Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is a massive complex of temples up to 1000 years old. The main temple is the most famous and is considered the largest religious building ever constructed. It is surrounded by a massive moat which is almost as amazing a feat of construction as the temple, which has no mortar or anything like that, just perfectly shaped blocks of stone that all fit together.

We decided to explore the temples by bicycle with Jo and Nick, to see the whole shebang involves doing two loops of 26 and 16km. We took three days to see everything and I think I speak for all of us, but by the end of the 3rd day we were bloody sick of temples. The favourite of ours was Ta Proem, a ruin that has been left to the elements to a certain extent with big trees growing all over the old buildings. Unfortunately now it is most famous as "the one from Tombraider, with Angelina Jolie".

At each temple along the path there was a massive bank of restaurant/souvenir stalls and before you had even got off your bike, you heard cries of "you want water sir?", "something to eat sir?" said in almost pleading voices...I guess when you have 25 restaurants all next to each other, all identical in every way, competition is fierce, especially in low season.

On day two, our visit coincided with celebrations to mark the one year anniversary of Angkor Wat being named as a UNESCO world heritage sight, we saw lots of school kids with musical instruments. We also had a long argument with the gate keeper at one of the temples because we didn't have a hole in our ticket. He couldn't give us our hole, only a perfectly round hole punched by the guy 5km away would do, so Nick rode back and got our holes for us. On the last day we also met a Polish guy on his bicycle who had cycled all the way from Poland! He had clocked up 20,000km cycling through Iran, Pakistan, India etc. amazing!

The nearby town of Siem Reap (which translates as Defeat of Thailand, no love lost there...I think the history is that Thailand and Cambodia were engaged is a battle for a temple on the border, which Cambodia won in the end, also I think the Thais invaded Angkor centuries ago) was tourism central. There were heaps of bars, restaurants, hotels, it was all a bit overwhelming. We found a nice local place to eat called Mr. Grill, which we morphed into Dr. Beef, and spent a few hours there drinking mini beer kegs at our table and eating grilled stuff. We spent our spare time playing 4-player canasta, it is 6-5 to the girls at the moment.

Anyways, I'll let the photos speak for themselves. Don't feel the need to make any special trips to see a temple now after seeing the mother of them all.

Cambodia - Part 1 - What do you mean it's 4US$

Phnom Penh - Siem Reap
July 1 - July 15 2009

As soon as I was on the mend (apart from the aforementioned hideous purple rash) we headed across the border to Cambodia, the plan was to make it to Siem Reap by Monday 6 July to meet up with Jo and Nick, good mates of ours who have biked from Singapore yep that's right biked, more about that later! We caught the bus on 1 July from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and after two huge queues at the check point (and an extra $4US dollars each for the bus guys to fill in our visa applications!) and a few hours, we arrived in Phnom Penh. At about 2 million Phnom Penh is much smaller than HCMC and therefore a little less insane. Phnom Penh is a pretty well established city and you can get anything you want in this city. What we wanted was the Lleyton Hewitt vs. Andy Roddick Wimbledon quarter-final on a big screen. Which of course we found in a bar with a friendly owner from Adelaide!

We spent a few days simply wandering around the markets of Phnom Penh saving the museums, pagodas etc for when we return with Jo and Nick. One of the most bizarre aspects of Cambodia is the dual currency the Cambodian Riel and the US dollar. You go to an ATM (usually an ANZ) and you get US$ you catch a tuk-tuk or stay in a hotel it's quoted in US dollars. Basically it seems to work like this, there is fairly consistently 4,000 Cambodian Riel to the US dollar (although obviously the official rate varies) most things are quoted in US$ if you need change that is less than a dollar you receive it in Riel so it is not unusual to get a mixture of Riel and US$ in your change - what the? Anyway we are used to it now and have learned to barter effectively using this strange mixture of currency.

Phnom Penh is actually quite an attractive city with some stunning art deco and french colonial architecture and wide treed boulevards. The cities location next to a tributary of the Mekong certainly helps this as well. Unfortunately a lack of drainage infrastructure and rubbish collection can effect this ambiance, particularly in heavy rain. More on Phnom Penh later. On the 5 July we headed to Siem Reap where the plan was to meet up with Nick and Jo by Monday - they were riding their bicycles a couple of hundred k's from Thailand and were not sure how long it would take them. (The link to their blog, which they update way more often then us, is on the right under crazyguyonabike.com). It turns out that they arrived two days earlier and by 8pm Sat evening we were sharing some well deserved Angkor beers. Jo and I have known each other since high school and have had many an adventure in Oz, Asia, Africa and Europe and it has been great to catch up - we will travel together for a while now through Cambodia and onto the Mekong Delta into Vietnam. We have been so adventurous since we all met up that we spend several hours each day undertaking the guys vs gals Cambodian Canasta Championship (CCC)! Every now and then we drag ourselves away from the CCC to venture out to ride bicycles around Angkor one of UNESCO's most significant World Heritage sites (Angkor will be the subject of a future blog). Other people at our hotel actually participated in activities around Siem Reap like volunteer work at schools and orphanages and the like whilst we played cards and drank beer. This didn't last forever of course and we eventually began to again socialise with the outside world.

After a week or so in Siem Reap we caught a boat to Battambang according to the guide book it was to be the most picturesque boat ride in Cambodia. $18 US each for a boat ride seemed a bit steep but given it ended up being 9 hours maybe not! We were collected from our guesthouse at 6 in the morning the four of us and Jo and Nick's two bicycles, the Khmer guys walked us over to a ute that already had 6 people and their luggage sitting on the back, they piled in all of our luggage myself and Ben and then proceeded to put Jo and Nick's mountain bikes on top of all of us! Nick was directed to sit on the roof. Jo got a squashy seat in a minivan behind us! We considered this to be a bad sign for the boat trip ahead.

Ultimately it wasn't too bad (hint: take a cushion) card playing was not to be but the scenery was pretty interesting and we only broke down once, when the boat ran into a fishing net which was stuck in the propeller. The journey passed through Tonle Sap lake (one of the most productive inland fisheries in the world) past the floating villages which are villages built on boats that move up and down depending on the height of the river and then up a very narrow tributary which the boat didn't quite fit so we would crash into the reeds.

Spending time with Jo and Nick has made Ben and I very jealous of their much more independent method of transport (and made us realise how unfit we are!)

Ho Chi Minh Fever

June 1st - 14th

We flew into HCMC, Vietnam, on a very late night flight from Manila. We were relieved that the traffic was so light in this city...

Then the next morning, stepping out of our hotel room, after first being assaulted by jackhammers pounding on the other side of our wall, we were assaulted by everything else this city had to offer. Motorcycles EVERYWHERE, honking and weaving and mounting curbs and going the wrong way down streets. The roadside food, selling yummy tangy, spicy cuisine, a great changeup from the lacklustre FILIPINO food. Then there were the guys offering rides on there bikes - "Taxi sir?", "Motorbai sir?", "Where you go sir?"on every street corner and in between (they always seemed to approach me and not Taren). Then there are all the other people selling all sorts of stuff that you kind of need, but not really, and if you show the slightest bit of interest you are given the hard sell. There were also way more tourists here than wee had seen on any other part of the trip so far.

We visited the War Remnants Museum which tells the grim Vietnamese story of the American War (or the Vietnam War as we know it). Australia was mentioned on the information a few times, and we were one of the biggest serving countries in the war, but if you were from the US, you would have felt pretty bad about the things your government did which were described in the exhibition (chemical warfare for example). That's not to say the Vietnamese were angels by any stretch of the imagination - the stuff the Viet Cong were doing was pretty gruesome too. But when we left the museum, we were feeling a bit low as some of the pictures and descriptions were very tough to look at.

It was about the next day, the 3rd of June, that Taren started to show flu like symptoms - high fever, joint aches, headache, lethargy. After a couple of days of this, we took her to the doctor and they diagnosed Dengue Fever. The fever lasted about 8 days and a gruesome looking rash hung around for about a week or more after that (see gnarly picture). During this week and a half of rest and recovery we played a lot of Yahtzee, cards, read some books (Taren read a big fat stupid murder mystery thing in less than 24 hours), watched some TV, every now and then I would go out by myself and have a snoop around the city.

Once Taren had recovered enough, we ate some nice food together. One evening we went for a fish hotpot, where you boil up the raw ingredients in a big pot at your table. The waitresses didn't speak a word of English (which is great!) so we pointed at another table meaning we wanted to eat that too. The other table seemed pretty chuffed at this so they gave us a shot of vodka to celebrate, and we then watched what they did so we ate it properly (the trick is not to cook things for too long). They then offered us another shot or two, so wee bought a bottle too and repaid the favour a few more times, after a slowly eaten meal of a couple of hours we walked slowly home, there seemed to be twice as many motorcyles on the road this time!

The highlight of HCMC for me (Ben) though was the waterslide park, so much so that it deserves a whole blog post of its own...