Wow. I have got a whole lot of blogging to catch up on. The past 18days have been unbelieveably amazing, extremely busy, exhausting, educational and eye opening.
The only place to start is the beginning - as Julie Andrews taught me, so it's back to Saturday the 1st August.....
After saying a sad goodbye to Lauren, I caught a Taxi to the meeting point hotel in Bangkok to meet my group. I was pretty scared. What if they didn't like me? What if i didn't like them? What if they all knew each other and I got left behind? But as per usual I was being silly. My Cambodia group were the best part of the trip and the amount of fun and laughs we had made the first leg of my trip what it was - amazing. Intrepid Travel is an Austrlian company, so the Aussies were the majority but there was also 3 of us from England, an American couple on their Honeymoon and a girl who was originally from South Korea, but now lives in London. The age range was from Ben at 15, to his mum Nicky, in her 40's. But we all couldn't have got on better and I have now got some friends to visit on the East Coast of Austalia when i'm there.
Sunday 2nd - We had a fairly early start to begin our long journey into Cambodia. I'm pleased we had someone to show us the ropes when crossing the Cambodian border as it was slightly confusing. Lots of different check points where you had to show different documentation and have your tepmerature checked etc etc.
Cambodia is much more beautiful then i imagined it to be. Some places you still see extreme poverty, but everyone is still smiling. The countryside is stunning and Siam Reap, our first stop, was a lot cleaner and traveller friendly than i expected. Due to it being the closest city to the famous temples tourism is the main source of income for the people here.
We had our first Cambodian meal at a buffet style restaurant and watched an Apsara show (traditional Cambodian dancing). It was a good way to begin to get a taste of Cambodian culture.
Our tour guide, Limny, was Cambodian and was extremely good at showing us little things that made up Cambodia and the way people lived.
Monday 3rd - was our first day at the temples of Angkor. We had a different guide for our temple days - Allan who spoke very good English and her knowledge of the temples was second to none. Angkor as a place is beautiful. It reminded me of a huge National Trust park. There are 38 (I think!) temples in this area. We obviously didn't see all of them, just the most famous. The ones that we did see were all absolutely breathtaking. How on earth did they carry this massive concrete blocks and make them into buildings for kings? The carvings in the stone were also so detailed, it must have taken months just to do one block.
On our way inbetween 2 temples we stopped at a Landmine Museum, set up by Aki Ra. He used to be a child soldier in Cambodia and helped to lay Landmines during the war. When he grew up he realised the damage that they cause and now helps to demine areas all over Cambodia. I couldn't believe that there are a huge amount of unexploded Landmines still in Cambodia and they affect and take peoples lives every day. Aki Ra set up the museum to help fund a school for children affected by Landmines.
Our final temple of the day we climbed to the top and watched the sunset over Angkor. It was a little bit cloudy but we got the gist - beautiful and so peaceful just sitting....
Tuesday 4th - We set our alarms for 4am so we could watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat (the most famous temple). At 4am, I wasn't over enthusiastic about the situation but by the time 6am came around I was happy as larry. The sun came up behind Angkor Wat and it was a clear morning which made it beautiful. I only wish that Pops was there with his camara - my pictures really don't do it justice! We then had a tour of Angkor Wat - all before breakfast!
We finished our temple tours by 11am and headed back to the hotel. On the way some of us jumped off the mini bus to give blood at the local childrens hospital. Allan had told us that it was safe and they particularly needed blood group A/B. Being A/B positive and seeing some of the poverty, I decided the least i could do was share a few blood cells.
After lunch we had an optional tour to a floating village, which i was interested in seeing. It was amazing to see people living in huts on stilts above a river. They live so simply. They don't have anything materialistic. They jump in their boats and go fishing for their dinner or picking vegetables that grow in the water. The childrens playground is the river and they use this water for everything. There was a dry part of the village, where we jumped off our boat to look around. There was a school and a temple for the monks to pray. We spoke to a 16year old boy, who wanted to practice his English and he was extremely good. It made me feel completely inadequate to only speak one language fluently.
Wednesday 5th - We left Siam Reap for Phnom Penh. Along the way we stopped off to try some local delicacies. Sticky rice - rice cooked for hours with coconut milk and some seasoning and then stuffed into a bamboo tube. Spider - fried whole spider. Real life, massive black, hairy spider. There was a huge bag full of live ones and then a basket of fried ones next to it. When in Rome, I thought!! There was also Crickets and Grasshoppers here, so i sampled one of these too. Actually a pretty tasty snack. An alternative to knobby's nuts with a pint...
Half way between Siam Reap and Phnom Penh we stopped for lunch at a silk farm. We got to see how the silk went from worm to scarf. A long process but one that gives the locals a job, which is something that is desperately needed and the American guy who set the farm up is a legend!! I also decided to give Silk Worm a try here as a pre-lunch apperitif. Not good. It left a horrible taste in my mouth. Luckily there was a delicious lunch cooked up for us after our little tour.
The food in Cambodia (generally - obviously you don't eat bugs and things all the time) was amazing. Everything that was recommended to us to try (minus the silk worm) was really tasty. Definately going to google some Cambodian recipes when i get home!
By now i had begun to learn more about the Cambodian history and about the terrible things that happened there within the last 30 years, which made it even more shocking. Over Breakfast one day Limny told us about his family and experience. We were all either speechless or in tears. Its absolutely mindblowing to hear what the Cambodian people have been through and yet they all just get on with their day-to-day lives. If half the things that had happened in the west as they had here, we'd all be in therapy. Limny was only 2 when the Khumer Rouge stuff started but his mother and older sister had to watch his dad dig his own grave and then be murdered. If they cried, they would have been killed too. His uncle was also killed and they saw it all happen right in front of them.
If you were educated, or had a business that was it, killed. if you had pencils in your pocket, wore glasses, had soft hands. Killed. If you cried, if your child cried, if you were out of step, showed weakness...or strength, you were killed. It's just horrible.
We learnt more about this during our visit to the museum S-21, which was a prison and a place of torture during the war, and a trip to the Killing fields on Thursday. Hearing the stories and seeing the mass graves was just shocking. It really didn't happen that long ago - so recently that there were still bits of bone and clothing on the floor at the killing fields and in the middle a huge glass cabinet filled with the skulls of the people that they found - a lot of them crushed in places where the had been hit over the head. We all came out wide eyed and silent.
Friday 7th - We caught a bus to the Ferry port in Phnom Penh. I use the word "ferry" here very loosely - More small stuffy boat with no fans or aircon and water coming in the windows if opened making it extremly hot. We managed to sit at the back, where it was open, for a while and have a little picnic which made it more bareable. It was 4 hours over the Cambodian/Vietnamese border to Chao Doc - A town that the Cambodian people still believe is in Cambodia and the Vietnamese belive is in Vietnam. Here we dropped our bags at the hotel and hopped onto a convoy of scooters and headed up into the hills to watch the sunset. The sunset part of the trip didn't really work out - it was too cloudy. But we all sat in hammocks drinking local beer before going back into the town for dinner. Riding on the back of a scooter was a new experience, but one which i really enjoyed. Although petrified at first, I soon relaxed and enjoyed the wind in my helmet covered hair!!
After dinner we had a short Cyclo (a push bike with a carriage on the back) tour of the town, stopping off at a local bar to try locally brewed beer and a bar snack. Rat and Snake. Rat was actually quite nice. Its a cliche, but it tasted like chicken. Snake on the other hand was a different matter. Far too boney to enjoy!
Saturday 8th - We had yet another early start to begin our long Journey to Ho Chi Minh City (formall Saigon) It was a bit of a shame to finish our tour with 2 long days of travelling, but we made the best of it.
We checked into our hotel in Ho Chi Minh and went for our "Farewell dinner". It was sad to start saying goodbye to my travelling family. We had such a good time together. A couple of them were staying in Ho Chi Minh for a few extra days, so we saw them again. It was nice to stagger the goodbyes! But it was time for Nicky, Ben and I to meet our new group to begin the second leg....
To be continued......(shower and dinner calls!!)
p.s. Happy Birthday Mikey! Love you x x x
