Cambodia: my one full day of pure awesome

Thus far on my 18 month adventure teaching English in Taiwan, I've been to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and now Thailand and Cambodia. Well, and Ghana, but that's obviously not in Asia. Out of all the places I've visited, if I had to recommend one place for my readers to visit, I'd pick Cambodia. Specifically, I'm talking about the Angkor Wat in Siem Reap. We didn't have time to visit other cities in the country, and I'm fine with that. Even the most prosperous city, Siem Reap, is poverty-stricken, and the wounds from the civil war fought about 40 years ago still haven't fully healed. They don't even use their own currency - they use USD because their own dollar is so unstable. I kind of had this Truman show moment where I thought the whole country was in on a big scam to take as much of me and other tourist's money as possible. Despite this, the Angkor Wat temples are a MUST SEE. Really. Get off your computer right now and start saving money and looking up flights to Asia.


Saturday, January 21st
We awoke at the unbearably early hour of 4:30 for a longggg day of traveling. First, we took a 6 hour train from Bangkok to the border of Thailand, Aranyaprathet. It cost a whopping $1.50 for a comfortable ride. I think about how I paid around 30$ for a 40 minute train in London once... Have I mentioned how cheap Thailand is? If I haven't, here it is: Thailand is friggen' cheap.


Once we got to the border, we had to take a tuk-tuk to the immigration office. Remember those?

The tuk-tuk driver dropped us off at fake visa service offices, despite our (untrue) insistence that we already had visas. I did my research before about all the scams in Thailand / Cambodia and knew to not get our Cambodian visa anywhere besides the official office. Even if I hadn't researched that, how could anyone fall for a visa office with a sign clumsily made on Microsoft word and the workers sitting outside, drinking beer on dirty plastic patio chairs? The real visa office was packed with backpackers and Asians traveling for Chinese new year. It took about two sweaty, un-air-conditioned hours to walk through the border. Once in Cambodia, we then took a shuttle bus and a 5-hour cab for 17$ to Siem Reap. The taxi, unsurprisingly, forced us to stop at his friends' stands along the way. Although we told the cab driver where our hostel's directions before we got in, once we arrived in Siem Reap, he admitted that he didn't know where it was. He tried to make us get out at a random hotel but we refused to get out and made him ask for directions.


Finally, we reached our hostel, the Angkor Wonder. It cost us 3$ each a night, which included our own private room with a TV and bathroom. THREE DOLLARS!? That's less than I pay a day for my rent! Though far from a 5-star hotel, it's definitely one of the nicest places I've stayed at on a backpacker's budget. We arrived quite late, so we really only had time for dinner and some souvenir shopping in an indoor market.


Sunday, January 22nd


Again, our alarms woke us up at 4:30 AM. We hired a tuk-tuk driver for the entire day (10$ each) and he picked us up from our hostel and drove us to see the temples at sun rise. 

These are just the appetizers. The city is filled with miles upon miles of temples that you can't walk around - you HAVE to hire a driver. There's also no possible way to see them all in one day. Most guide books recommend 3 days. We only had one, so we tried to see as much as we could.

Set of Angelina's Tomb Raider movie (above)

Explanation for the last one: I was getting sick of the same "temple poses" I had done all day. I decided to do a different one for each picture. I did "Charlie's Angels", "blue steel", "Taipei 101", "Taiwanese handsome boy", "bill nye the science guy",  "here-I-am-bending-over-awkwardly-at-a-huge-tourist-scene-where-everyone-can-check-out-my-ass", a cartwheel, jumping picture, etc. You name it, there's a chance my friend or I posed it.


There's about 500 million more pictures, but you can check out my facebook for my top 100 or so.


While we were in Cambodia, a ridiculous amount of vendors followed us around, begging us to buy their overpriced postcards and souvenir junk. Some of them were adorable young children, like Chambo, pictured below.

I probably shouldn't have bought anything from him in retrospect considering I probably just helped enforce child labor... On the other, less-adorable hand, loads of creepy older vendors begged us to buy their things without Chambo's luck. One man claimed we should visit his food stand because he was Justin Beiber. I'm about 95% sure it wasn't the ACTUAL Justin Beiber though.

Once afternoon came, we asked our tuk-tuk driver to bring us to the hot air balloon stand. Hot air ballooning over the most beautiful temples I've ever seen in real life? Heck yes! Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate so we decided upon plan b: taking a boat tour of the floating village.

Victoria and I sat on our own personal boat tour (15$ each maybe?) with the driver and tour guide.

The guide pointed out the places on the river/lake; the house boats where people made a living fishing all day (and not having to pay rent/taxes), the party store boat whose cell phone you could call if you needed them to deliver beer or other supplies (awesome?!), the hospital boat, the school boat, etc.

 

We stopped off at an overpriced "supply store" and the tour guide asked us to donate money for the school for orphans down the river. Well, he had us there. My friend and I both work as teachers, and even if you weren't a teacher, who can deny a school for friggen' orphans? And poverty obviously affected the boat houses; families of 8 or even more (Cambodians apparently like big families) fit in boats barely larger than my apartment. However, I did feel a bit scammed; both my friend and I doubted our money actually went to these "orphans", or if it did, not all of it. 

Whatever. If I were as poor as many of the Cambodians are, I'd probably try to screw me out of my money too.

Then after the orphan donation *cough scam cough*, the boat driver said, "oh hey look at these 15 crocodiles in a cage." So we did.  

 Weird.


Then we left the boat tour and ate dinner at a buffet full of yummy (and not so yummy) Cambodian food. I think I'm going to make yet another blog post filled with all the pictures of food I snapped pictures of. Yes, I take pictures of food now; I've been in Taiwan so long now I've pretty much become Taiwanese in that aspect. I have a Taiwanese friend who literally takes pictures of glasses of water at restaurants. I have yet to sink that low. The dinner included a traditional Cambodian dance, which was downright weird, but cool to see the costumes.

I have no idea what the hell this guy was doing.

All in all, Cambodia itself is not the safest or best place to vacation, but the Angkor Wat makes it all worth it. DO IT.