Temples and Dengue Fever
Trip Start
Jun 22, 2009
1
34
Trip End
Sep 22, 2009
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Friday, September 11, 2009
We took the 5.55am train from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet - a six hour journey in a third class carriage, quite a rickety train, and very busy, but a fun way to travel (apart from when we first boarded and a mad woman was attacking another passenger - Eric tried to intervene and stopped the crazy lady from snatching another woman's bag...too much drama for such an early start!). We were also joined by a sweet Japanese girl Yoshi, who was also traveling to Cambodia, and later with an American woman called Megan who shared our taxi to Siem Reap.
I slept most of the way until we reached Aranyaprathet and we took a Tuk Tuk to the border town Poipet. Didn't take too long to cross and sort our Cambodian Visas, then we took a share Taxi to Siem Reap, another 3 hours drive (we were lucky as the new road between Poipet and Siem Reap had just been completed - by all accounts the drive used to be a nightmare).
The difference between Cambodia and Thailand was very stark - Cambodia, after it's recent troubled past, is a much poorer country, and it is really sad to see the amount of people (and children) begging in the streets, or trying to sell you whatever they can.
We visited the temples of Ankor the next day, and seeing sunrise at Ankor Wat was an amazing experience (albeit very crowded with tourists!). I really loved the temples of Bayon, with the amazing carved heads, and Tha Prohm (made famous in Tomb Raider) with it's ruinous temples gradually being taken over by the huge roots of the surrounding jungle.
By the end of my first day in Siem Reap I was starting to seriously feel ill - aching, feverish, exhausted, feeling nauseous if I tried to eat. I was so tired I didn't make it to the temples for the second day, and we decided to move on to the capital Phonm Pehn, so I could seek some medical advice. I was worried it might be malaria - or something worse (I'd swallowed some river water during my rafting trip and thought it might have given me something nasty!).
Another friend from my CELTA, Rusty, was living in the capital and looking for teaching work, so we all met up with him and he helped me track down a clinic to get some tests. The clinic took blood tests and confirmed I had contracted Dengue Fever. Luckily I had one of the milder strains, but it was still pretty horrible. Within a few days the dengue rash came out and I was covered in itchy red blotches. My hands and feet swelled up and itched like mad - I looked like I was a puffy marshmallow!
I'd originally started to make plans to visit the beach area in Cambodia, Sihanoukville, and then travel to Ko Chang in Thailand, but it was pretty obvious I wasn't going to be well enough, so I ended up spending longer in Phonm Pehn, and then flying back to Bangkok for a few days before my flight home.
Didn't manage to see as much of Phonm Pehn as I would have liked. Made it to the Tuol Sleng Prison genocide museum - a school that was converted to a torture prison during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. A very hard place to experience - horrific, such unimaginable cruelty and senseless killing. Especially horrific to realise it all happened during our lifetime. Our guide at the museum had lost her father and siblings during the oppression. She was one of the lucky few who managed to escape with her mother to Vietnam. We didn't make it to the killing fields - the museum was enough for one day we couldn't face more misery. Seeing the legacy of the Pol Pot era explained a great deal about why the country was still struggling to recover.
