Siem Reap.

We arrived in Siem Reap after a short 1/2 hour flight on Siem Reap air. The flight was mostly empty. We got to the hotel, another Raffles and checked in. We didn’t like the room we were given and asked for another. They said none were available, but Doreen persisted, and they found us one with a better balcony overlooking the gardens, not the pool. This sort of set the stage for our relationship with this hotel. While it wasn’t a bad hotel by any means, everything seemed just about a half beat off. Nothing was horrible, but plenty could have been better.

The hotel had arranged for a tour guide to get us to Angkor Wat the next day. We left about 8:30 and made it to the temple after buying a three day pass to the ruins at a very efficient waystation run by the richest guy in Cambodia (who we were told is Vietnamese).

The temples are something. You can see my photos in my Picasa albums. I won’t try to describe them here, others have done a better job than I could even start to do. I would recommend visiting these places to anyone who can take the travel.

Since we stayed in Siem Reap for five nights, we had quite a time arranging transportation and food. We were lucky with the food. We used several resources to uncover some interesting places to eat. The Robert Parker bulletin board (ebob) was extremely useful in getting ideas of places to eat. Doreen got a bunch of ideas from Patricia Wells (we love her recommendations for Paris) and the hotel as well.

The food ranged from fancy cooked by creative Australian Chefs to a local kitchen where we could not spend much more than $10 if we tried, but the food was outstanding.

The geegaws in Siem Reap were much more expensive than in Phnom Penh. I think that was because there are so many more tourists. The shopkeepers were less willing to negotiate as well.

You had your standard contingent of dissolute ex-pats and hippies in Siem Reap. You could find places to stay for under $5 a night! And some of these people were odd, and some of them sort of mean. I saw one guy negotiate with a little Khmer kid until he started to cry (the kid, not the hippy). We saw another couple go to a café, (which served food) then proceed to pull out a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and make sandwiches and comment on the local (male) talent.

But the strangest thing about Siem Reap is how you developed a relationship with your transportation. As in Phnom Penh, the tuktuk was the most common way to get along. And once you used a tuktuk drive, you were his, and he was yours. You were expected to use that same guy whenever you saw him (or more like, he saw you). The good thing about that was you could honestly answer you had a tuktuk waiting when the others came by to bug you. You had better remember his name, though. Because they would ask. (we used number 555 for a while, but our favorite was Mr Phaunna – he was one sad looking guy. But he was a good driver. One night I negotiated a different guy too low for his preference, so he got drunk when we were eating dinner. You have not lived until you have been driven around Siem Reap by a drunk tuktuk driver)