Siem Reap

Where do I start? Siem Reap is a great little town. The journey here was painless, or should I say without event at least. Arriving at the bus stop was pretty comical in itself, as before you even get off the bus there is a mass of tuk tuk drivers swarming to grab a big juicy tourist and speed them off to their friends guesthouse. The funny part is that half of them are holding a board with your name on it, as they've all been tipped off by the guest houses in Phnom Penh. I calmy waited for the frenzy to die down and having kept my travelling plans a secret from my previous guest house they was no 'Mr.Mark' board waiting for me. So I picked the least dodgy looking driver that I could find and headed for town.
Cambodia was described to me by a few travellers, who seem to have bad encounters, as Scambodia, and I can understand their reasoning. The town sits on the edge of the Angkor Wat complex and is under constant development to accomodate to hordes of tourists who visit every year. The reason why the name 'Scambodia' seems to have arisen is because the streets of siem Reap are peppered with beggars, but beggars who have become fairly accustomed to the western tourist.
There's a very good reason why there are so many beggars, and a very good reason why resentment seems to have occured. Cambodia is an extremely poor country and outside the tourist areas, namely Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and the beaches in the south, the only economy is agriculture, and it's a fairly weak economy at that. To compound all this, the government is about as corrupt as one could get, so the poor stay poor and the corrupt and rich get richer.....and more corrupt.
With the country only recently coming out of the Pol Pot regime and the grip of the Khymer Rouge,the people there are stil trying to pick up the pieces and make the most of what they have......which isn't much. Pretty much everyone that I spoke to has lost family members to the Khymer Rouge or knows of someone lost, which is no suprise as they murdered 20% of the population. So with the threat of genocide over, the people in the country now have just the landmine situation to deal with. Which brings me onto my original point, the beggars. The town is full of landmine amputees ranging from six year old children to adults. It's hard to cross the street without someone asking for, what would appear to be the standard rate of, one dollar. On the first couple of days, everyone who asked would get some cash, maybe not a full dollar, but something at least. However, and my bank manager will vouch for this, I am not made of money and can't afford to dish out cash to all of them, so I took to buying food. Pat yourself on the back mark, aren't you a kind fellow? Kind but niave it would seem. I but dinner for maybe half a dozen homeless kids and a the word spreads pretty quickly, "the big bald guy's buying dinner, get him". So the trend becomes, eat (at the local food stalls of course), pay and at the same time buy diner for homeless kids then make a dash for the nearest bar. Seems to work OK, and doesn't cost me all my precious dollars.
So apart from feeding a percentage of the local population, and befriending a good dozen adult amputees, who make a great effort to support their families by selling books on improvised wheelchair stands, I set out to explore the temples of Angkor Wat.
If there was ever a time to experience feeling like Indiana Jones, this was it.......apart from the treasure, the beautiful girls, the bad guys, the bull whip, etc, etc......you get the picture.
The temples are simply amazing. Angkor Wat itself is a piece of work, but the entire complex requires more than the three day pass that I opted for. They go on and on......and on!
The best way to see the temples is with a tuk tuk driver, and the Siam Reap form of tuk tuk is a scooter with a makeshift trailer hooked on the back. It goes without saying that the tuk tuk drivers are able to acquire anything, or "something", should one require it. I however just wanted three days of 5am starts to catch sunrise and then play at being Indiana Jones for a few hours. The 5am start came as a bit of a suprise to my driver, however it wasn't too much of a chore for him as everytime I went off to play 'Indy', he'd find a bar with a hammock and catch up on some zzz's. Or so I thought, as come day three he'd decided it was too much and handed me over to one of his fellow tuk tuk bretheren......lightweight!!
So going back to the temples.......incredible. My personnal favourites were Bayon and Ta Prohm. Bayon was a maze of stone faces and the camera couldn't keep up with my enthusiasm at times, and Ta Prohm, "the one where tomb raider was filmed"(and boy do they make you aware of that), is a maze of stone ruins and huge tree roots.......again the camera was struggling........lightweight!!
I was under the illusion that my 5am starts would give me some degree of privacy in the morning........how wrong I was. Bus loads of Japanese and Korean tourists raced to join me watch the sunrise, took almost as many pictures as me..... and then headed back for their buffet breakfasts at their hotels. Me, I grabbed an omlette and a cup of tea(of course) at one of the food stalls dotted all around the complex.
Whilst ambling around one day, I met a monk called Vat, and in time honoured tradition gave the VAT man some money, although this time it wasn't as much as I normally do and it went to a worthy cause......his English lessons.
So this was the pattern for three days and both I and the camera were glad of the lie ins we treated ourselves to the following days.
Aside from the temples, Siem Reap is home to a childrens hospital, whom I shared a couple of pints of my beer diluted blood with, and a landmine museum run by a guy called Aki Ra, formerly a child soldier in the Kyhmer Rouge. The museum, and when I say museum I mean a couple of huts deep in a local village, was free to get into and survives purely on donations.
This guys story is simply amazing and can be read on the link below,

http://www.akiramineaction.com/story.html

Stories like this are commonplace in Cambodia, and especially in the Siam Reap area, with there being so many landmines and unexploded ordnance all around the area still.
So having seen one of the greatest man made religious structures in the world and spent time at the landmine museum and a rehabilitation centre for amputees and given blood at the local childrens hospital..........I proceeded to enjoy the, extremley lengthy, happy hours at the bars on, the very appropriately named, pub street for the following two days. 30p a pint can't be wrong!
Siem Reap was a great place. The incredible Angkor Wat complex, but I think the education I received about the recent Cambodian history was far more rewarding.
For those who are interested, I'd move fast as there is hotel after hotel being thrown up there and what charm is left will soon be extinguished by us, the tourists.

Oh yeah, I saw my second spider of the trip in my room one night.The size of my hand and quicker than a tuk tuk driver. Needless to say, I didn't sleep too well that night.

Next stop, Bangkok and then the islands........no beached whale comments please.