Cook's tour of Cambodia

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Five days is a scandolously short time to attempt to visit Cambodia, but it's all the time that Dan and I had available, so we tried to pack as much as we could into a little taster of the 'bodge.

We started in Phnom Penh.  We started out pretty early on Saturday morning and didn't head back to our hotel room until we were well and truly touristed out.  We began the morning with a very sobering trip to Tuol Sleng museum.  The converted school where the khmer rouge tortured and killed alleged enemies has been preserved as a museum that seems to be a mandatory part of every tourist's Phnom Penh itinerary.  It's a very strange juxtaposition to have tuk-tuk drivers and tourists haggling over prices just outside a building with such a grim history (tuk-tuk drivers will be quick to offer you a special discount price if you want to see the killing fields after Tuol Sleng...).  The stories and the photos of victims with looks of wide-eyed terror are extremely confronting.  We decided to save the trip to the killing field until another day.

For a city that was turned into a ghost-town not so long ago by the Khmer Rouge's policy of abandoning cities to focus on the agrarian revolution, modern-day Phnom Penh is quite a bustling little city.  We enjoyed wandering through the streets and checking out the markets.  We spent the afternoon seeing the Royal Palace, walking along the river and visiting a temple.  We then headed to the FCC for happy hour drinks watching the sun set over the river.

On Sunday, it was time to high-tail it up to Siem Reap.  In Siem Reap, we befriended a tuk-tuk driver who became our personal chauffeur for our visit - it seems to be pretty standard practice for visitors to Siem Reap to 'adopt' a tuk-tuk driver.  The small town of Siem Reap has been completely redeveloped to meet the every need of the hoards of foreign tourists who come to see Angkor Wat- there's a wide selection of fancy cafes, bars and restaurants that charge more for a cup of coffee than most locals earn in week (although, this really says more about the local wages than the price of coffee).  The contrast between the opulence of the tourist restaurants, hotels, etc and the lives of local street children and moto drivers is really quite stark.

There are plenty of latte-sipping tourists busing their way around the temples of Angkor Wat, but the number of tourists still can't diminish the experience of seeing such incredibly old, beautiful temples. After a very full day of clambering up and down temple ruins and taking photos from every possible angle, we returned very hot and dusty to our guest house (where auntie greeted us with cold towels and iced water).  The temples are amazing and there are so many of them that many people spend 4 or 5 days sightseeing, but time had run out for us, so we headed back to our respective homes.