Cambodia - Angkor What?!!?!!

So after our long and VERY stressful journey we felt we deserved a nice meal!! There was a great Italian pizza place just around the corner from the hotel!! Totally not Cambodian and totally not cultural but we just need comfort food at this stage and it was owned by a very friendly Italian chef who enticed us in from the street and the pizza definitely did not disappoint!!

Gorgeous food and a great nights sleep - we awoke energised and ready to check out Angkor Wat and the other famous temples in the area. As we had mentioned in other posts we were kind of templed out at this stage but you can’t really visit Siem Riep and not do the temple tour!! And to be fair they have quite a few spectacular ones!! We hired a Tuk-Tuk driver for the day and headed to Angkor Thom for our first temple. The most striking feature of this one is the historical stories carved on the walls depicting Khmer & Cham war scenes and daily life of the Khmer people. The carvings are so detailed and cover massive stretches of the walls that surround the temple. It also had huge stone faces on its many towers, some say the faces are representations of the King who built the temple and others say it’s a combination of him and Buddha. All Buddha carvings in the temple are de-faced as a Hindu King took over the temple after the original owner and instructed his people to get rid of all signs of Buddhism!!

After spending the morning at that temple the heavens opened and the wind was blowing a gale!! The tuk-tuk driver tried to bring down the plastic sheeting which was the roof and the sides of the tuk-tuk but we were still getting soaked so we decided to take a break for lunch. Tom had the local Fish Laksa which was amazing and to be honest 4mths on I can‘t remember what I had but I’m sure it was gorgeous!! Fully fuelled up and even though it was still raining we headed for Ta Prohm. This temple is famous for being in the film Tomb Raider with Angeline Jolie. What was amazing about this temple was that it had been left in much the same condition in which it was found. It had trees growing out of the ruins and the jungle surroundings and rain only added to the experience. It was definitely our favourite temple.

We passed a temple that the archaeologists were dismantling and then restoring piece by piece and I must say I have done some large jigsaw puzzles in my time but this must be some major headache!! Then we visited the final temple of the day, Angkor Wat. It was dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. We were expecting to see the famous picture postcard which is on all the guidebooks but as there was a lot of ongoing re-construction with lots of scaffolding to help and a serious lack of water in the pond in front of the temple, Michaela’s best attempt at the famous reflection picture was a little away from the perfect postcard!!

     

The Picture Perfect Postcard - stolen from google images => the best that I could do!!

It was to hard to believe that The Angkor complex was built in only 300 years. Its massive and the size and detail in the temple buildings is spectacular. In its hey day, Angkor had a population of over 1 million and the Khmer Kings controlled a vast territory extending south, to the Mekong delta in present-day Vietnam, north into Laos, and west over large parts of Thailand.

To top off a great day we went to a show put on by one of the local kids orphanages displaying shadow puppetry & Khmer Aspara dancing. There are a lot of kids begging in Siem Riep and their English and powers of persuasion are unbelievable! The orphanages and other children’s charities in the area plead with tourists not to give money to the children as there are many organisations in the area to help them with housing, food, clothing and most importantly education but because the children can make more money on the street the choice in the short term is easy! 

Nong Khai (Thailand) to Siem Riep (Cambodia)- THE most stressful border crossing to date!!!!

We took a 2 day bus journey from Nong Khai to reach the Cambodian - Thai border at Poipet. It is a really busy border crossing as a lot of Thai’s go across into Cambodia for the casinos as gambling is illegal in Thailand and on this day it was bucketting down with rain - so there were little rivers running along the roads!! We had heard a lot about this border and the tourist scams that went on there! We had done a lot groundwork (meaning Tom had made a spreadsheet!!) on the potential scams and were intent on getting to

the other side without paying any more than the $20 we knew it should cost for the official visa!! The madness began when we arrived at the bus station and a driver put our bags directly onto his tuk-tuk and said he would take us to the border. On our way he took a detour from the border road to a so called Visa Office!!! (a rundown shack) and out came a guy with a very official clipboard trying to sell us a Cambodian visa. We refused to get out of the tuk tuk and told him we wanted to go the official border. There was a bit of a stand-off but the driver realised that if he was going to get his fare he would need to move on. So stage 1 complete.

Then as we made our way across the border people were continuously trying to sell us a visa but we told them we already had one. Finally we found the official office where we met the border police and they told us the visa would cost us $20 (the correct fee) and an ‘express’ processing fee of $2 - we were the only people in the office so im not sure who we were getting expressed past!!. There was a sign directly over the counter stating $20 so we handed in our passports with just the $20, waited on a seat for 5mins and got a visa - no mention of the $2 again!! Stage 2 complete! 

We went to the next office to get stamped into the country and that was surprisingly easy so we thought we were home free. All we had to do now was get to Siem Reap - about 2 hours away - which sounded like an easy task. We knew that $12 each was the normal going rate but that’s assuming 4 in the cab. We were being bombarded by taxi drivers promising that they would give us the cheapest price and that it normally cost $60 and they would do it for $48, then $40, a few steps more $35 etc…but we said we were waiting for the free government run bus which took you to the official “Tourist Bus Station“. This was a bus run by the government to try and get tourists away from the rip off, dodgy taxi drivers at the border to a more organised, official set up about 10 mins away!! The bus eventually pulled up and as we were about to hop on 2 people came running out of it and headed down the road so after a 5 minute ‘discussion’ on the pros and cons of getting ripped off by the bus or the taxi drivers with reservation we hopped on to the bus!! It was impossible to know who to trust!!!! When we got to the bus station, a massive building in the middle of nowhere with 15/20 people working there and we were literally the only customers. It had turned out that the last bus of the day left at 3pm so our only option left was to get a taxi and the battling with price began again. They were trying to charge us more than at the border and were pretending not to understand English so we threatened to just take the bus back to the border and finally we settled on 30 dollars! So one person took the money off us - he handed it to another guy who did a couple of sums on his calculator and counted the money - he handed to another lady who wrote out a receipt - the receipt was given to us - we handed it to another guy who lead us 5 metres to a door where another guy checked the ticket - he gave it to another guy who took our luggage to the taxi and gave our ticket to another guy who then jumped into the wreck of a car that was going to take us to Siem Riep for the bargain price of $30!!! Stage 3 complete and most employees utilised!!!

The very official looking 'government' run tourist bus!!!

The whole time we were in the taxi we tried to keep an eye on road signs to make sure we were actually going somewhere near Siem Riep!! We had given him a piece of paper with the hotel address that we were staying in but he took us close to Siem Reap to a so called taxi rank and said that this was as far as he was taking us and then we had to get into another taxi organised by them to go into the town!! So feeling seriously uneasy but having no other choice we jumped into this taxi who instead of following the signs into Siem Reap he told us he was taking a shortcut through the countryside which was ringing alarm bells for us!! Thankfully sure enough we arrived at our hotel 10 minutes later, Stage 4 complete. We have never been so glad to make it to our destination and never been so exhausted from the stress of deciding who to trust!!