are actually just big floats with 4 walls and a roof. They residents would have their houses situated at different places along the lake depending on how high or low the water is. Due to the level of the water, most of the houses were tied to the shore that day so we didn't see the houses sitting in the middle of the lake as the brochure pictures showed.

The people who live here are the fishermen and their families. Some also come from Vietnam. There is a small school and medical facilities there. The school was donated by the Japanese I believe.

One of the most interesting and yet sad thing I saw was that families on boats will send children in little floating buckets to go onto tourist boats and restaurants to ask for money. There are also alligator farms to attract tourists to merchant shops, although what's funny is that alligators are not native to this lake.

The lake is very beautiful and very quiet.

Our guide says that the government grants a private company the rights to the lake (based on bidding perhaps) and that the fishermen that fish at the lake has a pay a fee to the private party for being able to fish there.

What is cool is that just a few weeks after I took this trip down the lake, NPR did a story on this lake: http://www.npr.org /templates/story/story .php?storyId=5039980 It's too bad I didn't know that this lake was in so much trouble when I was there.

My Perspective on Current State of Cambodia

The one thing I love about travel is to learn about the culture and the people of the area. For me, Cambodia is infamous for the Khmer Rouge Uprising where the people of Cambodia were devastated. The land mines have been cleared but the people are still affected. The government is still corrupt. My Angkor park pass has the name of a hotel group on it. My guide says the reason is that the Cambodia government leases the authority to run /maintain the park (same as with the Tonle Sap Lake). So a private company actually runs this national treasure and has all rights for ~ 5 years. The Japanese government apparently bid for the rights and outbid the Vietnamese investor by $1Mil but due to corruption, the Vietnamese private party still won out.

The people are still very poor. Education is not available to most. No one can afford college because they are offered by private foreign schools. Children only go to school around 4 hours a day. Many children are just selling goods to tourists. The children are actually amazingly multi-lingual. The children pushing out goods could quickly tell who is Chinese, Japanese, American etc and they know enough of each language to sell their goods.

Angkor itself is becoming more and more "touristy" as you can tell by the number of hotels being built. It's not very cheap to go there. Everything is in U.S. Dollars, even the fee for the Visa can only be paid in U.S. Dollars. Our hotel charged us $2 for a water bottle. The merchant children all can say "Miss, it's only 3 Dollars....ok 1 Dollar for you today."

What is a bummer for me is that it was really hard to find authentic Cambodian food. Most of the food is either Thai or Chinese. It's almost like they are afraid to show their food and culture to the foreigners.

But there seems to be progress (unfortunately probably only driven by tourism). New roads and hospitals are being built with the help of foreign countries. When I was there, Japan was sponsoring a road and the hospital is Swiss.

I hope that progress also means better lives for the people that I've met on this trip. I definitely want to go back some day and see how this simple but growing country has progressed.....