Cambodia – Temples, Wartorn Past, Beaches and Corruption

We have now spent 2 weeks in Cambodia.  First we went to Siem Reap where we experienced a local festival, the temples of Angkor, a floating village, a water buffalo cart ride, one of the many Khmer Rouge killing sites, fantastic local food (imagine Thai food but not spicy) and (after the parents left) the 50 cent beers on Pub Street.  We also went to a restaurant that was an NGO site for training local at-risk youths in the food industry so that they had marketable skills.  The food was great (we ate ants and maggots in addition to more “normal” things), the service was good and cute and we felt great about having contributed to a good cause.

Next we went to Battambang where we visited a circus performed by local kids trained in an arts school, took a Khmer cooking class at a tuk-tuk driver’s home taught by his wife, rode the bamboo railway, went to a temple on a hill, saw the killing cave (another Khmer Rouge site), saw 3 million bats leaving their cave for the night, and wandered the streets to find food.

From Battambang we took a bus to the capitol city, Phnom Penh.  We spent one night in Phnom Penh during which we dropped off our passports at a motorcycle shop to get Thai visas.  That was interesting, but we payed less than we would have at the embassy and didn’t have to go through all the paperwork.  With our passports on their way to visa land we headed off to the beach.

Sihanoukville!  Cambodia’s most important port and site of wonderful beaches.  We stayed in a hotel school’s teaching hotel where the staff was made up almost entirely of senior students who would be graduating soon.  This was a fun, cheap way to stay in a nice hotel for a few nights.  The most famous beach in the area is Serendipity Beach which is known for its party scene and tons of restaurants.  We headed there on our first evening to watch the sunset at a restaurant.  That worked well, but it didn’t really seem like place way we wanted to spend our time on the beach.  The next day we packed up a beach bag and headed to Otres Beach.  We walked along and found a nice looking restaurant to set up shop at.  We claimed two waterfront chairs and spent our day relaxing, eating pineapple (freshly chopped up), swimming, playing games and just enjoying.  The next 4 days were largely the same, with the exception of the day we went out to the islands for some snorkeling and a beach BBQ.

After our beach time we hopped on another bus back to Phnom Penh.  On the way out of town our bus was pulled over by the police, the driver simply hopped out stuffed a 5 dollar bill in the officer’s pocket, hopped back in and off we went.  This was our only direct brush with corruption here.  It prompted laughter on the bus as we all had nightmares of expired license plates and delays but watched a simple extortion scheme take a few seconds of our time.

The first thing we did after checking in to our hostel in Phnom Penh was to go to the motorcycle shop and reclaim our passports.  We then promptly handed them over to our hostel’s reception desk to get Vietnamese visas.  Yesterday we visited the biggest Khmer Rouge killing site, which had an excellent audio tour and left us in a rather somber mood.  So to lighten things up we went to the S-21 prison where people were tortured before being sent to the killing fields.  That didn’t help our mood, so we had a couple 50 cent beers and then went on a sunset cruise.  This morning we got our passports back and set off to visit the royal palace, which was pretty impressive.  On our way out of the palace we met another traveller, who joined us for our afternoon wanderings.  We had ice cream together, visited a temple which turned out to be the Cambodian center for Buddhism and reportedly houses one of the eyebrow hairs of the original Buddha, and toured the Cambodian National Museum.  It was fun hanging out with a new friend and we saw some cool stuff together.

Cambodia has been great, and we’re a bit sad to be leaving, but we’re sure Vietnam will be awesome too!