Jungle Boogie

Sunday 5 October 2008

Phnom Penh to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)

So we get up early and catch a tuktuk to docks, as we've booked a high speed boat up the Tonle Sap river to Siem Reap - the town that basically exists to service the tourists for the Angkor Wat temple complex.

We board the boat. It's a bit cramped and though it's cool at first, as the outside temperature rises through the day it gets a bit hot and sticky inside. But luckily as it's a boat, you can sit outside and the weather was beautiful and as we were motoring along at a good rate, it was pretty cool (though it was a bit of a false economy as it exacerbated any potential sunburn). Also the riverside scenery was beautiful - jungle and marshland, and people in long, thin wooden boats fishing and rowing across the river. At one point I saw a small boat full of goats, its owner ferrying them across the river. And towards the end there were floating villages and wooden shacks on stilts hugging the shoreline.

We arrive in Siem Reap and check into the hotel - after the low-end hotel we had just stayed in, we decided to go for something more upmarket, and it paid off. It was a sweet place.

After settling in we drive to our first temple, a relatively small one on a hill, where we see over the whole surrounding area. There are elephants ferrying people up and down the hill. There are a fair few tourists though not too many, interestingly most of them were Asian, not Western. We watch the sunset.

After returning to the town we hit the G&Ts again. Then we go to one of the coolest places I have ever been. Bizarrely called Dead Fish Tower Restaurant, it's a huge place spread over many layers and platforms, with various stairs linking the place together, with a bunch of hand-operated dumb waiters, some diagonal in direction. We chat to a waiter who is, like all Cambodians we have met, very friendly, smiley, and with surprisingly good English, better than most Thais and Vietnamese that we've met. He even teaches us a few phrases in Cambodian. The place is amazing and I take a few pics and a video of the place to capture what it's like. There are even live crocodiles, that's how cool it is.

After that we go to a bar who's name is the most obvious pun for the area and a favourite of mine - Angkor What? By chance we meet bar manager, a large boisterous Indian, and chat to him about football. He ends up buying us shots, albeit of Sambuka, but you can't have everything, eh?