Friday, June 25, 2010
We arrived in Siem Reap and got a tuk tuk direct to a decent place for us to stay. Unfortunatley Jodie caught some sort of stomach bug. Some thing that alot of travelllers seem to latch on to in and around this area. I spent most of the day making she was alright and wandering around the town. First impression of Siem reap is that people will only come here for one thing and one thing only; Angkor Wat, which we aimed to do on Monday, aiming to miss out on the weekend rush and madness. As a town, Siem Reap only also offers a couple of tours to small local fishing villages and is packed to the rafters with bars and restraunts all trying to out do each other with there drink promotions.
On our second day we arranged a trip to what is known as the Floating Village. We were picked up by tuk tuk and dropped off at a port called Tonle Sap. From here we got an hour and a half boat trip across what i thought was the sea
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. Later i found it was a huge lake. Dotted around the lake we could see loccal fisherman setting out to set up or indeed catch there fish. Eventually we arrived and hopped off the boat. Normally the village we walked into is filled with water. The village has very highly stilted homes opposite one another and when the water level is high, boats are used to get from place to place. Odd thing is, that though it is the wet / rainy season here at the moment, it was very dry, and we were able to walk straight through the middle of what would normally be there river. Hench having to loo up at the stilted houses.
One thing that we find very annoying about visiting some of these smaller villages, is that not only the kids, but the adults will talk to you in an assumptive way, assuming that you are going to hand them money or smoething out of guilt. Sure, we feel sad for them, but we are not millionaires and they make there money from these tours which are not cheap to do. We are not going to hand over a few dollar purely because they ask.
In the evening we walked into what we truly believed from the outset was going to be waste of an evening: England Vs. Germany. With what started off as a decent game, in a rowdy bar full of Brits soon became a shambles.
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And with Jodie and I being sat next to the only Germans in the bar, we left before full time. As for Englands 'goal', would it really have changed anything? Maybe the final score would be England 2 Germany 4 haha.... not funny.
The following day was the big one, we were goig to visit Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is an ancient Buddhist / Khymer Rouge development which stands head and sholdurs above any other templ that we have seen. And believe me, after 7 months in Asia, we are starting to get a bit templed out...
We made it there for sunrise which was amazing. We sat by the Reflection Pool watching the sun come up. The morning started off very cool but it did not take long for the sun to start hammering down on us; it was very very hot. The main site that you atart off with is massive. The main tower was closed off for repair works and this 'worker' told us that he would take us up for a few dollars each. So over the No Entry sign we went and got an amazing view of th entire site which is massive.
From there we went to Bayon Angkor Thom, hich blew me away. I never thought i would get excited over an ancient building or its architecture, but it really was something else. I cant really put it into words so check out the pictures!
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