As I mentioned earlier, this weekend was our huge trip to Cambodia and Angkor Wat. The trip was epic, and my blog entry is going to turn into a novella, but I want to be thorough simply for my own well-being. So if you get some time, grab a cup of coffee and a scone and have a read.
Angkor Wat from the back/side
Angkor Wat is located in the city of Siem Reap, one of the two major cities in Cambodia (the other being the capitol, Phnom Penh). To get to Angkor Wat from Bangkok, you first have to take a bus to the Thai border (4-5 hours), then go through immigration and walk across the border to Poipet, Cambodia. From Poipet, you can either take a bus or a taxi to Siem Reap (3-5 hours). We left on Thursday and arrived that night, spent Friday and Saturday exploring Angkor Wat and the other temples, then headed back on Sunday.
I must confess, I spent quite a bit of the ride home sorting through our wealth of Cambodia puns for the perfect blog entry title. This one won because it is both lame and fitting. Cambodia’s local currency is called Riel, but the country actually uses the US Dollar as its primary currency and Riel mainly just as change. The current exchange rate is 4000 Riel to the dollar, so if you buy something for 50 cents, you’ll pay 1 dollar and get 2000 Riel back. Ironically, we had no US money and were stuck running to ATMs to avoid getting ripped off trying to convert our Thai baht back to dollars.
The trip itself was an absolute whirlwind of emotions which I can hopefully organize as follows (temple pictures dispersed throughout).
This temple was buit to last, but the door was built TOO SMALL...
The Journey to Siem Reap
The problem with Cambodia is that everyone and everything is trying to scam you. I will elaborate on why later, but for now just know that Westerners are literally walking dollar signs. We knew this going into the trip and prepared. Our group was five people, but (long story short) we split up for most bus rides and immigration. The border was mayhem, and my friend Judy and I had to be very, very aggressive to get across without being scammed. First, people on the street tried to overcharge us for “arranging” our visas, but we knew to keep going. Then, when we got to the official government office, THEY tried to overcharge us, giving all these excuses as to why the price had “increased.” We wound up basically shoving $20 (the proper, listed price) and our passports at the guy, and he gave us our visas. Once we were across the border, we had to find a taxi ride, and of course they tried to overcharge us as well. We had to insist, then walk away, and also lie about not having enough money. If you open your wallet and they see that you have money, your bargaining power is gone. I hid most of my money so that when I opened my wallet, only a few dollars were visible.
We took the taxi because the bus takes much longer and arrives late at night, forcing its riders to stay at a more expensive guest house (yes, the scams are that elaborate!). The road from Poipet is about as basic as it gets. Dirt road, lots of construction. I’ll come back to that aspect later. Our ride was a little over three hours and was bumpy the entire way there. There was next to nothing on or around the road. Most of the way, we could look out the windows and see miles and miles of open field with nothing in the distance (and yes, this prompted exactly one reference to the Who song). Occasionally, there would be villages with huts or people. Other users of the road included the occasional bus/car, motorbikes, bicycles, schoolchildren, cows, and other animals. Our driver would honk every time we passed anything on the road, and during busier stretches our car sounded exactly like the van in Little Miss Sunshine (the horn sounded exactly the same, too). That made me smile. The picture of the road that I’ve included is the only one I took of the ride… it was out of the back of the car after a particularly busy cow-crossing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my camera out in time to catch the cows as they were swarming our car and only got them in the distance.
The road to Siem Reap... during a particularly lively stretch
At the end of the ride, all of a sudden, the road became paved. We then saw street lights. A median appeared, lined with bushes and trees. Painted lines and lanes appeared on the road. Then the city came. Huge resort hotels, one after another. Massive, fancy, just like you would see in the US. We’re talking $300-700 per-night luxury resorts. Then a bustling street of restaurants and bars lined with tourists. We got out at the taxi station (i.e. parking lot) and took a tuk-tuk to our guest house - a modest, simple guest house that served its purpose for the three nights that we were there. We got dinner and went to bed, knowing that we would be getting up at 4:30 to get to Angkor by sunrise the next morning.
The Temples of Angkor
Of course, the Angkor Temples tourist police tried to scam us when we went to get tickets. They told us there would be an ATM, and then there wasn’t, so we didn’t have enough US money. We wanted 3-day passes, which cost $40, but we didn't have time to bargain and wound up paying about $47 each in a bizarre combination of baht, riel, and dollars.
As far as the temples are concerned, Angkor Wat is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the most preserved because it was the only one that continued to be used throughout history, but there are dozens more scattered throughout the area. Quite a few are overgrown by jungles and forests, and all are falling apart to varying degrees. We saw eight temples in all, which is not even half of what is there, but we went to the most famous ones. All of them are basically wide open to exploration, so you can go inside and climb up through everything. The big three are Angkor Wat, Bayon, and Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is amazing because it is entirely overgrown with trees and jungle. I’ve posted a picture of how the tree growth looked, but the temple itself was massive as well. Bayon was my favorite of all the temples, mainly because I liked the layout and the statues. It was literally a real-life Legends of the Hidden Temple. We felt like little kids exploring and learning, completely in awe of everything. I could’ve spent a week or more there. I’ll scatter some pictures and hopefully put them all on webshots eventually when I get better internet. Each temple had amazing architecture and intricate carvings and designs on the walls. My favorite part part of Angkor Wat was the set of Bas Relief galleries (6 in all, I think) that lined the perimeter of the temple. I’ve loaded two pictures, one showing the size of one gallery and one showing the intricacy of the carvings.
Of course, these temples are trafficked by thousands of tourists… or rather, thousands of walking dollar signs. Around each temple there are stalls filled with Cambodians trying to sell you everything from food to paintings and postcards to photocopied travel guides. The thing is, they also send children to run around and sell merchandise. From the minute you step out of your tuk-tuk and try to walk somewhere, you are accosted by children who have been trained to sound like aggressive broken records: “Hey lady, you buy? You buy? One dollar. Two one dollar. Okay, you buy?” They are trained to use exactly the rhetoric that will invoke sympathy and get money out of tourists. Some will carry a smaller sibling with them to look more pitiful. Some try to impress you by asking you where you’re from and then listing off random facts about your country. “Oh USA, capital Washington DC, first state Delaware last state Hawaii, president George W Bush… etc.” We even got accosted inside a few of the temples. They persist, figuring that you’ll buy something to get them to go away. They follow you and block you from walking or getting back into your tuk tuk. The nature of it all is disturbing, but the best way to get by is to be aggressive. If you’re feeling uncomfortable reading this, you’re feeling how I felt the entire time.
Bayon: outside and inside
Cambodia
Set apart, independently from everything else, Siem Reap would be a nice town. It’s very touristy, but there is good food and a lot to do there. However, thinking about it in the context of Cambodia, I was never comfortable there.
The bottom line is that Cambodia is poor. There is drastic, visible poverty, and the contrast in Siem Reap hit me in the face like nothing I’ve ever experienced. There are two sources of frustration that are both so intense that I'm still having trouble processing them.
1) The realities of the tourism industry
2) The contrast between Siem Reap and the rest of Cambodia
Angkor Wat is a wonder of the world that is visited by tourists from all over the globe. Sounds like a great thing for Cambodia, right? Not. Every single enterprise in that country, from the hotels to the gas stations to the temples themselves, is owned and controlled by foreigners. Yes, even the pride of Cambodia, ancient Khmer architecture, doesn’t belong to Cambodian/Khmer people. The Cambodians that we talked to told us that some Korean guy pockets all the money from Angkor Wat. The restoration is carried out by other countries. The natives themselves, most of whom are struggling to survive on less than a dollar a day, are reduced to begging and taking advantage of foreigners. Cambodians scam you is because they have to. It’s the only way for them to get revenue from the tourism in their country. As a Westerner, I will never be able to interact genuinely with these people because to them I represent their source of income and also essentially their oppressor. Quite a burden.
Ta Prohm
Historically, Cambodia has been through so much that you’ll have to just look it up if you’re interested. Think: invasion, corruption, and horrid genocide. In recent history the country was run by a tyrannical regime that executed all the educated people in the entire country. Now it is simply being exploited by foreigners. The sad part is that tourists enter and exit Cambodia without learning a single thing about the people or the culture. Even if you wanted to, it’s difficult to find authenticity in such a tourist-oriented town, and there’s absolutely no dialogue about the issues there. I wanted to learn about Cambodia, but I didn’t even know where to start because I felt like nothing about Siem Reap was actually Cambodian.
I feel like at some point when you visit a country, tourist or not, you have to step back and think about where you are or show some interest in the local history or culture. I was completely appalled at the general obliviousness of the masses. I understand that most people fly into Siem Reap and don’t see the dirt road that we saw, but you can tell from the children at the temples that there’s a problem. Did I mention the rumor that the Cambodian government is bribed to keep the road unpaved so that most tourists fly in? That way they don’t see the poverty and are more apt to stay at the 5-star resort. The impression that I got while I was there was that Cambodians and tourists alike are just pawns helping the rich pad their bank accounts.
Ta Kao
My friends and I learned how to say a few words in Cambodian, and the locals seemed shocked every time we used these words or expressed an interest in their culture. I honestly don’t think that most visitors take any interest in them. Rather than ramble and rant further, I want to offer an anecdote or two of people that I met along the way, but I'm going to do it in another post because this one is already so long. On the final day of our journey we had some delays at the border and had several interesting experiences there, but again, I've dragged this out enough. I’m not 100% happy with what I’ve written, but I’m also entirely spent.
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