Cambodia…checking in

Arrived in Siem Reap in one piece. Checked into hotel. Killed the other 12 residents who’d been living in the room before I got there. Promptly bought some Raid mosquito spray to be sure their friends weren’t coming back.
Started taking the doxycycline for malaria. Between that and the Raid lingering in the room I had the craziest dreams! Ha ha.
Spent the next there days exploring the temples of Angkor Wat. The temple area begins about six miles from town. The options are bike, tuk tuk or taxi, in order of expense and general desirability for a proper visit.
Miked it for the first two days. The bike weighed in at about 40 lbs. Like a tank, but it had shocks and worked well enough.
The temples are incredible. The area is huge. It’s possible to bike through back woods areas and explore temples off the beaten track. It’s too much for me to describe, so I will post pictures. Of note: some of the temples have steps leading to upper levels that are quite climbable. They’re steep. Really steep. The ratio, best I could judge using my hands, was 3 to 1. IOW, each step was there times taller than deep. Normal steps are roughly 1 to 1. These were so steep that most people, including me, had trouble looking down them from the top of say 30 of them. At that height, 3 was roughly 15 feet up but only a horizontal distance of 5 feet from the last step. We all crawled up and down these…very carefully.
On way home, met a cool Brit and asked him to snap a couple pictures with my camera of me riding next to some of the local kids. Riding along, talking to the kids, I heard the sick sound that comes from metal crunching together at speed. He had run head-on into a scooter. The girl was alone and riding a new scooter. He flipped over the bars and never dropped my camera. I lifted the scooter off her pinned leg and there we were, in a Cambodian road-show. The girl was ok, the Brit was ok, but nothing was going to stop the crowd from coming. We had 50 people in as many seconds.
I biked home and later ran into the Brit. Turns out, the police wanted him to pay $800, a number they apparently pulled from the air. It was also up for negotiation. Huh? So they kept his passport while he made a decision as to what to pay them. Really nice guy and I wish him the best with this.
The next day, more biking. Visited the temple used in the movie Tomb Raider. Of course, they were selling counterfeit Tomb Raider DVDs right inside the temple. There’s got to be something wrong with that.
Last day was spent on a tuk tuk (here, a tuk tuk is a scooter with a trailer with seating for two people.) went with Ryan from the first day’s taxi ride. We took it 1 1/2 hours north to a waterfall and underwater carvings. The waterfall fell into a nearly-dry pool but it was none the less spectacularly refreshing to stand under. The hike was 45 mins one way. The Lonely Planet described this trip as “frankly not worth it”, but I completely disagree.
The town of Siem Reap is exactly what one would expect of an impoverished tourist center; beggars and children selling everything imaginable are omnipresent. But, the Cambodians are different. I found them to be brilliant. Most of the children (roughly 6-10 yrs old) working the monuments could speak a little of up to six languages! I had a little not rattle off the numbers one to ten in English, Spanish, German, French then a couple more I didn’t know. It wasn’t unusual to see Cambodians acting as tour guides speaking English, French or German. While that’s not particularly unusual, I got the feeling that a fairly large population was capable of doing this, and from the countries I’ve been to, that’s was quite remarkable to me.

On a bus now. Going to Pnom
Pen (sp?), the capital. I’m sitting 3 feet from the only speaker on this stinky bus. It’s blasting the audio from the Cambodian comedy show that’s playing at the front of the bus. This is entertainment and presumably makes the trip go by faster. So, while I search for earplugs, everyone’s laughing and enjoying the show. I always get the screaming baby on flights and seem to now also attract the brain-meltingly loud speaker on bus trips. As I pray for a massive electrical disturbance that knocks out the DVD system, the guy two seats in front of me sounds like he’s about to bark himself to death. I’m actually legitamately concerned.
But the road is paved, the bus has A/C and after 30 minutes I found the button to recline my seat back from its 90 degree angle.

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