Battambang and Siem Reap

After a few days in the countryside (and slightly in the bar) around Kampot, we headed at the crack of dawn to Battambang. Apparently this is Cambodias 2nd largest city, but it is a far cry from Phnom Phen, and we felt like we could navigate it within a day of staying there. The main attraction was a day trip into the surrounding area to see a collection of temples on top of a hill (complete with children trying to fan us all the way!) and the 'killing caves' - another legacy of the Khymer Rouge. This was where my ability to cope left me, and I elected not to go into the cave into which children and babies were thrown, alive.
The other main event of our trip to Batttambang was a Cambodian cookery course, which was great. We were the only two to have booked that day so we got a very hands on lesson and were able to choose our own dishes to cook. We started with a trip to the local market, where were able to see what we SHOULD be paying for things rather than what we would have been charged.. We then prepared and cooked 3 dishes - Fish amok (a coconut based dish), spicy sour chicken soup, and beef with basil and lemongrass. I have to say, we did very well and it all tasted magnificent. Asian themed dinner parties when we get back!
After Battambang it was time for Siem Reap and the temples of Ankhor. We managed to find ourselves a very nice hotel with a beautiful swimming pool, which had expensive rooms, but also a couple of non air-con, no hot water, slightly shabby rooms at a price we could afford - well worth it for the swimming pool! We obviously couldn't waste this opportunity, so spent the first day lazing in the sun and in the pool, with a trip to the town to see the numerous markets and sample the delights of 'Pub Street'.
We decided after much deliberation to spend just one full day at the temples, as we have realised in the past 7 months that our temple enjoyment level doesn't allow more than this before we get 'templed out'. So, up at 4am to catch sunrise at Ankhor Wat. Sadly, we managed to choose the one day (actually, I have no idea if this is true, not having been up at sunrise since Varanasi in India) that the sunrise was a total anticlimax, as the whole sky was covered in cloud! Still, it was a strange and special feeling walking into such a world famous sight in the pitch dark , almost feeing like we were the only people there. Although we didn't see a spectacular sunrise, it turned out to be a good time to be there as, we could see Ankhor Wat with far fewer people arounf than at other times of the day. It really is spectacular, the strangest thing being the way that, froma distance, it looks almost 2 dimensional, and it is only as you come closer that you can see it stretches to 1km square. We then spent the day seeing a selection of the other temples, my favourite of which had huge faces built into the outside (reminded me of 'Return to Oz!). The effect of this in a dark, cloudy thunderstorm was quite impressive and just a little scary.
We then had another day free to enjoy the pool, although we spent much of this doing useful bits and pieces around the town, and deciding, on a whim, to go to Bangkok the following day and travel to the north of Thailand before heading to Laos.
So, now we are in Bangkok on the famous Khao San Road, ready for some slight seeing (more temples!) tomorrow.

Kampot

After a busy and heavy few days in Phnom Pen, we were looking forward to getting out into the Cambodian countryside for some relaxation and beautiful scenery. All started well when we arrived and found ourselves a $5 room in a friendly guesthouse on a quiet leafy street. A welcome change from the box in the capital! By early evening we were well settled in the bar with some good Khmer food and beer and some great company, most of which was ex-pats rather than tourists which made a nice change.
We hired a motorbike for 2 days, which was a good way to see the area around the town itself, which is really the main attraction of this area. The first day on the motorbike started out well - Kev soon got used to his first ride with gears rather than automatic and we headed out towards a cave we had read about. As we pulled up outside the cave, we were greeted by a group of kids anxious to show us around the cave. For some reason, the fact that this cave didn't really seem to have been set up as a tourist attraction, despite being in all the guidebooks, never really occurred to us and we happily set off into the dark depths with a group of guides averaging about 12 years old. And one torch. Still, it was pretty interesting to see and certainly made for a different experience! It wasn't until 2 days later that we actually realised we'd gone to the wrong cave... At least we never came across any snakes! The kids tried their hardest to claim a $5 fee for their services but had to make do with considerably less.
After this we drove to see a Buddhist temple, then drove past Kep beach and another 20km or so into the countryside. It was a really picturesque journey, until ominous dark clouds began to appear and we realised the monsoson was coming. At this point we had two choices - all the way back and hope we made it before the rain, or keep going and find somewhere to shelter when it did. We chose to keep going (possible unwisely) and, sure enough, it began. We found a small 'restaurant'at the side of the road and drank coffee and ate noodles and played cards until we felt we couldn't really stay much longer and the rain was easing a little. Unfortunately the rain didn't seem to have eased at all once we actually got moving and within 5 minutes Kev was soaked to the skin. I was really quite dry what with having him to shield me! Once we made it back to Kampot, we were ready for a hot shower (shame we never had hot water then!) and another coffee.
The next day we kept hold of the motorbike, but didn't get out on it until lunchtime as we had stayed up chatting pretty late and so had a slow start to the day. Once we did get out we made it a short journey along the river and to a restaurant for lunch. Hammocks in the guesthouse garden were too tempting and we spent the rest of the day reading and generally relaxing.
By this point we felt we really needed some exercise, so the following morning we borrowed bikes from the guesthouse and took off down some small tracks into the villages. The houses in this area are great, as many of them stand on stilts, with rooms underneath the house as well. We cycled past paddy fields and waved to children along the way. It was really lovely, if a little hot and sweaty! Towrads the end of the ride, I realised that my back wheel was completely flat and was seriously struggling to keep pedalling. I was debating whether to do anything about it or struggle back when a little boy came up to me and mimed pumping a wheel, then pointed towards a group of houses. We followed and we soon surrounded by a large group of children and a man who got out his kit to pump up the tire. Sadly, it turned out to be a puncture which initially had us panicking as we hadn't brought much money with us and ahd no idea how much it was goingt o cost to repair. Language barriers prevented us from either finding out or stopping the repairs so we sat for about half an hour talking to the children as the puncture was fixed. As it turned out it cost next to nothing, and what it did cost was immediately handed out by the man to his children. This puncture turned out to be one of my favourite experinces in Cambodia so far!
Once we got back from out bike ride we had a late lunch, which we had been excited about ever since we arrived. The owner of our guesthouse was a chef back in England and promised us that his Sunday Roast was fantastic. It really was. Roast beef, yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, red cabbage, cauliflower cheese, carrot, beans, homemade gravy, horseradish sauce... The food in Asia has been great, but that roast dinner was a taste of home! It was so big that we couldn't even eat dinner, although we did pick at a couple of other poeples leftovers during the evening... Kampot has been such a great place to visit - once of the few places we've been that we could both picture living. For once we spent far more time with people who had moved there than other backpackers and got a real sense of what every day life was like. By the time we left we had a plan in place for my very own school (built by Kev). Anyone want to come and teach for me?

Mekong Delta and Phnom Pen photos

Saigon photos

Phnom Pen

..which I have finally managed to persuaded myself is pronounced with the 'n'. It just sounds so wrong somehow. I am currently typing on a keyboard with all the letters rubbed off - which is a great test of my touch typing ability and testament to the hard work I put into 'Mavis Beacon teaches typing' as a child.
So, after our great value guide to Phnom Pen with his extraordinary ability to say thank you in so many languages, we arrived in the capital to a sea of tuk tuk and motorbike drivers the likes of which we hadn't seen since India. Apparently my tolerance level has gone down in the past few months and I found this extrememly irritating. We found ourselves a cell ina cheap guesthouse, went out for some food and then proceeded to spend the rest of the day sleeping and watching parts of films.
The next day was all go and we started with a trip to S21, or Tuol Sleng genocide museum. This made the war remnants museum in Saigon seem easy to handle. It was orginally a high school, and at first glance looks like a typical school building complete with climbing apparatus. However, it was used by the Khymer Rouge as a security prison - or, it seems, torture chamber. We walked around the school buildings and saw cells that had been left as they were discovered, with the addition of photogrpahs on the wall of the tortured victims who had inhabited the cell. We saw blood stains still clear on the floors and walls in places. And in the final building we saw photograph after photograph of the victims which had been taken when they were brought to the prison - faces from the past staring out in fear, defiance and confusion. We also discovered the reason for the climbing apparatus being left in tact - it was used as one of the torture methods where victims would be hung upside down whilst questioned. This fact hit me more than anything as they could have been found in any playground in any school. I don't want to go into any more of the details of what went on there in this, but it's worth looking up if you, like me, were only partially aware of some of the monstrocities that took place in this country. After a heavy morning we deicded to leave our trip to the Killing Fields outside of the city for the next day and instead went to see the other extreme of tourism in Phnom Pen - the Royal Palace.
We were not allowed into all areas of the palace as it is still the official residence of the King, however a large area is open to the public with some impressive buildings and beautiful grounds. The best known attraction within the grounds is the Silver Pagoda, which is not qso silver as I had hoped - in fact Kev and I did actually manage to walk around it without noticing that was where we were... Having gone back in it was just about noticable that the floor was silver - but only just as most of it was covered in a variety of tatty carpets! We then had a relaxed beer or two by the river and a lovely meal.
The next day was another tough one, although the journey to the Killing Fields at Choeug Ek was relaxing as we took a tuk tuk there and were able to enjoy the sights of the city in some style (well, more style than a bus tour, anyway!). The first thing and most obvious thing seen when entering the sight is a large memorial to the victims of the Khymer Rouge, a stupa divided into levels. On the very bottom level are scraps of clothing recovered when the mass graves here were discovered. After that are several levels of skulls (more than 5,000 in total), then other bones that were found. The most unsettling thing was realising that this was where the tortured people at S21 were taken to be killed and those skulls were the same people that had stared out at us from photographs.
As you walk around the area, there are various signs explaining how many bodies were recovered in the numerous graves you walk past. Sometimes there are pieces of cloth and even bone noticeable in the ground as you walk. To realise that this sight is just one of many, and the sheer scale of the genocide that took place in this country is, well, I can't think of the right word. Perhaps 2 million people, perhaps more. Again, I think that's probably enough to be writing here, there are certainly more horrors we learnt that I could write, but the facts can be read easily elsewhere.
After a hard hitting day, we were looking forward to the evening and meeting up with Nina - an ex work colleague. It was great catching up if a little strange being in Cambodia to do it. We had a few beers at their (very nice..) hotel and a great meal - I hope you two enjoy the rest of your trip, it sounds amazing!
We're now in Kampot - escaping the city and getting into the countryside for some walking and bike rides by the river over the next few days. Something amusing to finish on - as we came down here on the bus Kev looked out of the window and remarked that the river was a lot bigger than he's imagined. Slight pause before I replied that it was actually the sea.

Saigon to the Mekong Delta

So, back to my thoughts on the War Remnants museum. Having just come back from the Killing Fields outside Phnom Pen I feel like this entry may be mostly gloom and doom, but we have certainly seen some thought provoking places over the past week or two.
The War Remnants museum in Saigon is presented very bluntly - there's no escaping the horrors of war with photos of people dead and dying, photos of the effects of Agent Orange on war veterans and their children as well as reproductions of cells where the Viet Cong soldiers were held. Much of the photography itself is amazing if hard to look at.
The day after we visited the museum, we took a tour out to the Cu Chi tunnels a few Km outside Saigon. The tunnels are a huge network and are part of a much larger network of tunnels that underlie a lot of Vietnam. The tunnels were the location of several military campaigns during the war. They were used by Viet Cong during combat, as hiding spots as well as serving as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous guerrilla fighters. (yes, I'm paraphrasing from Wikipedia...). Going through the tunnels themselves I found a very claustrophobic experience, even for the few metres that we crawled. They are very low, very narrow and very dark. As well as crawling through the tunnels we were shown an extraordinary variety of methods used to trap and hurt American soldiers, most of which were constructed using the remains of American weapons. There was also the option of firing machine guns in the shooting range - something we resisted. The sounds of gunfire as we walked around the site was quite disconcerting.
At this point of our trip to Saigon, Kev fell ill with what could be flu, but we suspect may have been Dengue Fever. He certainly had all the symptoms and was mostly confined to the room for about a week. So, not too much to report from the rest of the time although I did get out for a bit of sightseeing, including visiting the Reunification Palace, the place where the war ended in 1975 when a North Vietnamese Army tank crashed through it's gates. These days it's a museum open to the public.
On our last day in Saigon, with Kev feeling a little better, we went with Amy and James to a water park, which was really fun. Kev and I then headed off to the Mekong Delta for a trip down the river to Cambodia. On our first day we took a bus from Saigon for a couple of hours to reach the river. We then went to see a floating market, and then to see rice wine, coconut candy and rice paper being made. The snake wine was less appealing to try than the other goods, especially with a huge live python in a cage watching you. After that we took to bicycles (I am now a cycling pro) and cycled to a restaurant for lunch,. Then it was off to another boat for a sunset cruise down the river. This part of the trip was beautiful. It was fascinating to see how the river provides everything for the people living in the area - transport, food, water, somewhere to wash, somewhere to sell their goods...
We spent the night in a floating hotel, then the next morning went to see a fish farm and a minority Muslim village. The fish farm was crazy - a huge number of fish in a small area which turned into a jacuzzi when a handful of food was thrown to them. The village was interesting, but unfortunately the school that we would have visited was closed. And then off to Cambodia! My first border crossing on the river. It was quite a strange way to enter a new country, but very relaxing and peaceful. Once we got off the boat we had a short drive to Phnom Pen with a great guide on board. His first words to us were 'I can say thank you in 15 languages'. At least, that's what we thought he said. He then proceeded to show us, and we realised he did, in fact, know how to say thank you in 50 languages. And he did.
So now we're in Phnom Pen and have spent the past 2 days sightseeing. The contrasts in the major sights here are unbelievable - once minute you're looking at a sight where thousands of people were tortured, the next at a grand palace full of gold and solver and jewels. But more about that in the next entry!