Cambodia
August 1, 2008Our adventure to Cambodia was to start with a train ride from the central Bangkok train station, Hualumphong. The train leaves from there to Aranyaprathet at 5:55am. Well…that didn’t happen. Too early and we woke up at like 4:30 but decided it would take a good 45 minutes to reach the train station by taxi so we went back to sleep. There was another train at 1:05pm that we decided to take. Eve drove us to the subway station where we caught the train to the central station. Our ticket from Bangkok to the border town of Aranyaprathet was a whopping 48 baht, about $0.50. It was a commuter train though, so it made lots of stops and took roughly 5-6 hours to reach our destination. I really don’t mind long train rides though, the windows go down and you can lean out the window to see the beautiful landscapes passing by as well as let the air hit your face and smell the land (watch me take that back after I go on a 24-hour plus train ride in India). Plus you can get up and walk around, or stand between cars on the platform.
So we finally got to our destination at around 6:30-6:45. The lady at the train station said the border closes at 5pm, our books said 6pm, when, in fact, it closes at 8pm. We took a tuk-tuk from the station to the border for 30 baht, they will ask for 60-70. They may also take you to the Cambodian consulate’s house to get a visa, tell them to just take you to the border. We overpaid a little when we got there, they charged 1000 baht for the visa and 100 baht fee for not having a passport photo to give to them. So we paid $33. You can get it at the border for 20-25$ depending if you can haggle your way down to 20, despite the sign saying “Tourist visa: $20.” We got across the border at about 7:30ish and shared a cab with a guy we met on the train from Sweden and another American, who was a TV reporter in Miami and North Carolina but quit to spend 6 months traveling around the world. They were both really cool and funny, which made for an enjoyable 3-hour taxi ride from Poipet to Siem Reap on the Road from Hell.
Highway No. 6 is essentially a 30-40ft unpaved dirt road that is a free-for-all closely resembling Super Mario Kart. Instead of dodging goombas and koopa shells, the driver dodges bikers and motorcyclists while passing monster dump trucks. There are several interesting vehicles on this road, scooters pulling 20fft long flatbed trailers, multiple 2×4’s bound together by a metal frame with a naked engine bolted to the front to turn the front tractor tires while the driver steers with reigns as he would a horse and buggy.
We made the drive at night and it was pitch black. Even leaving Poipet the only lights were those of cars and scooters with the occasional fire on the side of the road. This is what I expected Cambodia to be like. The drive on the highway at night reveal the clearest night sky I had ever seen. You could honestly see EVERY single star in the sky, even star dust or nebulas (I know nebulas are colorful but I am talking about the cloudy star like stuff that fills the void between stars sporadically). At about the halfway point the driver stopped the car and got out and this was the middle of nowhere. We were like “Ok….?” And asked where he was going and he said, “pees,” and proceeded to go the bathroom in front of the car. The Swede then asked, “Is it alright if we get out of the car? We’re not going to get shot or anything right?” Which it did feel eery being in the middle of nowhere, at night, in a country that had been the place of genocide. But it was fine, we all took a bathroom break and continued to Siem Reap.
The only term I can really use to describe driving into Siem Reap, at night, is shock & awe. I never would have guess to see 5-star hotels one after the other on a dirt road. These hotels could have been any 5-star hotel seen in America…yet they were in Cambodia? Obviously the biggest and only draw to Siem Reap is Angkor Wat, one of the wonders of the world. And let me tell you, it is magnificent.
We got up at 5am to get to Angkor to see the sunrise. Everyone gets there at 5am to see the sunrise, it is a spectacular scene. Usually the night before you can set up a tuk-tuk to pick you up the following morning. We got a tuk-tuk to drive us around for the whole day for $10. Not bad, split between 3 people, the Swede wanted to find a cheaper deal..,which we were doubtful he wouuld. $3 i spretty cheap for a while day of being driven around to the nummerous temples at Angkor. So the tuk=tuk picked us up at 5am and we set off after getting only 4 hours of sleep. It was actually surprising that as we went through town on our tuk-tuk people were already up and setting up shop at 5am.
It was $20 for a day pass to Angkor, they take your picture and print off an ID card for you (a cool souvnieer) and you have to show it before entering all of the temples. It is like $40 for a 3-day pass, which I would like to do in the future. We saw a good majority of the temples and spent a lot of time at all of them but in retrospect I wish I could go back through another day to get an even closer look. In the second half of the day I had to ration out pictures, only taking photos of something really great or important. I ended up running out of space on my memory card after taking 187 pictures just at Angkor in 1 day. The 3 best and most popular temples at Angkor are Angkor Wat (the largest religious structure in the world), Ta Prohm, and Bayon. Ta Prohm is the temple where the jungle is ‘eating’ it. There are huge trees growing out of the temple and growing down the sides of its walls. Bayon is famous for all of the faces on the towers and walls. We got to Bayon last and it was raining and only got to spend about 30 minutes there between it closed at 5:30pm. It was my favorite in terms of being a kid and exploring it. There aren’t really any guards walking around or signs that say keep out so you can go through all of the small hallways and corridors. This was the most intricate temple that we went to. Halfway through the day we went to this temple far away, north of most of Angkor because we had so much time to kill before sunset. It was only an extra $3/person for him to drive us about 45 minutes to this other cool temple and then on the way back we stopped at the Landmine Museum. It was very powerful and told a great story of the guy who started the museum. He was a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge (genocidal regime) and doesn’t even know what year he was born. As he got older he became a mine layer, spending years laying thousandns and thousands of mines. When the Vietnamese invaded he was able to defect and fight the Khmer Rouge. After the Vietnamese pulled out he continued to fight with rebels. Once the Khmer Rouge was overthrown he started defusing land mines by himself, going to villages that had found mines near their homes. He then got trained by the UN in England to defuse land mines and was given protective gear (before, he had just been digging them up and defusing them with no protection or anything). He has spent the last 10 years or so defusing mines and running an orphanage for landmine victims with his wife.
After that we ate lunch and continued going to various temples. We left at 5:30pm back to town, got some food to eat for $1. There is a really cool street in Seim Reap callled Pub Street. There are a lot of nice places to eat here, ranging from $3-8 for food. But since we are on a budget we just eat at the Cambodia restaurants on the street where each dish is $1. Then we got back to our hotel and we had no room. Right, we didn’t check out yet they gave our room away. We still had a room key. We said we were coming back tonight. They said the kid was new and had only been working for a week. He was confused because I left my baggage at the front desk while we were at Angkor all day. I did so because I didn’t necessarily trust it sitting alone in my room. So they set us up with a room down the street. If you go to the guest houses (which there are a lot of), you can get a room with 2 twin beds, full bathroom and hot water and cable tv for only $8, which turrns into $4/person/night. That is a pretty sweet deal, and the place is real nice and clean as well.
The next day we slept in a little since we got 4 hours of sleep the night before and were up for about 15 hours the day before. I went next door to the place we had stayed the night before and had breakfast and used their WiFi internet for a few hours. We then set off to walk around the town. We went to the day market for a while and then walked along the river in town. At night we went to see this free Apsara dance. This is traditional Cambodian dancing. It was really cool, videos of it when I get back to the USA.
Then this morning we woke up and got on a taxi back to Poipet to get the 1:55pm train back to Bangkok!
If you want an adventure, go to Cambodia. The people are nice, the scenery is beautiful, and everything is cheap. You can stay in a 5-star hotel suite for around $70/night. But how much time are you going to spend in your hotel room? We were at Angkor for 12 hours. It is definitely a place I would like to come back to and travel down to Phenom Phen and then down to Sihanoukville, where there are incredible beaches, which aren’t crowded with tourists.