Cambodia Part One

I tried to post this yesterday, but it wouldn't go through, so it's going up now. I'll update later on what we did today.

Yesterday morning, Nisha, Ivo, Jean Phillipe, Knut, and I began our trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Partly to save money (flights between Siem Reap Airport and Bangkok are expensive), and partly for the experience, we decided to take the trip there via land. This meant a 4.5 hour bus ride to near the border, a tuk tuk ride to an outsourcing place where we bought our visas, walking through Thai and Cambodian security, a government bus to the taxi terminal, and a 3 hour taxi to Siem Reap, all of which cost me about 20 bucks.

On that note, one of the strange things I've noticed about Cambodia is that they rely primarily on U.S. currency, though they have their own (4000 Cambodian Riel per 1 US Dollar), and they also widely accept Thai Baht. My guess is that their own currency became unstable sometime in their brutal and unstable history, so they just decided to screw it and use ours.

Driving through the countryside, the rampant poverty here is obvious. We saw lots of cows that are used to manually till rice fields, and people seem to live in shacks made of rotten wood and sheet metal. There is still a big problem here with unexploded land mines, and we've seen quite a few amputees here. But aside from that, our time here has been comfortable. We are staying in a very nice hostel run by Westerners that has its own restaurant and bar, and everything is dirt cheap.

This morning, we caught a tuk tuk at 5am to take us to Angkor Wat (about 15 mins north of here), where we celebrated Independence Day by watching the sunrise. Angkor Wat is the largest and most spectacular, but far from the only temple in the area. There are many, many temples constructed of stone over a 300+ year period around 1000 years ago. Angkor at its peak was a city of 1 million people and the capital of the Khmer Empire, which stretched from Vietnam to Myanmar. Each king, it seems, would try to outdo his predecessor by having a larger and more fantastic temple built. They are dedicated to a combination of Hindu gods, Buddha, and the kings themselves. After seeing Angkor Wat, our group split up, and Nisha and I explore some of the more far-flung temples. Tomorrow we'll go back to see more of the central main attractions that we skipped today.

I have cheap Internet access here, but it is very slow, so pictures will need to wait until I have a better opportunity to upload them.