In January 2012 I made a trip to IndoChina to explore a little in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The plan was to take a relatively short trip (2 weeks) to Vietnam with side trips to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Vientiane in Laos. My friend Nancy was in Vietnam during early January and we planned to meet in Angkor Wat and then travel back to Vietnam and continue over to Laos.
I made hotel reservations and bought train tickets before departure so most of the itinerary was in place before I left. There was a little uncertainty owing to the fact that it was going to be Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and indications were that travel around Tet was particularly difficult. In the end everything worked out fine - Tet wasn’t such an obstacle at all.
The flight from the US is long and with the beginnings of a cold made it even more tiring than usual. I arrived rather bedraggled and tired in Bangkok’s new and very splendid airport (where in the US do we have such a fine and modern terminal, nowhere that I can think of). After an overnight in Bangkok it was the early morning flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Siem Reap is the supporting town for the Angkor Wat temple complex - lots of hotels, restaurants and of course lots of tourists.
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| The main entrance to Angkor Wat |
The hotel in Siem Reap was nice - more than nice actually - quite luxurious - a Sofitel. There was lots of greeting and bowing and door opening. All a bit over the top, but I can’t say I objected too much - I am getting spoiled in my older years. I met up with Nancy who had been there for a couple of days with her daughter, Arden - they were already seasoned Angkor Wat visitors.
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| Angkor Wat |
I did the usual tourist thing in Siem Reap - a trip to the Angkor Museum to get the background on the Khmer culture then a trip out to the temple complex to see the sites. Angkor Wat itself was most impressive - an immense moated complex of temples. Quite awe inspiring when you imagine what it must have been like in the 12 Century when it was built. Of course along with this awesome and remarkable complex comes the other side of the coin - people like me, the tourists. You really couldn’t get away and be by yourself and just about every picture you took had some westerner ambling through the middle of it.
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| Monks at Angkor Wat |
The next day, Tuesday, it was off to see some of the other temples in the area. While Angkor Wat is the main temple that has been extensively renovated and is the one that most would recognize, there are a myriad of temples and structures in the surrounding area. Many of these are not so renovated and restored and they have a more dilapidated look to them. I found these more interesting and much more enjoyable but no less populated with tourists. Angkor Thom in particular had some amazing examples of the power of the jungle with trees and their roots intertwined with the temple structures so that you couldn’t imagine one without the other.
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| Angkor Thom |
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| Angkor Thom |
After two days of intense temple touring I was ready to move on and on the Wednesday we left for Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. (Arden left us here and flew back to the USA.) Between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh is a large inland lake (the largest in S.E. Asia) and a river system that flows into the Mekong River at Phnom Penh. This unusual thing about this lake and river system, the Tonle Sap, is that it flows in different directions depending on the season. In the rainy season the Mekong flow is so strong it pushes water up into the Tonle Sap and swells the size of the lake, in the drier season, the water flows out of Tonle Sap into the Mekong.
There is a daily boat leaving from Chong Kneas, just outside Siem Reap, for the 6 hour trip to Phnom Penh. The boat was a long thin vessel with aircraft style seats below deck and luggage storage on top of the deck. Since the top deck was so much nicer than the stuffy and clammy interior cabin, we climbed out onto the deck and spent 6 hours in the sun as the boat roared its way down to Phnom Penh. The first mile or so of the trip was in a small river channel where we got to see the how the locals lived in their floating homes. Since the water level changes the houses have to be moveable so they can stay close to land and yet be close to the water for the transport and sustenance that it provides.
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| Floating Church Tonle Sap |
We reached Phnom Penh by mid afternoon and made our way to our hotel - the Raffles Hotel (did I mention we stayed in some nice hotels?). The hotel was just beautiful - one of the old colonial hotels from the 19th Century. It is the place to stay when in Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh was a pleasant city. Nothing too spectacular as far as sights to see, but interesting enough. We wandered around town visiting the Royal Palace/Temple complex and a few other sites on the tourist agenda. We then spent a while walking around a food market with a wonderful array of foodstuffs - from beautiful displays of exotic fruits and vegetables to somewhat stomach churning selections of meats and fishes that in the open air with all the heat, humidity and flies tested our resolve.
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| Market in Phnom Penh |
One of the things on the tourist agenda in Phnom Penh is to visit the so-called Killing Fields. A complex outside of the city memorializing the awful things that went on during the Pol Pot regime. It is somewhat strange to visit a memorial to such a horrible period of Cambodia’s history, and fairly recent history at that. While the area looked like a relatively innocuous park, the story told by the audio tour guide told a quite different story. Some quite horrible things happened in that little piece of land. The shrine which is the focal point of the area is basically a pagoda full of shelves of human skulls.
All very disturbing but then you come outside to the current day and a throng of vendors selling food and drinks and tourist bric a brac - very strange.
Traveling by Tuk-Tuk out and back to the Killing Fields gave us the chance to experience how the Cambodians get around - usually by small motorcycle or scooter, usually with their entire family on the same vehicle. It was not unusual to see 5 people on a very small motorcycle.
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| Taking the children to school |
The next morning we left by bus for Vietnam. All was going well until the bus stopped on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Everyone got out and waited on the side of the road while the driver and his assistant tinkered with the bus. Apparently the air conditioning was not working. So we waited and waited for an hour or so by the side of the road for a replacement bus. Finally we were off in air conditioned splendor towards the border and Saigon.
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| Waiting for the replacement bus |
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