a wildflower in the land of smiles: Cambodia: Angkor WHAAAT

Nearly two months later and I’m finally blogging about Cambodia!

One thing I have learned about traveling.. It is sometimes best not to have a strict plan, because they often change… When I started traveling, my original plan was to travel with the girls then head back to Khon Kaen for a day or two after Chiang Mai to repack to have a solo traveling adventure for a week in Bali. While in Chiang Mai, Alysha expressed great interest in traveling to Bali with me. Long story short, the girls easily talked me into going to Cambodia with them and changing my flight so Alysha could stay longer in Asia (she extended her flight date home to the states) and go to Bali with me! Funny thing was, I had only packed for Laos and Chiang Mai, basically a weeks worth of clothes and now needed to make it all last for another month of traveling! I always knew that I am an over packer but this really made it a reality! I made it work with NO problems.. my “week” packing is really a “month” packing. I’m hoping to be a better packer in the future!

The girls and I took an overnight bus from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then another bus to the Cambodia/Thailand border. We had been warned by other travelers to watch out for scams in Cambodia and we were instantly ripped off at the border. From the bus station on the Thailand side, we needed to take a tuk-tuk to the border to walk across but instead it took us to a visa station which over charged us for our Cambodia visa. We walked across the border in the scorching heat and were directed to a “tourist bus” to take us to a bus station to get to Siam Reap, a city about three hours from the border. Another scam.. these tourist buses over-charge westerners for bus tickets and we were warned of this in the South East Asia Lonely Planet but we didn’t have another option.. The four of us ended up splitting a cab to take us to Siam Reap.

We spent the next three days in Siam Reap, Cambodia’s most popular tourist destination and gate way to Angkor Wat, the worlds most religious monument and one of the wonders of the world! Angkor Wat is surrounded by numerous temples and we spent our first two days exploring them. We broke our days into halves because of the heat so the first day we went out in the morning, and the second in the afternoon. We hired a tuk tuk for about 15 dollars a day and it took us to different temples including the temple “Tomb Raider” was filmed at. My very favorite was the Bayon, a Khmer temple decorated with 216 gigantic faces. When we weren’t running around temples, we were eating delicious food, drinking fruit smoothies, exploring the night markets, and getting pedicures and massages for less than five dollars!

We woke up at 5 am on our last day in Siam Reap to go see Angkor Wat at sunrise. At orientation in Bangkok six months before, Jenna and I went to the Grand Palace where they had a mini model of Angkor Wat. When we saw it, we took a picture in front of it and decided that we would make it there while we were in Asia, and today we had! Angkor Wat is Cambodia’s pride and joy and has become their national symbol, appearing on their national flag as well as having Angkor beer. It was built thousands of years ago in the Khmer Empire and has Buddhist and Hindu influences. We explored the worlds greatest religious site for an hour or two, then headed back to our guesthouse to get ready for our bus ride that afternoon. Even though it was too cloudy to see an actual sunrise, Angkor Wat was AMAZING!

Around 12 30, a janky little blue van that looked like it was about to break down pulled up in the pouring rain to take us to the bus station. We hopped in, it reeked of mold and was a bumpy ride, picking up a few Cambodian people on the way. We arrived at the bus “station” which was more of a dirt lot where the bus pulled up. Five hours later, we arrived in Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh is the capital and largest city of Cambodia. Phnom Penh has been the national capital since the French colonized Cambodia and has grown to become the nation’s center of economic and industrial activities, as well as the center of security, politics, economics, cultural heritage, and diplomacy of Cambodia. Phnom Penh has more to offer travelers than a quick, depressing swing to the Killing Fields.. I didn’t know much about the genocide in the 1970s before coming to Cambodia, but after visiting the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, the actual torture prison where thousands of people lost their lives, I learned more about it. We encountered a huge memorial site filled with thousands of human skulls and it was extremely surreal to realize that this genocide occurred only 30 years ago. (For those interested in learning more about it, google).

We stayed in Phnom Pehn for three days and visited the Russian Market which has good souvenir shopping, ate tasty food, got caught in a huge rain storm while at dinner (it caused numerous of the streets to flood in about an hour and we couldn’t walk through it, we took a tuk tuk which took us around town because the streets were so flooded!), attempted to visit the royal palace THREE times and turned away each time due to strange hours and lack of appropriate attire (needed to have our shoulders covered but can’t wear a shawl, close toed shoes but nice ones), and had Easter linner (lunch/dinner.. with Sangria! The best meal I had in Cambodia!) at an AMAZING Spanish restaurant on the Mekong River.

After Phnom Pehn, we took an overnight bus back to Bangkok. We were slightly nervous as we approached the border because Cambodia and Thailand are currently in disagreement. They aren’t exactly one another’s biggest fans and are in fighting over a temple near the border. It made headline news the day we left Phnom Pehn and a few people had been killed in the battle. Luckily, this wasn’t at the border that we were crossing and the bus ride went very smoothly.. other than they turned on the lights and music at 4am which woke us up.

All in all, Cambodia was a pleasant experience, even with the scorching heat! Cambodia uses the US dollar so it made the conversion extremely easy for us. Everything was very inexpensive and we could easily find lunch or dinner for three dollars a day. However, it was still obvious that the people of Cambodia have been to hell and back and they rely a lot on tourism as a major source of income. Many of the people in Cambodia are uneducated and it broke my heart to have small children grab my arm and ask for money. As westerners, we were often approached and asked to buy sunglasses, books, and were countered with a “Please, miss?” when we declined. I had a little bit of a hard time in Cambodia because I have never seen families in such a struggle and I was heartbroken when feeling like I couldn’t help them.

We made it back to Bangkok and Kianna, Alysha, and I stayed the night on Khao San Rd before our flights the next day. Jenna went back to her town for a few days before her parents arrived to visit, Kianna had a flight to the US the next morning, and Alysha and I were flying to Bali at 6am! Sadly, this marked the end of our adventure together, but I had such an AMAZING time with these girls! I’m so lucky I was able to explore three different countries with them, we all got along so well and it'll be a trip I’ll never forget.

Next up… BALI!