On-the-Road Tales

Up at 0500, we jetted out to the airport for our 0800 flight on Bangkok Airways to Siam Reap, Cambodia. We walked through what seemed like endless shops and stores to the gate and were bussed out to our ornately painted 737. It was a short 45 minute flight to Siam Reap and I was surprised at the terrain as we approached. I had always envisioned the ‘jungle’ to be dense mountainous forest like S.America but the area was surpringly flat and the trees sparser than I expected. We landed and stood in line for a $20 photo visa. Nancy is much less inclined to go with the ‘wherever I end up’ approach to travelling I revel in. In addition, she stated Air con and hot water were mandatory so my hostel accomodation choices were definately not in the running so she had prebooked a guesthouse and our transport was waiting outside. Our vehicle, and the mode of preference, is a tuk-tuk. Basically a two wheeled carriage of sorts that attaches to a moped. So us and our backpacks climbed in and hung on as the journey began. The 15 minute ride from the airport was our introduction to Cambodia. We could not quite figure out what side of the road they drove on because, well, they drove on every side in both directions. It was a cacophony of bicycles, mopeds, tuktuks, pedestrians, pickups, cars, and trucks. Sounds like a normal road except there were left hand and right hand drive vehicles and the pickups and mopeds were stacked with everything you could and could not imagine. The tiny two-wheeled motored transports often carry whole families mom, dad, toddler, toddler holding infant. The pickups had whole villages perched in the back, in the cab, on the roof, and on the hood! with motorbikes, rices, plastic chairs etc in the mix. Mopeds would cruise by with a bamboo cylinder attached full of piglets or 2 or 3 full size pigs strapped down on the way to be sold at the market, When this is your only form of transport – you do not have a hell of a choice.

We made it to The Villas at Siem Reap and checked into our room. Angkor Wat is one temple in an area chock full of similar ruins. You buy a pass to visit the whole complex and can go out after 1700 the night before your pass starts to watch sunset and enjoy 3+ days. So we purchased our 3 day $40 pass and headed to Phnom Bakheng. We climbed a small hill to perch on the top of a ruin. It was hard to concentrate on the setting sun when there were no fewer that 1000 other tourists milling in your space. Apparently the largest tourist group to Cambodia are Koreans and they were everywhere, by the busload. Next were Japanese with more Nikons than one could count. There were surprisingly few westerners. We descended the mountain after the nice sunset with the hordes and amazingly found our Tuk Tuk driver amid the melee. We headed into town and had dinner on pub street at the Red Piano.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.