sbb travel blog

Over Easter weekend, Alicia and I decamped from Hong Kong and headed to Cambodia, where we visited Phnom Penh and then Siem Reap / Angkor Wat et al (there are many temples besides Angkor). Took lots of pictures (click here to see the album at Ofoto) and jotted down some thoughts as well...

First, some travel tips if you are going to visit Cambodia yourself. (skip the travel tips by clicking here)

The Lonely Planet Guide says that the best time to go is December or January, when humidity levels are low and there is little chance of rain. The rainy season lasts from May to October, and the temperature steadily increases from November until April (when we were there) to its peak of midday temperatures higher than 40 degrees Celsius. So December or January will also be cooler.

Go during the week if at all possible. There are lots and lots of tourists there on the weekend, and while it is still possible to see everything, it will be much quieter and much more enjoyable if you are there on a weekday. You could sandwich it in between a trip to Thailand and/or Vietnam, for example.

Bring lots of US Dollars!!! Everything is priced in dollars, everyone will take them, and there are no ATM's in the country AT ALL. You can exchange money but the exchange rates aren't so good, and you can take out a cash advance but you pay a 2% fee. So just bring alot of dollars and you'll be ok.

We had a great guide, and you can email him to book his services directly. His name is Kong Soeun, and his email address is kong-soeun@hotmail.com. Highly recommended! He speaks great English, is very knowledgeable about everything, and is overall a very nice guy.

Our friend Kit suggested the following itinerary:

1) What to do for a day in PP.

First get some Cambodian Culture:

National Museum and Silver Pagoda (they are right next to each other. Note they are closed from 11:30 to 2:00 so best to see these things first. They take about an hour total)

Then some Khmer Rouge History:

Killing fields (short drive out of the city)
Toul Sleng Museum (in town)

Then some Shopping:

Russian Market (THE place to buy Cambodian silks, silver, wooden carvings etc. Best shopping in Cambodia)
P'saa Tmei Market ("Central Market") only if you have extra time on your hands. NOT great place to buy things but interesting old building plus you see real Cambodian street life

Finish up with drinks and then dinner at the FCC (Foreign Correspondent's Club). An absolute must. Rated one of the top ten coolest places IN THE WORLD for a drink. Go at sunset and watch the Mekong River slide by in the fading light. Perfect ending to a great day.

Any hotel can arrange for a car and driver to take people around for the day. Costs around $25

2) What to do in Siem Riep

Wake up very early. Try to leave the hotel when it is still dark to that you get to the temples by true sunrise. Take long lunches back at the hotel with a swim or a nap even. Get back to the temples for the afternoon sun and then sunset. Early morning and late afternoon are the most beautiful times of day, the coolest temperatures, and best for photos.

The following itineraries are in order. Recommend A before B, and also recommend seeing temples in the order listed. If you arrive in the afternoon it is probably best to just go straight to Ankor Wat. If you arrive in the morning, go straight to Ta Phrom.

Afternoon Itinerary A

Angkor Wat for late afternoon and then Sunset

Afternoon Itinerary B

Prea Kahn
Bayon
Sunset at Phnom Bakheng (might be fun to hire an elephant to go up and down the hill)

Morning Itinerary A

Bayon for sunrise. Get there early and see the sun light up the faces one by one
Ta Phrom

Morning Itinerary B

Ankor Wat for sunrise
Banteay Srei (bit of a hike but worth it. Hit the road IMMEDIATELY after sunrise. Driver will probably charge extra)
Kbal Spean (short hike up into the woods to a remarkable waterfall. Check if accessible during rainy season)

There are lots of other temples which the guide will take you to. Guides are quite good.

For evenings, have one dinner at the fancy restaurant at the Grand Hotel, following the footsteps of Jackie O. Also recommend dinner at Ankor Village Hotel's dinner and dance pavilion. Great traditional Cambodian Dance.

The dancing is not every night, so check schedules.

We followed his itinerary pretty closely, although didn't go to the National Museum in PP due to lack of time. We stayed at Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh and the Grand Hotel D'Angkor in Siem Reap. These hotels are related and both fairly pricey. Kit recommended Angkor Village in Siem Reap, which is also quite nice and is much cheaper. Our travel agent said the Grand Hotel was one of the best hotels she had ever stayed at, which won us over. It is definitely an experience, but if you want to spend your money elsewhere I'm sure Angkor Village is very nice and I think around half the price (if you want to try a different five star experience, there is a new Sofitel Royal Angkor that looks very nice as well). Also, we went to the Cambodian dance thing at the Grand Hotel, and the dancers seemed pretty inexperienced- so even if you do stay at the Grand Hotel, go to Angkor Village for the dancing.

We followed the recommended itineraries for the temples very closely, and were definitely happy with what we saw and when. Our guide felt that we really should have gone to Angkor for sunrise the first morning, and it was pretty crowded when we were there, since it was a Saturday. It would have been nice to tour around the bas-reliefs and whatnot when it was quieter, which it might have been in the morning (it definitely was the next morning). So see what your guide thinks of the itinerary and adjust accordingly, you could, for instance, do Angkor sunrise on Saturday and Bayon on Sunday (if you are there on the weekend of course).

Phnom Penh

We arrived on Thursday night, and decided to go to dinner at Ponluk, a Cambodian restaurant listed in Lonely Planet as 'upscale', which means that it will cost more than $5/person. It actually ended up costing $25 for three large dishes, two beers, a glass of wine, and a bottle of water, but was well worth it- Alicia described the meal as the 'best we have had in Asia'. The food, not surprisingly, is a combination of Thai and Vietnamese, but with truly spectacular results. Frog's legs curry, pork spicy noodle salad, fish (something)...all excellent. The Japanese violinist playing Beatles requests behind us (part of the obligatory group of Japanese tourists) added to the experience.

Followed diner with drinks at the FCC, which has great views over the river. Our friend Kit, who lived here for three years, recommended drinks at the FCC at sunset, which I'm sure is amazing. While we enjoyed our drinks there, it was quite hot, even on the roof. Probably has something to do with the fact that April is by far the hottest time of the year for Cambodia, with temperatures reaching as high as 40C.

Next morning, met our driver at 8AM and headed off to the Silver Pagoda, which is located on the grounds of the National Palace. The National Palace overall is quite impressive, the buildings are similar in style to the Chinese Ming Tombs and Forbidden City, but with a few key differences. First of all, they are all painted yellow, with roofs of bright gold. The Chinese buildings have animals in the corner of the roofs, with the number of animals signifying the importance of the building. The Cambodian buildings have what appear to be stylized animals on the corner of the buildings, possibly antelopes, and instead of multiple animals, they have multiple heads/trunks/whatever. The ceiling and wall murals throughout the Palace are also amazing, very detailed images of mythical figures dancing and other scenes. Apparently the Khmer Rouge destroyed 60% of the Palace. One can only imagine what it looked like before.

After the National Palace, we went straight to S21, a former high school that was used as a prison by Pol Pot and is now a museum. We hired a guide who showed us around. The first stop on the tour is the first floor rooms in the prison that were cells for prisoners. A week before the Vietnamese made it to PP in 1979?, almost everyone there was killed. There are pictures on the walls of the bodies where they were found, and you can see the bloodstains on the walls and ceiling from when they were murdered.

At this point, a cute little three year old girl joined us. She was smiling and wearing barrettes that said 'love'. She stayed with us the rest of the tour, while the guide pointed out the former gymnastics area that Pol Pot converted into a torture device- they would tie the prisoners arms behind their back and then pull them up in the air. If they thought the prisoner was strong they would then drop them on the ground, and then lift them up again. Sometimes they would fill a big vat with feces from the prison cell boxes, and lower the prisoner's head into the vat.

Next stop were rooms where the KR had built brick cells so that they could fit a bunch of prisoners in the room. Prisoners were given no food and water was thrown on the floor for them to lick up. Here the guide told us about her experience during the Khmer Rouge, and showed us the scar on her leg where she had been hit with a bamboo stick, for refusing to work in a field filled with decomposing bodies. Her leg was seriously injured at the time, so she couldn't do any work, therefore, she said 'Pol Pot' wouldn't let her eat, and she had to sneak off into the woods to keep from starving to death.

The next few rooms were filled with photos of prisoners taken before they were killed, with numbers around their necks. Especially horrifying were the rows of pictures of young boys, maybe 6-10 years old, and then even worse the pictures of babies and toddlers. All photographed and then killed by the Khmer Rouge, generally for 'collaboration' with the CIA.

The final rooms contained some of the other equipment used to torture the prisoners, a wooden 'bed' where they would time them down to beat them, a water-filled chamber where they would suffocate the prisoners.

And then we were done. The little girl ran off to play with some friends, we paid the guide and left. As we left the workers fired invisible machine guns at us. A joke, of course.

Next, we went to the Russian market, although we weren't really in the mood to shop (didn't end up buying anything), and then to the airport for our flight to Siem Riep.

Siem Reap / Angkor Wat

The photos speak better than words for Angkor Wat- the temple complexes are incredible. We woke up _extremely_ early in the morning (4:30AM the first morning, 5AM the second) and spent about 4-5 hours touring around, then returned to the hotel until around 3:30, at which point we headed back out and toured again until sunset at around 6:30 or so. We were definitely happy with the amount of stuff that we saw, and our bodies needed the break after waking up so early. On Saturday, we also went to Les Chantiers Ecoles, a school that teaches wood and stone carving techniques to children from impoverished backgrounds, including those maimed by land mines. When the students finish the program, they return to their province in Cambodia where they can then open a factory and train others. Bought a number of things here, including a long wooden carving of Apsaras copied from an Angkor Wat bas-relief.

Sunday we drove out to Bantay Srei and Kobal Spein, as Kit recommended, and were very glad we did, both were extremely interesting. The road onwards from Bantay Srei is a dirt road running through a string of rural villages. As it was Sunday and the no-one was in school, we had groups of children directing us how to get the car over/around large holes in the road. Not very helpful, but very cute. Alicia was going to take some pictures on the way back, but the driver went a different way, so as not to destroy the undercarriage of the car. Oh well.

Book recommendations:

Lonely Planet Guide to Cambodia (for travelers only of course)
Ramayana, the Buck translation - one of two bible-like books of the Hindu religion. Like reading 400 pages of Greek myths. Many of the bas-reliefs depict scenes from Ramayana.
Angkor Revisited by Jaco Poncar
Ramayana in the Arts of Asia by Garrett Kim
Angkor: Cities and Temples by Jacques and Freeman
Cambodia, The Years of Turmoil

posted by Stephen Bronstein 10:37 PM link