Cambodia – 8 day stop 2/6/16 – 10/6/16

After our 17 day full on tour of Vietnam and Cambodia we booked into the Model Angkor resort for 8 days of nothing. All we wanted to do was relax, sleep in eat and drink. Our resort has everything, a great pool, restaurant and cocktails galore. Our room, or should I say our suite is massive, a huge Californian king bed, a sumptuous round stone bath in the corner of the room and a huge shower room completed with rain fall multi coloured shower, bigger than some of the hotel rooms we’ve stayed in. It’s about a 5 minute tuk tuk ride out of siem reap centre, but only costs us$2 each way. It’s beautiful, relaxing and quite luxurious.
On our first night we had to go into town as we had only seen snippets of it, so headed for pub street. This is tourism at its best, and rivals any bar area in any city in any country around the world. Bright neon lights, old architecture and packed with tourists all snapping their cameras. We stayed at the resort on the second day and just sun bathed around the magnificent pool. On the third day we hired a tuk tuk for the morning who drove us around to the well known areas of Siem Reap, which included, the war museum, the national museum and the killing fields memorial. The war museum was amazing our guide, (an actual survivor of the war against the khmer rouge) was very informative. It’s set outside with lots of tanks, missile launchers, jeeps the lot, all in all around 100 pieces, all from within siem reap. He added that the land mines possessed the biggest threat as he showed us dozens of varieties, and said there are almost 2000 land mines still to be discovered in the border between Cambodia and Thailand.
The national museum has only been opened for about a month but once inside we learnt a lot about the history of Cambodia, which is grouped into three eras – pre Angkor 6th century to 9th century, Angkor 10th to 17th century and post Angkor 18th century to present. It is set up very well indeed, once entered you go to the 2nd floor watch a 5 minute video, then enter the first door. Inside this room there are over 1000 Buddha’s on display, we learnt the different names of the Buddha’s by the way their hands were pointing. Through another door to a gallery explaining the 3 eras of Cambodian history, through the next door, then the next and so on until you reach the entrance to the museum. An excellent way of getting around. Lastly our guide took us to a site where people remember the killing fields. This was basically a couple of buildings and lots of posters telling the tale. Pol pot was once the leader of the khmer rouge, and he ordered the people to make agriculture the number priority of Cambodia, so he expelled everyone from the cities into the countryside to work on farms. Within his regime he split families up taking children away from their parents, separated husbands from wives etc as he believed families would work against him. He made people work for 20 hours a day, any who couldn’t because of tiredness he would class as lazy and these were shot. As were any academic people such as doctors, law enforcers etc. The children were brainwashed into his future regime, as he thought they would have no recognition of their own past. The children were then forced to be his soldiers, killing anyone they thought were no “towing the line”. The conditions were horrific, people died of malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease. There were accounts of him massacring between 1.5 and up to 3 million people. The war did not end until 1999! As the Cambodians were under attack from not only the Khmer Rouge but the people of south Vietnam too.

We have both loved it here in Siem Reap, people are lovely, the city is so much more peaceful than Vietnam or Bali especially the traffic and not quite so many really annoying hawkers. We have had awesome fresh mango juices from street stalls and ate some great food (the Khmer red curry is the best). Had some great cocktails served up in some way out ways, wondered through the street markets and bought a couple of souvenirs. Our main tuk tuk driver ‘Charlie’ has been great and picks us up on time or waits for us. Pub street is great, loads of restaurants and bars and nightclubs, we had had a few boogies. There are also loads of little side streets crammed with shops and bars so we also managed to find a little place with the best chocolate mousse ever. Another highlight was the Cambodian Circus a group of acrobats who have travelled the world and who come from some of the poorest towns. What a great little show, singing, dancing, fire dancing and acrobatics, great bunch and very humorous. The war in Cambodia only ended in 1999 and tourism is their main income and i must say they are doing it right as far as this city is concerned. We had a great 8 days and really could have stayed longer, will defiantly be back.