Today I did actually manage to get up at 6 a.m. and ride my bike through town and out to the temples. The traffic in Cambodia is odd. It's not so horribly busy, and surprisingly, most people do seem to actually pay attention to the traffic lights BUT they drive in whatever direction they want to. People are generally supposed to drive on the right here, but motorcyclists, who are the worst drivers here anyway, seem to ignore this and drive into oncoming traffic whenever it suits them.
Once I got out of town onto the road towards Angkor Wat, however, the trip became quite enjoyable. It was already pretty hot out (85* or so) but as long as I was riding, the heat didn't bother me, likely because of the wind. Whenever I stopped to look at a temple though, I just started dripping liters of sweat. I started at Prasat Kravan, a relatively uninteresting but often visited temple with carvings of Vishu and Lakshami (sp?) in the brick walls:
Then I headed over to Bat Chum, which was quite cool, and since it was slightly out of the way there were no other tourists there so it seemed much better than it was.
On my ride back to the main road, I passed tons of rice paddies, a family with a small daughter who waved enthusiastically, a few people also riding bicycles carrying straw brooms into town, and a group of maybe 20 elementary school aged boys in school uniforms, also all on bikes, who seemed thrilled to see me and shouted and waved until I passed. It was an odd little experience, like being in a somewhat rural part of Cambodia, yet while inside their foremost tourist attraction.
Next, I went to Banteay Kdei which was especially neat as it was done in the Bayon style of temple, which I hadn't seen yet. As I walked in I was accosted by several people, mostly women and children, trying to sell me postcards, guidebooks, handmade jewelry and scarves. I ignored them, which really is the best thing to do, even though it sounds mean, but one of the girls, Tong, followed me this time, and I'm not quite so rude that I can ignore someone trying to have a one on one conversation with me. She asked where I was from and I told her the United States. Proudly she told me that Washington D.C. was the capital. I later discovered that this is what every child in Cambodia will tell you when you say that's where you're from and one little boy even asked my state and knew Sacramento was the capital! Regardless, I started chatting with her a bit, because she was charming and I couldn't quite help it. She told me she wanted to give me one of the handmade bracelets for free and I told her "No thank you," so many times that I started to feel bad so eventually I took it. I knew this was a scam and that my guilt would force me to buy an overpriced postcard from her on the way out, and she knew this, but for this one time, I just couldn't help myself. So I did take the bracelet, which was probably worth about ten cents, and on my way out, I did buy a postcard from her for $1. It was okay though, because she knew, and I knew, and she knew that I knew, and I knew that she knew that I knew that it was all a scam and that I just felt guilty and wanted to help her out, irresponsible as helping children in this way really is.
Right across the street was Sras Srang, so I went over and took a few pictures but it was extremely boring as most of the temple was underwater.
I bicycled over to Pre Rup which was a "temple-mountain," which is a temple that's built upward. These type of temples sound like a pain in the ass, and they are; tons of steps so steep your pants will split, but the reason is that it's supposed to remind you of the mountain the guy had to climb in their branch of Hinduism. (Can you tell I'm getting lazier and lazier and more forgetful with this blog?) Anyway, this was yet another style of temple and the interesting thing about it was that it was made of three different types of rock: brick, sandstone (which is much harder than our or Australian sandstone, by the way) and lava rock.
The next temple was East Mebon which is very similar to Pre Rup:
Across the road from East Mebon were several tented shops and restaurants. Even though it was only a bit after 10 a.m., I'd been bicycling and climbing temples for four hours already in the heat, which by now was extremely hot, so I decided to take a break of sorts. I wanted to go out to Banteay Srei because Chris and Amarita and all the guidebooks said that even though it was much father away (something like 25 km from East Mebon, 37 km from the city of Siem Reap,) it was fantastic and amazing. So I planned to take a tuk tuk out there and on the way back, see Banteay Samre which wasn't supposed to be that fantastic but wasn't too far out of the way from the road.
Unfortunately, all the tuk tuks (meaning all three of them) in front of East Mebon were already in use by visitors so I asked around and finally made a deal with a woman to get a motorbike ride roundtrip for $7. The only catch was that I had to wait for her brother to get back, as he was the one who would be driving me since he was a cop so he wouldn't be stopped and asked to pay the extra fee. That was fine, so I bought a water, waited about 10-15 minutes and then we set off. We had to stop to get gas, which most motorcyclists buy from the side of the road where vendors keep the gas in various one liter bottles: liquor bottles, water bottles, Pepsi, Coke and Sprite bottles. There are normal gas stations here, mostly used by cars, and the prices aren't that different, but this is just how it's done. I actually took this picture in Phnom Penh, but it's the same thing.
Banteay Srei was different from the other temples, for one thing, it was quite pink. More importantly, its carving were more detailed and better preserved than any other temples in the area. There were many tourists there, which was annoying, but it was still nice to look at. Overall, though, I didn't care for it that much. I could see its value and admit it was exquisitely done, but for whatever reason it didn't do anything for me, though retrospectively it does seem pretty incredible.
Banteay Samre, however, was awesome. I was the only tourist there, save one British couple who asked me to take their picture and took mine in exchange. It wasn't just its emptiness that was cool, but it had walls so high you could actually feel lost or like you really were exploring without even the temple itself as a guide. I really did feel like Lara Croft now, so I had to jump down from steps unnecessarily and slow- fake run through part of the inner portico. It was stupid, but fun and it made me laugh. At myself. By myself. In an ancient, empty temple.
So after all that templing, I was rather tired but as I bicycled the 45 (or was it an hour?) back into town, I got some of my energy back. I went to the phone shop and while the guy was trying to make it work, I watched his two year old son eat duck embryo. I wish I'd gotten a picture and had even considered it at the time, but was too embarrassed. It was very strange to watch, not just because of what he was eating, but because of the meticulousness that he ate it with. Using a tiny spoon, he'd scrape a bit out of the egg and move it from the egg holder dish to a plate with pepper and pepper and basil, then combine variations of the three. It was simply a bizarre thing to watch, especially because I think he was trying to engage me in a water drinking competition- I won because I finished my bottle.
After getting my phone working and relaxing at my hostel for a while, I rode out to my Aunt's hotel and from there we took a van out to the dock to go to Chong Kneas, the floating village.
From the first view of the latte-colored lake, I knew it was a bad idea, the $15 charge for a boat, that went directly to a corporation (as even shown on the ticket) just confirmed that. $15 is a lot of money in Cambodia, especially for a crappy should-be-15 minute boat ride. Had I not been with my Aunt and her friend, I would have simply turned around and gone back, but as it was, I got on the tiny boat with the loud engine on the coffee colored water.
As if I needed any confirmation of my previous judgments, the faces of returning tourists we passed were proof enough- of several boats we passed, I only saw one person smiling. There was none of the happy chatter you usually hear on tours, just depressed silence.
After about seven minutes on the sputtering boat, we stopped. Our inept Captain had steered us into the bottom of the river. To be fair, it was very shallow and quite narrow, but none of the other boats had any problems. Amarita later said that she'd noticed that he had bloodshot eyes and liquor or beer bottles under the seat, but I didn't see these. We had to get on another boat with other tourists to go around, and when we finally got to the village, it was deeply, horribly depressing.
It was interesting, in a way. I can't deny that, it's just that it was interesting in the worst, most horrible, disgusting way ever. Being in Cambodia, with the extreme poverty and landmine victims, is difficult enough, but this was even worse. Things you didn't ever want to think about, and didn't ever want to be true (like the fact that they drink, cook with, bathe and defecate all in the same water) were true. Ethnically Vietnamese, the people of these floating villages seemed stuck in a disgusting type of poverty, the disparity of which I'd never quite seen.
Getting to their tourist point and reading the information signs just made it worse. They were communes with literacy levels much lower than equivalent groups on land, desperately poor and dying at every moment.
After all that, we didn't feel terribly happy and managed to just walk around the Old Market for a bit longer before saying good-bye as they were leaving for Phnom Penh the next morning.
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