December 9th, 2007 -- Posted in Cambodia |
Hello!
We have been in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh for the last four days. We are getting ready to take a boat to Vietnam tomorrow. The plan is to spend a few days in the Mekong Delta before heading to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).
Cambodia has had a sad political history and has rebounded since the genocide that devastated the country in the early to mid 1970’s. We went to The Tuol Sleng (S-21) Genocide Museum where we learned more about the sad history of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Tuol Sleng was a school that was converted into a prison where 20,000 people over a 3-4 year span were held, starved and tortured prior to being moved to killing fields where they were executed. Out of 20,000 there were 7 survivors. During the genocide 2.5 million Cambodians were exterminated, primarily people living in Phnom Penh (city dwellers) and professionals. We also visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek 15km outside of Phnom Penh. There were hundreds of such places throughout Cambodia, and in total 19,000 mass graves. These fields have been converted into a memorial site. There is a stupa on the site that is literally a tower of the skulls that were excavated from graves found on the site. A very powerful memorial.
We’ve spent the rest of the time doing more sight seeing and hanging out at some really cool local markets.
Again I have had to visit a medical clinic. I’ve had the lower half of me cured and now it seems I have a problem in my upper half! I have bronchitis and am back on antibiotics. Interestingly, the same medication I was prescribed in Nepal ($4 for the pills) was $33 here. That aside, I am on the mend and feeling a lot better despite a nagging cough.
Next update will be from Vietnam. Hope all is well at home. I’ve been really wishing for a glass of rum and eggnog, and some Christmas cheer. Have a glass for us…well, for me at least, Chris hates eggnog — you can just have the rum for him.
xoxo
Paula
December 4th, 2007 -- Posted in Cambodia |
Hi!
We are in Siem Reap, Cambodia now. We decided to cut our time in Thailand into two parts as we were hoping to be there to ring in the New Year. Thought we would be doing that on a beach somewhere but have discovered how truly busy the beaches in Thailand are in high season. Instead of keeping up our search we were both happy to land on Bangkok for NYE. We both really loved the city and have booked ourselves into a swish hotel for a few nights. This is the first New Years Eve in a while where we’ve had confirmed plans so early! Ah, the lure of a posh hotel… some things it seems don’t change. 
When we left Bangkok we headed to the beach. We spent 4 or 5 nights on Koh Chang, a beautiful island on the south east coast of Thailand about 5 hours from Bangkok and close to Cambodia. It was nice to be back on a sandy, hot beach and we are happy to have tan lines again. We stayed on Lonely Beach which is a bit of a misnomer, as it was quite busy with travellers and our “resort” played loud house music late into the wee hours (I’m talkin’ 4 a.m.). It definitely won’t win a prize for favorite accommodation on the trip but we were within steps of the beach and the Thai massage ladies so all was well. Though they were lazy days we did manage a couple of day trips to neighbouring beaches (and were glad to see that we had lucked out on the best of them) as well as a couple of trips to a village called Bang Bao for some excellent seafood. Bang Bao is a fishing town that is built on stilts in the ocean. I don’t think that we have had a fresher local catch in a while - not since our meal of crab from my cousin’s boat in Newfoundland. All in all it was a good time.
From Koh Chang we took a ferry to Trat which was where we had left mainland Thailand. We stayed in a guesthouse called POP which we agreed was among the best places we have stayed on the trip. Great rooms, super comfy bed, clean and cool. We also liked Trat alot with a great night market where we ate some awesome Thai food washed down with Chang and Singha beer. From Trat we booked a van to Cambodia. The bus trip is unfortunately not a great goodbye to Thailand OR welcome to Cambodia. The Lonely Planet warns travellers about these buses being scams — they basically take so long to get to the destination that you are so exhausted when you get there you agree to stay at the guest house that the driver conveniently owns. We ended up on such a bus/van. We left at 10 a.m. and ended up getting into Siem Reap at about 10 p.m. — 3 hours late. We had not scheduled a place to stay but happily refused the very pushy tout who would not relent on trying to sell his guesthouse. After the first 2 places we tried were full we began to get nervous, but we found a good place - and for $15USD a fairly good deal. Interestingly, in Cambodia they seem to prefer the US dollar, which isn’t a shock I suppose when approx 4000 Riel = $1USD. We thought we were being clever by trying to pay in Riel - they told us our room was $45 USD for three nights, and of course that equals to approx 179,500 Riel!! Gets a little heavy in the pockets, but added to that we discovered that ATMs give USD, not their local currency!
We hired a tuk-tuk and guide to take us to Angkor Wat today. What an incredible place! I don’t have the camera with me to upload any photos, but Google it, it is really amazing. It is a huge site, much bigger than I had imagined, and Angkor Wat is one of the major sites but there are many other temples to explore as well. There are Buddhist and Hindu temples, some a bit of both, but Angkor Wat itself was built in the early 12th Century as a Hindu temple for the god Vishnu. We visited Ta Prohm, one of the only temples that has been basically left to the jungle. It is amazing to see an ancient temple literally in the grips of massive tree roots and vines that have wound their way over, under, and through huge stone walls, statues, and doorways. Work has been done to prevent further deterioration but you really get a sense of the power of nature but also of the strength of these structures to endure! There are literally trees straddling the temple, and these are MASSIVE trees, not little bushes or ivy vines! It is beautiful.
That’s all I have to report for now. We will be visiting some floating markets in the country side tomorrow and possibly head back to Angkor Wat for sunset. Hope all is well at home.
xoxo
Paula