The R&R Big Adventure

Slow boat to Battambang

Our first impressions of Siem Reap on Friday night weren’t the best. We went to explore the area near our hotel and stumbled across ‘Pub Street’, which, as the name would suggest, was filled with neon-lit restaurants and bars with competing music systems. I think the owners must have seen pictures of San Antonio, Magaluf and Ayia Napa and thought this is how westerners like to holiday. Beers were advertised at $0.50 a glass (everything is priced in $ U.S.), tuk tuk drivers asked if wanted to get drugs, girls, or both, whilst we saw hotels advertising room rates by both the day and the hour. No wonder we saw groups of British lads on the streets: even with the increased cost of the airfare to Asia, they could still have a much cheaper holiday here than a week in Ibiza. 

The next day we started our three day ‘Temple Tour’ and thankfully this lived up to expectations. Aside from seeing many amazing temples that made you wonder how on earth they built them in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and wonder at the feat of craftsmanship required for the carvings and stonemasonry, we also learnt a fair bit from our guide during the trip. Siem Reap means ‘defeated Thai’ so called because the city had suffered several invasions from, and ultimately a retreat by, the Thais hundreds of years previously. Seeing a village primary school empty at 11am we learnt children only go to school between 7-11am or 1-5pm, due to a lack of facilities, and that they often walk or cycle miles to reach it as there is no school bus. The rest of the day they will help their parents on their farm or family business. We got through seven temples that day – don’t ask me to name them – and it was fascinating to think most of these had remained hidden in the jungle for centuries once the king had moved his court to Phnom Penh.

Clearly tourism is an important part of their economy. I have never had so many cold towels and welcome drinks. Our hotel gave us all sorts of discounts and freebies with our room rate, including a free dinner at one of their sister restaurants, which we went to on Saturday night. It was very good food, and the staff were falling over themselves to serve us, but we could have done without the manager standing over our shoulders to make sure we gave them a good Tripadvisor review. In a saturated market they know the power of social media recommendations. 

On Sunday our guide took us to a national park north of Siem Reap and to some pretty waterfalls where the locals picknicked. In the afternoon we were moved by a visit to a landmine museum, established by someone who, as an orphan, was taken by the Khmer Rouge and trained to be one of their soldiers. His job was to plant landmines, but he eventually changed sides. He went on to clear them after the war finished, given his expertise, and he eventually established a training programme to clear mines and also the museum we were now visiting. The museum was filled with sad facts, including how the Khmer Rouge laid millions of mines across Cambodia and deliberately wanted them to maim, not kill, as it meant their enemy’s resources were diverted to hospitals and rehabilitation. Even today there are still millions of mines that have not yet been found or made safe, and every year hundreds of Cambodians die or are injured from stepping on one. Our guide told us they made the mines look like puzzles or toys so that children would deliberately play with them. When he was growing up in the late nineties and noughties he would hear an explosion going off around his village almost every day. In one room of the museum we saw large posters of smiling Cambodian children. Each one of them had one or more limbs missing due to a landmine explosion. 

Despite the adversity these people have faced over centuries of their history – constant invasions, occupation, colonisation by the French and then a brutal civil war and mass genocide – they seem remarkably resilient and are one of the friendliest people we have met on our travels. 

In the evening we ate in a lovely restaurant by the river – I’m not sure why many tourists went for the ‘authentic street food experience’, complete with those primary school stools again, when for $2-3 more for a main course you could eat in a decent restaurant.

Monday it was time for the big reveal, and a visit to the main Angkor Wat temple itself. We had actually had a sneak peak on Sunday afternoon, as the upper levels were closed on Monday due to a Buddhist holy day. However we were going to see the whole temple today and got up at 4.30am for the sunrise shot over the temple towers. It didn’t disappoint. The complex is vast and until you are up close, you don’t full appreciate the workmanship that has gone into it. No wonder it took forty years to finish. Every single one of the millions of tons of stone and rock used to create it had to be brought by elephants from many miles away. After seeing a couple of smaller temples, including one totally overgrown with huge trees and a root complex that looked like alien tentacles amongst the stone walls, we stopped at APOPO on the way back to the hotel. This is an organisation (it is a Dutch acronym for anti personnel landmine detection products) that trains rats and dogs to sniff out explosives and who can, with their handlers, help clear a minefield far quicker than metal detectors. I even got to hold one of their (giant) ‘hero’ rats as they are called. And they had some formidable success statistics to back up their achievements. Another sobering statistic we found out – Cambodia has the highest number of amputees per capita in the world. 

Monday afternoon was spent by the pool – more cold towels, free canapés and discount drinks, and an hour’s massage in the hotel spa for an outrageous $10.

Tuesday morning and we left Siem Reap, to head to Battambang, a town famous for its French Colonial architecture. Whilst it can be reached by a 3hr bus journey, we decided to opt for the boat instead – a six hour journey across a lake and waterways to reach it. We knew it would be a long journey but didn’t realise it would be quite as basic a boat as it is: wooden seats, a very noisy engine and making only one stop. We have seen a lot of floating villages – not sure though I would want to swim in the same murky brown water in which I have seen people both wash their clothes and empty the toilet. As I type this we still have over an hour to go before we reach Battambang. Thank goodness massages in Cambodia are also cheap.