Siem Reap

Staying with Cambodia's grisly history for one more moment, I saw a poem published at S21 called The New Regime by Sarith Pou and have since found it on the net. You can access it here if you are interested. It pretty much sums up Pol Pot's fucked up ideology better than I can in this prose. Now, enough of that. Onward!

It was at this juncture that LampenHols left the hectic bosom of the CavTours organisation , the eponymous Cavs having flown back to Bangkok. So yesterday, it was up at 0500 hours, a quick last breakfast at Raffles, and a taxi to the Siem Reap boat. We booked a couple of seats a few days' back for $35 a head; the whole trip expecting to take around 5 hours. The Siem Reap Express duly left, motoring up the Tonle Sap river at around 7:30 in the morning, most travellers leaving their seats to climb over the boat to get a better view (and not much in the way of elf 'n safety rails between us and the murky brown waters). Passing the trappings of civilization, the riverside was dotted with shacks and homes on extremely long stilts giving us a clue to how far the river swells during rainy season when the mighty Mekong floods back into the Tonle Sap. The boat trip itself was glorious: stilted shacks giving way to jungle and occasional villages; cooperative fishermen in wide brimmed straw hats and black pyjamas hauling nets; the chug chug chugging of simple generators pumping water into blue hoses that snaked up the river bank into the jungle; little children waving furiously from the bank or their parents' boats (and me goofily waving back); iridescent blue kingfishers skirting the waters' surface (yes, plenty of ornithological examples here - just not sure what species); floating towns made out of rafts and empty oil drums. Eventually, the river widens out into the Tonle Sap lake; more of an inland sea that dominates the geographical center of Cambodia.

Our destination was the north eastern corner of the lake. We had paid a man in PP $5 to be picked up at the boat disembarkation point but didn't hold out much hope, especially since we realised he'd put yesterday's date on the receipt. However, there he was, with LAMPEN held up on a bit of card. Mr John took us to our hotel, the Sokha, a five star monster (there goes the rest of the business company profits!) in the centre of town. By the time we'd settled in it was time for tea. Siem Reap has a very appropriately named street called Pub Street that sells beer at a permanent happy hour at $0.50 a half pint. We drank at the Angkor What? Pub, the first pub ever to be build in the area and ate at a Cambodian BBQ. This place sold raw meat and vegetables that you could cook on your own dome-shaped bbq with a moat around it to make soup. Typical meat you could buy included snake, frog, goat, crocodile, as well as exotic stuff like beef and chicken. I cooked and ate, for the first time ever, snake and can categorically say that it doesn't taste like chicken!  Linda declined to participate. Then I knocked a pint of beer all over my trousers and shirt so Linda decided it was time to tuk tuk home. I like this place!