Saturday, July 3, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Siem Reap - Angkor Wat
Taking an overnight bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap was a lot better than our 15 hour bus in Laos...so we arrived in Siem Reap, the epicentre of the new Cambodia, a pulsating place that's one of the most popular destinations on the planet right now. At the heart of town there is old French shop/houses, shady tree-lined boulevards and a slow-floating river. Despite the fact that around 2 million people now visit Angkor every year, the people of Siem Reap are among the poorest in Cambodia.
The day we arrived with limited time in the area we checked into our nice hotel by the river and hired our tuk tuk driver for two days to drive us around and be our guide for the next two days. We headed out to Angkor Wat, the heart and soul of Cambodia. It is the largest religious structure in the world, it is the Khmers' national symbol, the epicentre of their civilisation and a source of fierce national pride. Unlike the other Ankor monuments, it was never abandoned to the elements and has been in continuous use ever since it was built.
We spent an very warm day touring all the temples before finishing at Angkor. Some of the more memorable and beautiful temples were Ta Prohm which could have been directly out of a scene of Indiana Jones. Walls are carpeted with moss and creeping plants, shrubs sprout from the roofs and many corridors are impassible, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved blocks. We then headed to Ta Keo and climbed a very steep staircase to the top of the highest temple in Angkor, the view was actually nicer from the bottom looking up at the temple...Terrace of Elephants and Terrace of the Leper King was the next stop before heading to The Bayon which epitomises the creative genius and inflated ego of Cambodia's legendary king. Its 54 Gothic towers are famously decorated with 216 enormous, coldly smiling faces of Avalokiteshvara that bear more than a passing resemblance to the great king himself. This temple was probably my favourite, all of the faces smiling down on your from every angle made it a bit eery...We continued onto see Angkor Wat during the day and then hiked Phnom Bakheng to watch the sun go down while pinks, oranges and yellows filled the sky.
The next morning we woke up around 4.30am to head back out to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise over the temple and lake in the grounds...The sun brought purple, blue and pink sky's and was the coolest temperature wise we had been in a while!
We had an afternoon nap to catch up on the limited sleep we had been getting the past few days and then headed out to Chong Kneas floating villages with our driver. We took a two hour long boat ride out to the village to see the everyday life of a fisherman and the families.
We had one last night in Siem Reap so we spent it eating at a Cambodian style bbq restaurant and watched the football with some beers. It's amazing how unified the world and travellers are when watching a sport overseas! It creates a great atmosphere in the area :)
The day we arrived with limited time in the area we checked into our nice hotel by the river and hired our tuk tuk driver for two days to drive us around and be our guide for the next two days. We headed out to Angkor Wat, the heart and soul of Cambodia. It is the largest religious structure in the world, it is the Khmers' national symbol, the epicentre of their civilisation and a source of fierce national pride. Unlike the other Ankor monuments, it was never abandoned to the elements and has been in continuous use ever since it was built.
We spent an very warm day touring all the temples before finishing at Angkor. Some of the more memorable and beautiful temples were Ta Prohm which could have been directly out of a scene of Indiana Jones. Walls are carpeted with moss and creeping plants, shrubs sprout from the roofs and many corridors are impassible, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved blocks. We then headed to Ta Keo and climbed a very steep staircase to the top of the highest temple in Angkor, the view was actually nicer from the bottom looking up at the temple...Terrace of Elephants and Terrace of the Leper King was the next stop before heading to The Bayon which epitomises the creative genius and inflated ego of Cambodia's legendary king. Its 54 Gothic towers are famously decorated with 216 enormous, coldly smiling faces of Avalokiteshvara that bear more than a passing resemblance to the great king himself. This temple was probably my favourite, all of the faces smiling down on your from every angle made it a bit eery...We continued onto see Angkor Wat during the day and then hiked Phnom Bakheng to watch the sun go down while pinks, oranges and yellows filled the sky.
The next morning we woke up around 4.30am to head back out to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise over the temple and lake in the grounds...The sun brought purple, blue and pink sky's and was the coolest temperature wise we had been in a while!
We had an afternoon nap to catch up on the limited sleep we had been getting the past few days and then headed out to Chong Kneas floating villages with our driver. We took a two hour long boat ride out to the village to see the everyday life of a fisherman and the families.
We had one last night in Siem Reap so we spent it eating at a Cambodian style bbq restaurant and watched the football with some beers. It's amazing how unified the world and travellers are when watching a sport overseas! It creates a great atmosphere in the area :)
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
History & Sights of Phnom Penh
Waking up early to maximize our full day in Phnom Penh is exactly what we did, 8.30am as a backpacker is pretty early, but at home I would have already been at work for 40 mins...yikes...work...
So we arranged a Tuk Tuk driver for the day to stay with us and take us to places we requested with some suggestion of coure. First stop was the Royal Palace which dominates the skyline of the riverfront where the Tonle Sap and Mekong meet, with its classic Kmer roofs and ornate gliding. Within the Royal Palace is the Silver Pagoda, named because it is constructed with 5000 silver tiles weighing 1kg each.
A little history:
Khmer Rouge Rule
Upon taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 - two weeks before the fall of Saigon - the Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal reconstructings of a society ever attempted. It's goal was to tranform Cambodia - renamed the Democratic Kampuchea - into a giant peasant dominated agragarian cooperative untainted by anything that had come before. Within days, the entire populations of Phnom Penh and provincial towns, including the sick, elderly and infirm were forced to march into the countryside and work as slaves for 12-15 hours a day. Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution.
The revolution soon set about wiping out all intellectuals - having glasses was reason enough to be killed. The regime wiped out lawyers, doctors, teachers and person to have worked for the former government, they destroyed hospitals, temples, and schools.
Leading the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot. As a young man, he won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he began developing the radical Marxist ideas. Under his rule, Cambodia became a slave labour camp. Meals consisted of little more than watery rice porridge twice a day, meant to sustain men, woman and children through a back-breaking day in the fields.
Khmer Rouge rule was brought to an end by the Vietnamese on 7 Jan 1979. It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died during the three years, eight months and 20 days but the most accepted estimation is at least 1.7 million people perished at the hyands of Pol Pot and his followers.
Next stop was where the reality of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge was very apparent. Tuol Sleng Museum. Once a centre of learning, Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge April 1975- Jan 1979) security forces and transformed into Security Prison 21 (S-21). The classrooms were turned into torture chambers and equppied with various instruments to inflict pain and suffering and death, which are still held in the rooms itself for viewing. Tuol Sleng was the largest incarceration centre in the country. The long corridors are hallways of ghosts containing haunting photographs of the victims, their faces staring back eerily from the past.
The Khmer Rouge leaders were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism and each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed. Where the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in early 1979, there were only seven prisoners alive at S-21 from the 20,000 who were incarcerated.
Pretty powerful stuff and to wandering on the grounds that these atrocities took place was very emotional. I'm also reading a book called 'First they Killed My Father' by Loung Ung, who lives to tell her and her families story at this horrible time. It's interesting to read her story while in Cambodia, it makes everything she speaks about that much easier to relate to.
After a couple hours reading and learning more about S-21 we took a 30min Tuk Tuk drive out to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Most of the 17,000 detainees held at the S-21 prison were executed at these Killing Fields. Prisoners were often bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting bullets. It is hard to imagine the brutality that unfolded there when wandering through the peaceful, shady former orchard but the memorial stuipa soon makes you realize, displaying more than 8000 skulls of victims and their ragged clothes.
After these two sites and all the information from the past 6 hours we felt it was time to take a break. We headed to a restaurant called Friends, that is an NGO set up for street kids, which gives them a head start in the hospitality industry. It felt good that the money we spent was going directly to them and their education, not some middle person.
We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon with our books in a cafe out of the sun, and then absorbed our minds the intense football match that evening before catching the overnight bus to Siem Reap...
So we arranged a Tuk Tuk driver for the day to stay with us and take us to places we requested with some suggestion of coure. First stop was the Royal Palace which dominates the skyline of the riverfront where the Tonle Sap and Mekong meet, with its classic Kmer roofs and ornate gliding. Within the Royal Palace is the Silver Pagoda, named because it is constructed with 5000 silver tiles weighing 1kg each.
A little history:
Khmer Rouge Rule
Upon taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 - two weeks before the fall of Saigon - the Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal reconstructings of a society ever attempted. It's goal was to tranform Cambodia - renamed the Democratic Kampuchea - into a giant peasant dominated agragarian cooperative untainted by anything that had come before. Within days, the entire populations of Phnom Penh and provincial towns, including the sick, elderly and infirm were forced to march into the countryside and work as slaves for 12-15 hours a day. Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution.
The revolution soon set about wiping out all intellectuals - having glasses was reason enough to be killed. The regime wiped out lawyers, doctors, teachers and person to have worked for the former government, they destroyed hospitals, temples, and schools.
Leading the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot. As a young man, he won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he began developing the radical Marxist ideas. Under his rule, Cambodia became a slave labour camp. Meals consisted of little more than watery rice porridge twice a day, meant to sustain men, woman and children through a back-breaking day in the fields.
Khmer Rouge rule was brought to an end by the Vietnamese on 7 Jan 1979. It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died during the three years, eight months and 20 days but the most accepted estimation is at least 1.7 million people perished at the hyands of Pol Pot and his followers.
Next stop was where the reality of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge was very apparent. Tuol Sleng Museum. Once a centre of learning, Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge April 1975- Jan 1979) security forces and transformed into Security Prison 21 (S-21). The classrooms were turned into torture chambers and equppied with various instruments to inflict pain and suffering and death, which are still held in the rooms itself for viewing. Tuol Sleng was the largest incarceration centre in the country. The long corridors are hallways of ghosts containing haunting photographs of the victims, their faces staring back eerily from the past.
The Khmer Rouge leaders were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism and each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed. Where the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in early 1979, there were only seven prisoners alive at S-21 from the 20,000 who were incarcerated.
Pretty powerful stuff and to wandering on the grounds that these atrocities took place was very emotional. I'm also reading a book called 'First they Killed My Father' by Loung Ung, who lives to tell her and her families story at this horrible time. It's interesting to read her story while in Cambodia, it makes everything she speaks about that much easier to relate to.
After a couple hours reading and learning more about S-21 we took a 30min Tuk Tuk drive out to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Most of the 17,000 detainees held at the S-21 prison were executed at these Killing Fields. Prisoners were often bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting bullets. It is hard to imagine the brutality that unfolded there when wandering through the peaceful, shady former orchard but the memorial stuipa soon makes you realize, displaying more than 8000 skulls of victims and their ragged clothes.
After these two sites and all the information from the past 6 hours we felt it was time to take a break. We headed to a restaurant called Friends, that is an NGO set up for street kids, which gives them a head start in the hospitality industry. It felt good that the money we spent was going directly to them and their education, not some middle person.
We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon with our books in a cafe out of the sun, and then absorbed our minds the intense football match that evening before catching the overnight bus to Siem Reap...
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Cambodia - Streets of Phnom Penh
We are now in our fourth country of the trip, Cambodia and in the capital, Phnom Penh. The capital is a crossroad of Asia's past and present, a city of extremes of poverty and excess, of charm and chaos, but one that never fails to captivate. Once the 'Pearl of Asia', Phnom Penh's shine was tarnished by the impact of war and revolution.
Already I have mixed feelings about this place, as Amy and I were checking into our hotel and I was signing my name on the guest list I noticed there were only single (white) males staying there.....hmmmm......then wondering the streets, I had never seen so many middle aged single men wondering around and a quarter of them arm in arm with a local young woman....I know this is common practice around Asia and I have witnessed it before but never to this extent. Both the prostitution and poverty is the worst I've seen yet in South East Asia which is a little sad but still an experience in itself. I'm excited to see what positive things this country has to offer! We plan to visit the sights tomorrow and take in some of the sad and devastating history of this place and then head further north to Siemp Reap......
Already I have mixed feelings about this place, as Amy and I were checking into our hotel and I was signing my name on the guest list I noticed there were only single (white) males staying there.....hmmmm......then wondering the streets, I had never seen so many middle aged single men wondering around and a quarter of them arm in arm with a local young woman....I know this is common practice around Asia and I have witnessed it before but never to this extent. Both the prostitution and poverty is the worst I've seen yet in South East Asia which is a little sad but still an experience in itself. I'm excited to see what positive things this country has to offer! We plan to visit the sights tomorrow and take in some of the sad and devastating history of this place and then head further north to Siemp Reap......
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