Happy 2018! We have spent the last four nights in Siem Reap, Cambodia exploring the ancient temples of Angkor, sweating like crazy, dodging tuk tuks, and ringing in 2018.
After a quick two hour flight from Hanoi, we arrived at Siem Reap airport. The visa on arrival process took a little over an hour. Once we finally got through we found Mr. Poouri, our tuk tuk driver waiting for us. We hopped in his tuk tuk (just a motorbike with a carriage attached) and he drove us to our hotel ‘Rosy Guesthouse’ - which took 45 minutes or so since there was heavy New Years Eve traffic.
Driving through the streets we noticed some immediate differences from Vietnam. The girls seemed to be more “done up” with makeup, and there was no honking! There were still mopeds and people driving in all sorts of directions but there wasn’t the constant loud honking of horns which made the drive and walking through the city much more enjoyable. After spending more time here, I have come to realize that this occurrence is synonymous with the Cambodian people who seem to be more soft spoken, gentle, and friendly. But then again, I am making this generalization off of one city in Cambodia rather than the several we experienced in Vietnam. Also, they use US dollars here! All menus, shops, etc. tend to have prices in dollars and ATMs spit out dollars. The Cambodian currency, the Riel, is used for anything under $1. So when you buy something you get change in dollars and then the “cents” is in Riel. A little weird!
We checked into our room and immediately went down to the hostel bar and restaurant to eat since we were starving. As we were waiting for our food (fried rice of course), we chatted with another American and one of the girls working at the bar, Sokteara (SOK-TEAR-UH). Sokteara is 26 years old, super bubbly, and originally from the countryside of Cambodia. Just from talking with her for 15 or so minutes, we learned some interesting things about Cambodia (I tend to bombard locals with questions if they speak a little English). First of all, she said numerous times that she was “old” by Cambodian standards because she wasn’t married. She said girls typically get married here between the ages of 14-18, similar to what we learned about women while in Sa Pa (people get married younger in the countryside). I guess that makes me old too? The other thing Sokteara mentioned was how much more dangerous it is in Phnom Penh (the capital of Cambodia) than here in Siem Reap. She said that theft is a problem there because there is so much poverty. She also said she wouldn’t feel safe walking around at night alone there, but in Siem Reap she has no problem. This wasn’t the first time we heard things about theft in Phnom Penh and we felt ok that we decided to not go there on this trip. Siem Reap (population 230,000), on the other hand, is much safer and actually has a large expat population. Although we were surprised to find our hostel locked up at night with a gate and security guard when we came back after our new years celebration.
After dinner, we ventured out onto the streets of Siem Reap. With sandals and light clothing, we walked across a river and through a big night market which was jam packed with people. At the end there was a big stage with lights and live music performances. Maybe I just didn’t notice this in Vietnam, but as we walked through the market everyone started looking at Al funny. I realized it was because he was so tall and looked like a giant. He towered over the crowds of people which all seemed to be more around my height. I got some good laughs.
We then just decided to continue following the crowds of people walking towards the city center where we jumped right in to the NYE celebrations. The streets were blocked off to cars/mopeds and PACKED with people, there were tons of lights, and loud music bumping on several different stages. We were like - whoa, what did we just walk into? But once we entered there was no going back because you literally would have to push through crowds of people. We kept wandering around and the streets full of people seemed like they were never ending. We bought a round of beers at a liquor store and a few moments later passed by a booth that was handing out free beer. We made it a priority to stay close to this booth for the rest of the night so we could get a couple more rounds. I thought it was cool that they were handing out free beer to the whole town - especially when they could make money off of it - definitely unheard of in the US (I think). They were Tuborg cans too, not some fancy IPA but also not some sketchy beer.
As it got close to midnight, we positioned ourselves by one of the stages with a countdown clock. Everyone was cheering, drinking, dancing, and waiting in excitement. At 3 minutes 42 seconds, the countdown clock froze, and didn’t get fixed so literally no one knew when it was midnight making it the most un-epic NYE countdown ever! At least the celebration leading up to midnight was fun and it goes down in my book as one of the crazier New Years Eve’s I’ve experienced. After we pushed our way out of the crowds we walked back to our hostel and stopped at a market on the way for some snacks. To our surprise, this market had the biggest selection we had seen in SE Asia to this point so we loaded up. And believe it or not, they had several gluten free products. But we now realize that Siem Reap, along with the expat population, caters to Western tourists and in doing so is more expensive! It was refreshing but also strange using our own currency and having some more familiarities than in Vietnam but we also spent more money on food, rides, etc. I liked it better when I didn’t exactly know how much money I was spending - HA! We even found an Italian restaurant that had gluten free pizza and pasta which we went to one night for dinner. Al definitely didn’t expect to be eating pizza anytime soon so this was a nice treat.
We woke up the next morning sporting a slight hangover but still managed to play tourists for half of the day. We decided to visit Angkor Wat, the biggest and most famous temple in the Angkor Archaeological Park. To give a little background, Angkor is the reason most people visit Siem Reap. From the guidebook our hostel gave us, I recorded some of the basic facts since I’m not the historian here: The park is comprised of the ruins of the different capitals/temples from the Khmer Empire (9th-15th century) which had a strong Hindu and Buddhist influence. Kampuchea, Cambodia, Khmer and Angkor are all names associated with a single Asian civilization renowned for its arts and architecture. The Cambodian language is called Khmer as well as the people - “Khmer people”. Buddhism and Hinduism spread to Cambodia from India as SE Asia was on the trade route between India-China. Interestingly, Cambodia is 95% Buddhist.
We grabbed some snacks and another tuk tuk driver “Thao” who drove us to the ticket office to buy our passes for Angkor park. These passes are not cheap! We were recommended to get a 3-day pass which cost us $62 each. Walking past the outer walls of Angkor Wat, we were awed by the size and preservation of the temple and spent the next several hours exploring the grounds, taking pictures, following a wild monkey, and people watching. We attempted to stay for sunset but learned the site closes at 5:30 and we had to leave so we didn’t get to see much. A lot of people tend to visit Angkor Wat for sunrise but we opted not to as we heard it is extremely crowded (and let’s be real, it would require me waking up much earlier then my liking).
The following day our hostel arranged for our original tuk tun driver, Mr. Poouri, to spend the day driving us to some of the other sites which are very spread out. We did the “big” Angkor circuit. We managed to visit Pre Rup, Ta Som, Neak Pean, Preah Kahn, Baphuon, Bayon, and Phnom Bakheng - all huge temples which towards the end started to look the same. We enjoyed reading about each temple from our guidebook and taking in the sheer size of them. It was crazy to believe people built them so many years ago and it was interesting to learn that some of the temples were specifically Hindu and others were Buddhist. We also got to see some elephants! I have realized how much I love animals on this trip and it was so cool to be in such close proximity to such huge creatures. Unfortunately, I also got to witness the political corruption in Cambodia first hand. While I was walking through one of the temples ahead of Al, a Cambodian man in a uniform (later learned her was a policeman) pointed for me to look at the statue in one of the side rooms of the temple. He showed me some hidden Buddhist shrines under the rubble of parts of the temple. How naive I was to think he was just being nice and wanted to show me something I may not have seen. After Al joined me, the policeman said “tip me”. I was completely shocked and taken aback by this and wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. We gave him a dollar and left. I am still pissed about this interaction because I would’ve preferred my money go to someone who didn’t scam me into it. (Alex here, all in all it was just a dollar lol not too costly as far as “scams” go but Rachie took it personally).
After around five and a half hours, Mr. Poouri drove us back to our hostel. To say we were exhausted at the end of the day was an understatement! We grabbed some food and headed up to our room for some reading, air conditioning, and relaxation. This has become our nightly routine here and it has been nice to have some solid down time.
Some other random things to note about Cambodia (in comparing Cambodia to Vietnam):
- Most people we spoke to were very friendly and had better English than most in Vietnam.
- Although it was hot and humid, it was nice to have blue skies and pretty scenery. Vietnam was very gray compared to here.
- The food here seemed to be a combo of Vietnamese/Thai food - more curries than in Vietnam.
- The vendors/tuk tuk drivers here weren’t as aggressive and pushy.
- The Khmer language is insane! Unlike Vietnamese which uses latin characters so we could still semi-pronounce and recognize words, the Khmer language was unrecognizable.
- The population seemed to be on the younger side. After reading a bit about Cambodia, I learned this may be due to the Khmer Rouge regime which killed about 25% of Cambodia’s population (1.5-3 million people) - absolutely horrific. I couldn’t help but think everyone we interacted with here was affected in some way by it since it wasn’t that long ago. We watched the movie “First They Killed My Father” (it’s not a documentary) on Netflix which is about the Khmer Rouge and it is very eye opening but depressing.
Our last day in Siem Reap wasn’t as eventful. We got a late start to the day and mostly just walked around the town, did some shopping and ate. We also planned and researched some upcoming legs to our trip.
Although we only spent time in one city in Cambodia, we feel we learned a lot about the culture and are glad we made the effort to come here. We now head to Thailand for a few weeks. This was our top destination when originally planning this trip so we are both pretty excited to finally be there.