The World is My Oyster

This post is the second part of my second day at Siem Reap. See first part here, first day here. Food experience first day here.

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Angkor Thom is one of the largest Khmer cities ever built. The total area of 900 hectares is now mostly forest but originally a considerable city.Gate to the city. We went by tuktuk because there’s no way you could go around on foot. It’s practically a city. There are a number of individual temples inside.I told you you’re going to see the gods (or asuras/demons? I really can’t tell the difference.) holding naga again. They’re everywhere.

Bayon

We went straight to Bayon, which is right in the middle of Angkor Thom. Bayon is one of the most famous temple among Angkor temples. It’s one of my favorites too. It’s supported by Japan and UNESCO for preservation of the world cultural heritage.

You would see all around Siem Reap (or Cambodia) the paintings of Bayon. Especially the face tower. I kept wondering whose face it was. It’s probably the face of their King or something.

“The temple is extremely complex both in terms of its structure and meaning. It uses, uniquely, a mass of face-towers to create a stone mountain of ascending peaks. There is some dispute about the number of towers. There were originally 49 towers even though Paul Mus thought there should be 54. Today only 37 are standing. Most are carved with four faces on each cardinal point but sometimes there are only there or even just two. The central tower has many more. Readers are invited to write in when they counted them all. Whatever the final number the overall effect is quite overwhelming.”
~ excerpt from the guide book, Ancient Angkor

Had lunch before we continued (separate post).

Baphuon

Still in Angkor Thom area, next temple was Baphuon. It’s restored in collaboration with French.

Baphuon’s signature is the long high causeway to the main building, with pond on each side…

… and the rocks. Crazy number of loose rocks scattered around the yard. Apparently the condition of the temple was so bad that they had to lay out all the loose rocks and need to put them back like 3D puzzle! All rock was numbered/marked to be put back into a complete temple. Walau, the job must suck real bad. It took them (and I assume is still going) years to figure out which goes to where.

More rocks…

We’ve actually seen something similar at other temples, including Bayon, but Baphuon had significantly more numbers of loose rocks.

View from the top. Beyond this was a lot of restoration work going on. They also put some new rocks in, and I thought they must have given up trying to find the right rock to fill certain slots, might as well make a new one =P

Elephant Terrace

Next one was Elephant Terrace, which was the foundation for royal reception pavilions. The carving of elephants along its walls give it its modern name. Somehow I always imagine elephants actually walking on the terrace a long time ago. Of course this is not true.

We were in the middle of the terrace when it suddenly rained pretty hard and we couldn’t find our tuktuk. We took cover under some tree, but it got too heavy. So when it slowed down a bit, we quickly ran to the nearby eating stalls…

… and had a coconut ;).

Coconuts were everywhere in Siem Reap and dirt cheap. One coconut was 2000 Riel (50c). They would always try to sell you more though. So if you ask, instead of saying 1 for 50c, they would say 2 for one dollar (one dollar again! It’s the magic word. Everything also one dollar.) But you can insist that you only want to buy 1 for 2000 Riel, they’d give up in exactly 2 seconds. Somehow they always had the coconut opened only small enough for a straw. So you can’t take the meat out. I suspect they wanted to eat the meat themselves or use it to cook something else.

A painter busy painting Angkor Wat just in front of us. My mind wondered if I were to live there, painting everyday, open-air, sometimes in the middle of the rain. Maybe sell some small paintings for bread and butter (or rice and vegie ;), while working seriously on the big one. One day someone who can really appreciate my hard work would buy it with a good price. Then I could live comfortably for a while working on another big painting. Would I just be happy?

Well, enough daydreaming. We went back to the Terrace when the rain stopped for a bit.

There are a lot of elephants carving on the side of the terrace. That’s where it got its name from.

The five-headed horse! We saw it on the guide book, saying that it’s somewhere on the hidden wall. And we accidentally found it!

Phimeanakas

Our tuktuk driver was so nice, he had 2 raincoats for us. So we could continue exploring even though it drizzled.

By this time we got pretty tired though. Because of the heat in the morning and afternoon, then the rain. So when I saw another steep steps with ‘Climb at your own risk’ sign again with deep canal just at the foot of the stairs, I thought naahh.. I’ll pass the climbing this time.

We went around a bit more since the temple had a big garden and pond and all, but the rain made everything uncomfortable. It was really hot and humid under the raincoat too. So we were sweating like monkeys with raincoats.

By this time I started to get really worry about my camera. First the battery almost died. Second I ran out of memory card, and I didn’t bring the cable to transfer the pictures. Siem Reap was a very small town, which we assumed of course, technologically behind. So we were just praying that we could find either a place that sold SONY memory card, or place that had SONY memory card reader (Note that my camera is SONY, so the memory card is not the standard one. It’s SONY memory card.) Well at the end we found a big photo shop that had both new SONY memory card and SONY memory card reader. I decided to just transfer the pictures and burnt them to a CD. Cost $5, $2 for the CD, $3 for the transfer. I just remember thereafter that I had my 2GB thumbdrive with me and I could just transfer the pictures to it.

Thommanon

This “mini” temple was neat and compact. And when we were there there was almost nobody around, because it was pretty late and after rain. So we managed to take quite a few good pictures.

It’s almost like a mini Angkor Wat, with its not so high steps and low ceilings.

Complete with library. We started to recognize library building. It’s always separated from the main building, and has certain squarish shape to it. This mini library though, was so small and dark inside that I wondered how the people in the old time actually used the place as library. I mean they didn’t have any electricity before, right? Do you really wanna bring fire to a room full of papers?

A pretty well reserved lady carving. Either that or they remade restored it.

Chau Say Tevoda

Our last temple for the day was this very small temple that was obviously still under heavy restoration, in collaboration with China.

There was a hut next to the temple with all the pictures and stories of restoration (the same thing with the temple with thousands of rocks lying around in its yard). There was also a big guestbook where people can sign and write crap. I wrote something too. In case you went there next time, look for our name ;)

If you notice, we’ve changed clothes to the Cambodian shirts we just bought because the rain wet ours. My shirt has Khmer characters at the front side and back.

Then we just called it a day. We were worried the photo shops we were looking for closed early (at the end I got to transfer my pictures, so it was all good). We went back to the hostel after that, setting up appointment with our tuktuk driver for 5am in the morning the next day to catch the sunrise. Took shower, went out to get dinner (separate post), and slept. Even longer days ahead.

This post is part of my Siem Reap series. See day 1 here. Eaters go here.

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On second day, we departed from the hostel around 8:30am with our lovely tuktuk driver, to the majestic Angkor Wat, the biggest temple of them all. It’s just in front of Ta Promh Kei that we went the day before.Now it’s very difficult to describe how big this place is. I often felt that my camera was not big enough to capture everything (not as in the actual size of the camera, but… oh you know what I mean). So just follow me bit by bit and hopefully we can show some parts of it ;)So here we start. YAY! We’re at the front gate.

The building you see behind me is not the temple. It’s the gate.

Still gate.

Buddha inside gate building. Angkor temples are fusion between Hindu and Buddhism.

Outside of the gate we found another long terrace. At one side we found these people with costumes. You can take pictures with them for a few dollars.

Walk a little bit more and you’d find this library. O well, what used to be.

Feel like I was in Greece. Not that I’ve been there before..

Some parts of the building would look obviously new (like that pillar behind me). They are restoring a lot of bits and pieces. Almost all the temples were destroyed during war. Apparently they were all in pretty messed up conditions when the outside world found out about this historic place. Countries from all over the world give hands to help Cambodia restore of what little they have left. Each of the smaller temples were ‘adopted’ by different country, from Japan, French, Africa, China, India, and more.

One of the best view of the inner temple that I can get. The ones that don’t have hundreds of people blocking my camera.

HERE is the main building! Finally!

We’ve walked so far to go in… That tiny building is the gate I showed you earlier.

Going in, we found a lot of hallways like this. Very very long hallways.

My favorite spot. Giant cloister.

I had to be in the picture to show you how BIG it is! Still the picture can’t do it justice. It’s huge!

Rendy is crazy about Buddha. He’s attracted to it like mouse to cheese, like bee to flower, like magnet to refrigerator. He has to take pictures with all the Buddha he sees XD

Have I told you how STEEP the steps were? They’re not only steep, they’re ridiculously narrow. You have to step like a crab (on your side) to fit your feet. I wonder how all the monks that time climb up and down the steps. Crawling up and down doesn’t seem cool at all. Did they just have very short feet and very long legs?

After I came back to Singapore, Hailey told me that someone fell from the steep steps and died. I wasn’t surprised. Seriously, someone must have died because of those steps. The husband then donated some money for them to make safer steps. So sometimes wooden steps were there at what I assumed the more dangerous spots. Oh by the way, I really don’t think Angkor is a good place to visit with your kids. The best spots are hard (to the point of dangerous) to get to. Then after you get there, there’s no safety bar or whatever. So you can be very high up without anything to keep you from falling down deep deep below..

Like this high up..

Or this..

It’s all really gorgeous. Amazing. Awesome. Jaw-dropping. I’m running of words to describe ;)

One of the most famous bas-relief, The Churning of the Sea of Milk, telling story about the gods and asuras (demons) pulling alternately on the body of the giant naga, which is coiled around Mount Mandara. They rotate the mountain for 1000 years to produce amrita, the elixir of immortality (I have a friend names Amrita by the way. Elixir of immortality, what a cool name!) They’re supposed to share it half and half, but of course, as demons they don’t play it fair and steal the stuff. Remember these gods and demons pulling a naga, because you’d see it again and again everywhere you go around Angkor. No idea why it got so popular among all stories.

Almost all the carvings depict figure of women. I think Rendy realized this first. He felt discriminated as a man LOL. I think I read somewhere that a long time ago the Kings in Cambodia had women as soldiers and warriors, and there was no (or few) men in the palace. Men were proven to be the ones who betrayed. Women were loyal. In their entire history, there was no woman betrayed the King.

This was the back gate. We walked there and there was nothing much. I bought a guide book and a bunch of postcards for $7. Here we learned that Siem Reap people had a completely different marketing technique than any other places I’ve ever visited. They would shout ‘one dollar! one dollar!’ for anything. And when you actually approach them, thinking that it’s really $1, it’s not. For my book the lady there shouted $2, and after I browsed through deciding to buy, she said “Nooo that’s not $2. This is $2 (suddenly had another much uglier book coming out from her basket).”

We got sort of annoyed after a while with people shouting $1 for the same book. So just for fun, one time we pretended to snatch the book right away when the guy shouted $1. Then he sheepishly smiled, saying “Free to look! One dollar! Free to look!” (As if he could charge us for looking *roll eyes*) Notice that the guy still said ‘one dollar’, like it’s some kind of magical word. We humored him, “Really? One dollar? We take okay! One dollar!” At the end he said, “Noo.. 1000 baht..” all the while smiling sheepishly (Baht is Thai money, sometimes they use this. 1000 baht=~$20-$30) O well, you played us we played you lor. We all were grinning all the way through. Can’t really blame people for trying to make a living =P

Angkor Wat from the back gate.

We tracked back to the front gate after that, but not by climbing up the main building again. We took the pathway on the side of the building. There was a separate small building for the toilet on one of the sides. The toilets were all surprisingly clean. But they were also ridiculously dark. Looked like they had light bulbs, but there was no electricity *_*. Couldn’t turn on the lights, I had to do all business in the pitch-dark. It’s really possible that the electricity had not gone in yet. Siem Reap is currently building like crazy, you could see new buildings and constructions everywhere.

The side of building. The toilet was behind those trees.

So that’s that for Angkor Wat. The guide book suggests several hours to spend here. We spent around 2 hours.

ps: I will try to conclude all the other temples in one post for the next one.

I compiled my “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list, based on the published book of that title. Doesn’t mean I’ll go around immediately eager to finish off the books in the list. Some of them are classics that I’m kinda reluctant to start (as they’re often sadly labeled as booring.. No offense, they’re still all high in value. But I just find them hard to grasp.) In any way, this list is good for books that otherwise I wouldn’t have heard of. It also re-highlights some books that I know everybody has read and I know I have to read too at some point of my life but have not. I’m sure there are lots and lots of gems here. So I’ll keep this page (and my to-read list) updated.

So far I’ve read 7-8 of them out of 1001 *grin*. I had about 10 of them on my to-read list before I found this 1001 Books list, added a few more after that. I’d probably random pick some books from the 1900s or 2000s once in a while to add to my list. The older ones scare me off easily.

How about you?

This post is about my food experience on our first day at Siem Reap. For full coverage of the trip, refer to my previous post titled Siem Reap Day 1.

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One of the reasons I’m traveling is to EAT local food muahahaaa! So it’s only fair for me to have separate post for food. It shows respect ;D

Golden Temple Villa

As told on my story for the first day at Siem Reap, we arrived at the hostel in the afternoon. Too hungry to wander around outside, we decided to try the hostel’s restaurant.

Turned out the dishes would be the best I had during my entire stay in Siem Reap.

This set for 2 people cost $5.
Starting from far left clockwise: amok fish, pork, then beef in Khmer sauce, and of course, white rice.

The Amok Fish was HEAVENLY! Amok Fish is one of the most popular Khmer dishes. Amok is actually the style of cooking. So you can choose fish, or other meat or seafood. It’s like Thai curry, but more sweet than spicy. The curry is mixed with beaten eggs. Yuuumm.. *drooling* I tried another Amok fish another time after that, but it’s not as good as the one at my hostel.

In fact, the pork and beef dishes were very good as well, and hardly defeated by any other dishes we took during our entire stay. Here we started to learn that Khmer food consist of HEAPS of VEGGIES and HERBS. But veggies had never tasted that good. They were great!

I have a hobby to taste after food and try to guess what’s in it. And in my opinion I do pretty good :). But I couldn’t guess what was in the dishes even after numerous attempts. A lot of foreign herbs for sure. Khmer dishes in general are somehow close to Vietnamese dishes, with their strong herbs and leaves, and Thai, but not as spicy.

Golden Temple Villa
Steng Thmei, Svaydongkum
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Ph: +855 12 943459
www.goldentemplevilla.com

Snacks

Bought these snacks when we were looking for soap around the town. Prawn and spicy beef cracker. Then 3 instant noodles. Which I brought back to Singapore and have not cooked until now.

Khmer House

At night we were looking for Khmer Kitchen as recommended by Travelfish, but it was closed! We were too late, it was past 10pm. So we went for its neighbor, Khmer House.

A brief look at the menu showed Khmer House was generally more expensive than Khmer Kitchen. Although the place is nicer.

Had curry and beef mushrooms. Liked the curry, it’s like Thai curry. But the mushroom beef was just so-so, almost like Chinese dish. By this time we learned that all the dishes in Siem Reap came in good (read: big) portion.

All these with 2 rice and the banana shake cost around $7. Dishes at Khmer House cost around $3-$4 each. Drink was around $1-$1.5 each.

Not long after, we had a little fight. Ggggrr Ruf Ruf!

UNHAPPY.

Lucky this flower-selling kid came to the rescue! A stem of rose for $1 ;)
(Whatever happened to him with all those bandages?)

And that ended our culinary adventure for day 1.

Khmer Kitchen
The Passage, behind Bar St
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Ph: (063) 964 154. Daily: 10:00-22:00.

~ All prices in USD.

On a side note, there’s a very loud noise coming somewhere around my building, someone speaking with extremely loud speaker. Saying something like “starbucks” a million times, then moved on to “botak” another million times, and move on to another meaningless word. (Obviously he’s speaking in some weird Chinese dialect). I hate it so much I imagine going down and ripping this guy’s heart out with my bare hands. And his eyeballs. He’s lucky he sounds far from my building (I’m SURE HIS VOICE IS GOING AROUND KILOMETERS WIDE!), so I don’t bother to come down myself. I called Eunos Neighbourhood Police Post (Tel: 1800 – 443 9999) and we’ll see if the Singapore police actually do their job. This is my first time ever to call the police because of loud noise, mind you. SO YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW LOUD HE IS. GAH!

Note: I used to write about books I read on my book site, but then I’m getting uncomfortable with a few functions (or lack thereof), and I’m so busy, or lazy, whatever you wanna call it, to fix it. So I’m trying this new format of writing about them on this blog. I’m still not sure whether it’s best. We’ll see.

Got this from: Joakim (borrowed)
Rating: 3 out of 5

I can’t get enough of Murakami. I read Norwegian Wood, this, and now continuing with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Interesting uncommon topic. About lesbian love. I told that to Joakim, he bought it soon after, finished it in one weekend, then lent it to me :).

Well, that’s about it really. Like Norwegian Wood, you can’t really summarize what’s in the book without giving too much away. In a few words, Norwegian Wood is about someone who loves a girl who has mental illness. Sputnik Sweetheart is about unreachable lesbian love, and the guy who loves this girl. Simple, yet complicated.

I don’t think this book is his best. It’s getting quite draggy at the end and going nowhere. Still, for me it was engaging in many ways. I’m a total sucker for Murakami now, so I’m biased. *rabbit-hopping happily to his next book*

Memorable Quotes

“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection” ~ pg 4

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” ~ pg 5

“What’s nurtured slowly grows well.” ~ pg 16

“The world’s crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I’m just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that’ll never come true.” ~ pg 55

“When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn’t it?” ~ pg 86

I came back! After wandering for more than 2 weeks around Singapore, KL, and Siem Reap. Got literally tons of pictures. Don’t know if I will ever get around to manage them all on this blog. I’ll just start on Siem Reap, since it’s really the most exciting of them all :)

For those of you who respond with “huh?”, Siem Reap is located in Cambodia, famous for the temples of Angkor, huge what-used-to-be city of temples. Angkor Wat, the biggest of them all, is said to be the world’s largest single religious monument. Avid fan would say that Angkor is more magnificent and grand than all of the 7 wonders of the world combined, and the reason it’s not one of the big 7 is because its existence was unknown at the time.

I’ve been craving to go there since my 1 month trip to South East Asia early last year, but couldn’t manage to fit it in, mainly because of time. Siem Reap International Airport was not opened until August 2006. Previously you need to go via Phnom Penh using either bus or boat for a few hours. So when I heard there were budget airlines going from Singapore/KL direct to Siem Reap, I knew the time was close for me to fly there!

Adventure to the Airport

Unfortunately I couldn’t get tickets from Singapore to Siem Reap by Jetstar (Air Asia doesn’t have Singapore-Siem Reap flight), while I managed to get the return tickets. Note that I tried to book them 3 months in advance! It was Singapore National Day weekend, that’s why it was full. So I did what I had to do. The time was then, I shall not delay any longer. These days time to travel is precious, money is of less importance. When I was a student, I had the time and no money. Right now I have the money (to some extent) and no frickin time. Life is not fair dammit! ANYWAY, so I bought Air Asia tickets from KL to Siem Reap. The frantic trip to KLIA from Singapore led me to adventure by itself.

I needed to work until Tuesday evening and our flight from KLIA was 10am in the morning. I was thinking really hard about how to get there in the most convenient and cheapest way possible. Consideration included taking bus from JB (it’s about the third of the price than taking it from Singapore) to KL and sleeping in the airport. But thinking that we still have days ahead, we finally opted for way that gave the most time to rest. We took KTM, Ekspress Senandung Malam that departed at 22:15pm from Singapore, at the cost of $34 for the upper berth at ADNS – Superior night (in other word, the cheapest bed in the train). Lower berth cost more at $39. I tried the cheapest seat many years ago and it was horrible. Bus seats are so much better.

We both took upper berths, so we could see each other.

I look kinda spooky here.

Lucky for me, the movement of the train made me feel like a baby in the stroller, so off I slept easily.

According to the schedule, we’re supposed to arrive at Sentral KL at 6:56am, which gave us around 3 hours to get to the airport. The last time I was in Malaysia, there was really no cheap way to go there. The airport is simply far away from everything else. Express monorail, bus, taxi, all expensive expensive (monorail and bus cost ~30MYR and taxi ~70-80MYR)! But apparently, not a while ago they started budget buses going to LCCT (Low Cost Carrier Terminal), from which our flight, Air Asia, took off (~9MYR).

But I woke up at around 7am seeing this:

Did not see any city or anything remotely to civilization! All jungles and tiny villages!

Trying to not panic, I took the view of the upper berth:

The bed was pretty much about my length, so I could straightened my legs. But any 20cm taller than me wouldn’t be very comfortable I guess. There’s no place to put your luggage, so you should keep that in mind. I put my backpack at the corner near my feet so it took some space for my feet away.

2 hours passed by and I still saw jungles. I was praying quietly that my watch was broken and it was NOT 9am. But Rendy woke up and told me “Hey it’s 9 o’clock!”
I know.

There was a guy who was looking as uneasy as us. By that time the train stopped at Seremban station. My memory tricked me into thinking Seremban was north of KL. I had a slight thought that we might have missed KL somehow. (But no, apparently Seremban was South of KL, and no we have not passed KL, obviously.) Apparently the guy also needed to catch a plane and started panicking because the train was still in Seremban at 9am when it’s supposed to arrive in KL at 7am. The train officer explained that the airport is nearer from Seremban than from KL. Also KL was still more than an hour way from Seremban by that stupid train. So the guy and we hopped off the train and rushed to the control station. We called him asking if he wanted to share taxi to the airport to which he surely must agree. We then spent more time asking the officers to chop on our train tickets to prove that it’s clearly NOT out fault if we’re late for the flight! (This was all the guy’s idea by the way. I can’t remember his name now. It’s probably Daniel. Let’s call him Daniel. He’s a Singaporean going to Philippines.)

The officers were pretty helpful, apart from making us super late (Apparently there was some faults with the engine, that’s why they stopped for a long time. At when I woke up and realized we were screwed.) One of them suggested we took a taxi, which cost around 60-70MYR. We rushed to the taxi line and got the first taxi, “60 ringgit ok?” He nodded and off we went. The taxi driver was Indian and named Kumar. He asked what time was our flight. I said 10am. “Wah! 10am cannot lah. I try ok. I try.” So Kumar sped up and we hung on for dear life. Daniel’s flight is at 11am, so he was in better position. During the trip Kumar kept saying “Pray your flight delayed. Pray lah.” He was also talking about Bumiputra always being late and lazy.

LCTT was SOO FAR AWAY from the main terminals okay! I thought we would never arrive for godssake. As soon as we hit the pavement I jumped off and ran to the check-in counters.

I had never been happier in my life than my flight got delayed.

Hurray for Air Asia! It conveniently got delayed for an hour, enough time for us to check-in and had breakfast. We had decent Nasi Lemak with ridiculous price for breakfast, and hot Milo. Yuumm..

We rushed to the boarding gate when they called our names, where Rendy’s bag got raped. They confiscated my BodyShop milk shower :( and shampoo bottle. Children, remember that you cannot bring any liquid bottle more than 100ml for each container and not more than 1L combined in your carry bag. I kinda knew about this but didn’t think they’re gonna be so strict about it. Moreover in Malaysia.

Finally, we got on the plane to Siem Reap, safe and sound. As exciting as everything was, I probably wouldn’t do this anymore for the longest time. But don’t bet on it =P

Tired, we fell asleep as soon as the plane took off. When I woke up we’re already there. Flight took around 2 hours.

Siem Reap Welcoming Party

This Manchester-United theme of Air Asia plane actually looks pretty cool. Like all boys, Rendy likes it a lot. So I took pictures of him with his favorite Soccer players.

Siem Reap International Airport looked all new, just opened its door less than a year ago.

You can apply for Cambodia visa on arrival for 20USD. You can also apply for e-Visa, which takes 3 days. Our first impression of the Cambodians weren’t so good. The officers in the airport were not nice at all. They talked as if they were the King of Cambodia and we were peasants. But in any way the process wasn’t that painful, so I wouldn’t complain too much.

The hostel where we stayed included free airport pick-up, so when we went out I saw a guy holding my name on a board. Poor him, he must’ve waited for a while. He asked us to wait at one spot. Rendy jokingly said he may come with a motorbike for 3 of us. It wasn’t that far off.

Isn’t fun? =D I introduce you to Siem Reap tuktuk. While Thai tuktuk is more like bajaj, this one is more like delman pulled by motorbike instead of horse. The guy standing there would be our tuktuk driver for the next 3 days. His name is Mr Chhoeung.

Arriving at the hostel (I’ll put the hostel on separate post, to include review), we ate our first Khmer food at the hostel’s restaurant (also separate post :), which was REALLY YUMMY! Met one waiter who told us almost his entire life story (who we would talk a lot with for the next few days, it became another story by itself. Have no idea where I should put this..) and another waiter who liked to greet people in several languages depending on where he thought they might be from. He greeted us in English, Mandarin, Korean, and Germany (so random). I heard him greeted other people in Japanese, Dutch, and god knows what else.

The Adventure to Find Soap

Having our soap confiscated by the Malay lady in the airport, we embarked on a journey to find soap in the town. It was just about 10 minutes walk from our hostel to the center of the town.

They didn’t have 7 Eleven, but they have 7 Twenty. Does it mean they open from 7:00 to 20:00?

All the prices were in USD. I read everywhere about this before I went. So you always have to have 2 currencies in your wallet. USD and Riel. They use Riel for small change. 1 USD = ~4000 Riel. So if the price is 50c, you can pay with 2000 Riel. By default you can also pay everything with Riel, they would just count it as 4000 Riel for 1 USD. During my days there I could change 100 SGD for 65.5 USD (bargained a bit. Remember that you can always, always, bargain for anything in Siem Reap). You don’t have to bother to change to Riel because you would get it later as change anyway. I did change about 50 SGD to Riel in the airport and proven wasn’t much use at all.

This is Bar St, the busiest street in town, full of cafes, restaurants, and other shops including second-hand bookshop. It’s especially alive at night.

I have not seen cows in the street since I was in primary school in Jakarta. By the way the land on the left and right side of my house before used to be cows’ playing ground. Hence the area where my house was, was called ‘Kandang Kebo’ (= cows’ nest). I read that they’re actually water buffaloes and not cows.

Catching the Sunset at Ta Promh Kei

The hostel people asked us if we wanted to catch the sunset, $3 to go and back by tuktuk. Sounded like a good deal, so we went with Mr Chheoung to Ta Promh Kei, a small temple just in front of the grand Angkor Wat (that for the next day). Before that we bought a 3-days pass for $40. The pass is valid for all Angkor temples except for 2 that’s really far away (we had a chance to visit one of them on day 3). If you buy the pass after 4:30pm, you can go to the temples and have the pass only starting the next day. They would take your picture for the pass so you can’t swap it with anyone.

To get to the temple we needed to hike a bit, around 15 minutes.

Above is the map to the temple. If it’s too small, the yellow one reads “elephants path”, red one “dangerous path”, green “safety path”. I actually saw elephants going to the left path at the foot of the hill. I’m not sure how dangerous is dangerous path. Like steep dangerous or full of mines dangerous?

Talking about land mine, we saw this music group on the way up:

They play to ask donation for land mine victims. I have no idea why Cambodia has so many land mines (and taken victims). I mean I know it’s because of war and all. But it almost sounds like they have land mines buried all over the country until now (which is not so far off from the truth). The story of land mines and the sight of their victims would go to no end until the end of our journey. Notice the couple of prosthetic legs leaned to their bench.

We got to the temple without much sweat and obviously we weren’t the only ones interested in seeing the sunset.

LOOK AT THE RIDICULOUS NUMBER OF PEOPLE CLIMBING THE STAIRS!! Like there’s GOLD on top okay!

This was the first time we learned that all the stairs of the Angkor temples were VERY-dangerously-STEEP. It even took me aback a little when I saw it. You literally have to climb up, and NOT walk up.

This sign didn’t help either (read: Warning!!! Climbing At Your Risk). It’s all over the place, at every steep stairway at every temple.

Rendy pointed that there was a slightly better pathway circling the stairway suggesting that we probably should take that one. Then I pointed to the fat old aunties and uncles climbing up. Of course we couldn’t take safer way and lose dignity. So up we climbed!

At the end there wasn’t much sunset to see because of the thick clouds. But it was a good appetizer for days ahead anyway.

There were so many people we had to fight for space to take pictures! As it got darker people started leaving. We’re about the last people who left. So below is the picture I captured when there was nobody left. Except for that lady who carefully went down trying not to kill herself. Believe me the stairs were a lot steeper than you can possibly see in the picture!

Ahh.. what a long day. We went back, took shower, went out for dinner (another separate post), then slept to get ready for another long day.. zzz..