Dec 2005

Journey aside; we had a lovely time in Siem Reap. The only reason people visit is to see Angkor Wat, rather than the town itself, so it retains the charm of a small relaxed town rather than a busy tourist hub. The people were all warm and friendly, and even the tuk-tuk drivers were more interested in showing off their vehicle than trying to rip us off.

Angkor Wat is a world heritage site, one of the wonders of the world, and apparently, the biggest religious building ever constructed. It’s all that Cambodia seems to have going for it, and pictures of Angkor are on everything from the flag to beer and cigarettes – the message being that Cambodia might be in a bit of a state now, but the Cambodians built Angkor Wat, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

There are two war museums in Siem Reap, and they are themselves at war. The owner of the one we chose to visit was arrested when a former army general decided to open a competing museum. Strangely, to secure his release, he’s scrapped the admission charge (so that his museum is no longer classified as such) but this has only increased its popularity. Lots of photos of the museum and Wat to follow.

Keen to avoid the Cambodian roads, we booked a flight to take us to Phnom Penh. The flight was smooth and only 40 minutes. There was just enough time to take off, throw some food at us, and then land again. We took a taxi to a hotel that we’d pre-booked only to find that the price had gone up 50% overnight. Neither of us felt like being ripped off again so we took a tuk tuk and fortunately managed to find a reasonable hotel on the other side of town.

We set off from Ko Chang yesterday morning and spent the entire day in transit, arriving at about 10.30pm in Siem Reap.

The first half of the journey, from Ko Chang to the Cambodian border
was reasonable, although the driver thought he was Michael Schumacher
and had a right to drive on which ever side of the road he chose –
beeping and cursing furiously at oncoming traffic for being in his
way.

We got dropped off at a roadside café, which doubled as a place where
we got our Cambodian visa, and boarded a second bus, which, we
assumed, would take us all the way to Siem Reap. The bus took us about 200m to the immigration point, where we waited for almost two hours in the mid afternoon sun to be allowed out of Thailand.

Once though immigration, our guide informed us that it was best to
change our money now and then promptly took us to a bureau de change
that offered incredibly bad exchange rates – so we've decided to stick with our dollars, which seems to be the first currency anyway.

We were then taken to an incredibly shabby bus, which was absolutely
packed full with luggage lining the gangways and virtually no legroom
at all. This was not the air-conditioned 'VIP' bus we had been
promised. 'Sorry, you have been cheated' was the refreshingly blunt
opening line of our guide's speech. He continued 'Hotels in Siem Reap
cost from between 100 and 1000USD'; we waited for the inevitable story of how he just happened to have a good friend who knew where we could get a room for 50.

He then told us how the journey from the border to Siem Reap is about
60 miles, but would take us about 5 hours – It's true that Cambodia's
roads are in a very poor state of repair, but I was skeptical that
this was the fastest the coach could manage, thinking the idea was
probably to get us to a hotel that the guide was on commission for so
late at night that it would be too dangerous for us to trek the
streets looking for a new one. Not being very happy with the
situation I decided to ask where we were going to be dropped off 'I
can't tell you; if I tell you, I have to tell everyone" was the
response, so I waited for a toilet stop to ask him again, this time he
gave away a little more 'very central, a guest house' and how much
would this guest house cost? 'very reasonable price'. For sure we were about to be shafted, again.

In the end, we arrived at a little guesthouse about 6km away from town at 10:30; the rooms are fairly over priced at 10USD per night. The hotel was entirely empty, confirming that our entire coach had
probably been sold to the guesthouse in advance, and our extremely
long coach journey was probably unnecessary.

Despite the poor transport, we're pleased to be here. Cambodia is a
very interesting place: it was a French colony up until the end of
WW2, but was largely ignored, and had only one high school and no
universities by the time the French left and installed Prince Sihanok
on the throne. He was overthrown in 1953 by the national army in a
coup. In 1969 the United States carpet bombed large parts of the
country, the effects of which can still be seen thanks to 'Landmine:
Keep Out' signs scattered across the country. In 1970 the US invaded
in an attempt to eradicate Vietnamese communist forces based here.
They failed, but they gave rise to the Khmer Rouge, who took the
capital, Phnom Penh just a few months later.

Over the next four years the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot's leadership,
systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians (targeting
the educated in particular) in a brutal bid to turn Cambodia into a
Maoist, peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. Currency was
abolished, postal services were halted, the population became a work
force of slave labourers and the country was almost entirely cut off
from the outside world. Responding to armed incursions into their
borders, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, forcing the Khmer Rouge to
flee to the relative sanctuary of the jungles along the Thai border.
From there, they conducted a guerilla war against the
Vietnamese-backed government throughout the late 1970s and 80s, funded by the US. 1993, UN administered elections took place and once again King Sihanok was returned to the throne as head of state.

Yesterday we went on an Elephant trek through the rain forest; it's so much easier seeing the jungle by taking a ride on an elephant rather than actually walking, and, as a bonus, it started raining through the trek. Not the little droplet sort either, the sort of rain that hurts when it hits you came down in massive sheets.

Today is Tabi's birthday (she sends her thanks to all those who wished her happy birthday via the blog, or at least she would,if I had remembered to tell her), so we had a fun day on quad bikes followed by Thai massage. Tabi envisaged the quad bikes as being 'something like lego land' so was a little shocked when we were driving around at breakneck speeds on one of the toughest offroad tracks I've ever seen. It wasn't so much a track as a mud path through the jungle. To add excitement, my quad would accelerate constantly, and the brake would only slow the acceleration, rather than slow the quad.

Most massages here in Thailand are the naughty sort, but we managed to find a genuine one on the beach. The main aim of Thai massage does not seem to be to relax, but rather to prod and poke you in as many intimate places as possible. Just as my massage was finishing, I turned over to see Tabi's masseuse lying underneath Tabi... thinking about it, maybe it was the naughty kind.

In the evening, we went to a fantastic Italian restaurant that even Momma would have traveled east for, and had a fantastic three course meal, and lots of wine for just a few pounds.

We've also been planning the next leg of the journey, to Cambodia. Cambodia doesn't have any cashpoints at all, so we decided to stock up on dollars while we were in Ko Chang. We visited the banks, and totally cleared them of all their dollars (230 in total). They arrange two night tours to Cambodia from Ko Chang, and we've managed to tag along with one of these tours on a 'transport only' basis - that is to say, they'll get us to Siem Reap, and then we're on our own.

In other news, the blog counter just notched up it's 2,000th visitor, each one of you is so bright that your leading cause of death is moth related injuries.

It's nearly midnight here, and we have to be up very early for Cambodia tomorrow. I'm also a little worried I might have a hang over... ho hum, best go to bed.

As always, you can view the full set in the gallery, but here are my favourites:

Cute Monkey!

A stream running through the rainforest

Where we had our lunch today while out trekking

Yay! It's the motorbike we've been riding on!

We left for our trek at 9am this morning, and got back about 3pm. Our guide was very nice, and spoke near perfect English, which is very rare out here. On the one hand, he seemed to hate tourists – telling us how since their arrival the island has been ruined, but as he made his living from selling trekking to tourists and was recently married to an English lady who came here as a tourist herself, he couldn’t have hated our presence that much.

The trek itself was exhausting and pretty scary; at several places we were clambering around without any safety equipment in front of huge drops, but the scenery was breathtaking and we learnt a lot (did you know loofahs grow on trees?).

Later in the afternoon we took the bike on a nice long ride around the island, stopping off on a mini trek of our own through the national park to take another couple of pics that finished off the memory card.

We’re going to stay here another couple of nights at least, deciding that there probably isn’t time to visit any where else in Thailand, given that we’d have to head back to Bangkok first, and we don’t want to be traveling on Tabi’s birthday.

PS – There are two Thai girls next to me in the internet café, who seem to be writing love letters to men somewhere in the West. They’re copying from what looks like a very well worn ‘template’ letter. They've obviously been trying to get their green card for quite some time!

We managed to get a ride on the pack of a pick up truck from Trat down to the pier, about 20km away, where we picked up the ferry to take us to Ko Chang. When we disembarked we expected to be besieged by rickshaw drivers and touts as is customary, however the pier at Ko Chang was more or less deserted. Eventually though we managed to get to our hotel by sharing truck space with a delivery of pineapples that had arrived on our ferry.

We were dropped off in the centre of town, and had to make our own way to the hotel. Our guidebook is pretty light on information about Ko Chang, so the first thing we did was try and get a map. The only one we could find was the ‘Ko Chang Treasure Trail Map’ which isn’t exactly ordinance survey standard so we ended up walking for about 2-3 km with our backpacks when the place we were trying to get was just around the corner. We’re staying in a little bungalow (or bung-low as the BBC spell it) on the beach which has lots of character, although is a little noisy at night.

There are no rickshaws or taxis on Ko Chang, so we’ve rented a little motorbike. We took it out for a spin today and covered about 80km or so visiting various places on the island. It only came with 1l of petrol, so we set off straight away to look for a filling station. Expecting to see a Shell or Esso that never materialised, we ran out and broke down on a steep hill and ended up having to push the bike until a nice Thai lady stopped and gave us some gas (and refused payment). It turns out they don't have petrol stations here and instead sell petrol by the coke bottle load from roadside shacks.

Tomorrow we’re going on a trek into the rainforest, which sounds great, but means getting up very early.