Fourth Day
Today we had a free day with our tour group, to decide on somewhere to go together or split up.
As we where all getting along so well, we decided to stay as a group and check out some more sites.
We decided to go to the Cambodian Landmine Museum. The guy who owns this place used to be in the war and placed the landmines. Now that the war is over and there are still people being hurt by the mines, he has started demobilizing them and finding the ones he put down. We watched a movie on how he goes about finding them and destroying them, it was very intriguing. He also has housed many of the landmine victims that have lost limbs and helped them get by in today’s world.
After that we went to this really nice restaurant close to where we were staying. It was a Butterfly sanctuary with really nice food. There was a fish pond with lots of large goldfish in it that the boys kept feeding dead butterflies to.
We then headed out to the Cultural centre, which turned out to be the highlight of our day. We had a walk around and looked at a few of the replica buildings and watched some of the Dancing shows. Dorn then took us to the archery section where we got to shoot 10 arrows for US$1. It was heaps of fun, Jamie managed 6 shots on the board (no bull’s-eye) and I managed 3 (no bull’s-eye).
Our Tour leader Dorn, the sneaky buggar, had organized for one of the guys in our group to be involved in one of the ceremonies. We went to the 'Selecting the fiancé' show and as they were picking someone out of the crowd they turned to Jamie.
At first we thought he wouldn't go up because he didn't want to be in the ceremony before that, when they were selecting volunteers. However, he went up with style, pumping his arms in the air on the way down.
After gaining approval from the 'Family', they took him to this little enclosure where he had to strip down to his jocks and get changed into this costume.
Everyone in our tour group was laughing as hard as they could. One of the guys in our tour, (Rob) taped the whole thing for us and is going to send us a copy hopefully. So there will have to be a movie night when we get home.
After all the excitement of Jamie’s marriage, we headed to the Angkor Amazon where we had dinner and watched the traditional dancing for only US$8 each.
