Cambodia

On Sunday, we got going at 3:45am to make our 7am flight, since Kuala Lumpur's airport is a good hour from the city. But the flight was quick and easy. Flying into Siem Reap was the first time this trip that I'd really stopped to wonder about what exactly I'd gotten myself into. The villages and farms visible from the plane were like nothing I've ever seen before (aside from maybe hunger relief commercials on TV), and flying over them in a 767 just made it even more ridiculous.

But we quickly found out that stuff like that is normal... there's a huge disparity between rich and poor here. The airport seems brand new and very efficient--we walked in, got our on-arrival visas in about 15 minutes and were out the door about five minutes later.

Our money goes a long way here. We're paying $8/night for our hostel, which puts the very nice Matahari Lodge in Kuala Lumpur to shame. The hostel sent two guys in tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws, basically) to pick us up at the airport free of charge.

Driving in, we passed maybe a dozen super-luxury hotels scattered amongst common homes and shops. I can't imagine what those places are like if they're paying $50+/night, since we have everything we could ever want at our hostel. We have nice rooms with real beds, breakfast in the morning for $1, a clean swimming pool, a restaurant/bar, several common areas and game rooms, and a friendly staff that speaks pretty good English.

That's another crazy thing about this place: most people speak decent or excellent English, and the currency of choice is the good old US dollar. Their currency is the riel, which runs about 3750:1 with USD at the currency exchange, but all stores use a 4000:1 rate. So this means you actually get a worse rate if you pay in riel. However, all change less than a dollar is returned in riel (so you often get a combination of both).

Yesterday (Monday), we got up early to catch a ride by tuk-tuk to Angkor, a semi-preserved archaeological site that has the distinction of being the largest pre-industrial city in the world. Since it has an area of over 400 square miles and contains over 1,000 temples, we only had time to see some of the more important/famous parts. I got some great shots, but doing so almost always involved climbing the temple stairs, which were steeper than any stairs I've ever seen before. Getting up wasn't so difficult as getting back down, but we all made it intact. Having them designed in this way makes the temples all the more impressive... and it's even more impressive that so much of it is still intact nearly 1000 years later.

Siem Reap is a very cool little city. There are plenty of shops, markets, and a pretty good nightlife scene. Most people are really friendly, too.

So this afternoon we're going to walk around the city some more before heading to the airport around 6pm to catch a flight to Bangkok. As was the case with Kuala Lumpur (and will probably be the case with everywhere we go), I wish we had more time to spend in Cambodia. But we have to keep moving...

Enjoy the photos. Connection speed is worse here than it was in Malaysia, so there's no hope of uploading my big stack of photos yet.



The main entrance to Angkor Wat, the main temple of Angkor.

Another temple about 5 minutes down the road.

A little Cambodian boy who called himself "spiderboy" and spoke some of the best English of anyone we've met in the past few months.

Matt demonstrating the steepness of a standard set of stairs. These weren't too bad, but the ones that ascended 30 or 40 feet were a different story.