We arose at 4 AM today to catch breakfast and arrive in time for the early flight to Siem Reap. After clearing immigration, we apparently missed the free ride to the hostel and hired a cab. After negotiating a hard bargain, he agreed to be our personal guide for the rest of our stay for $15 a day. All day, and supposedly anywhere we went. Upon check-in, the Guesthouse was none-too-happy that we hired our own driver. We are learning more and more that all referrals in this town lead to a cut off the top. Any driver or restaurant the hotel sends us too, my white skin produces a premium price which they will receive a portion of. It should be noted that upon booking our room 2 months ago, the web price was $5 (pretty nice room too for that price). However, we were met with the information that we were to pay more ($15). I disregarded this as a mistake and conflict to be resolved later, which will more than likely come to a head soon...
Since it's still early, we headed to the Temples of Angkor Wat. If you've not heard of this, it ranks Top 5 coolest things I've ever seen, for sure. Angkor Wat consists of 54 temples spread throughout a huge area, all of them 1000-1200 years old in the Khmer Kingdom Age. After paying $40 for a 3 day pass, our driver took us to several today. Not only are these temples magnificent in appearance and architecture, but it's also set in a surreal location, with cicadas chirping at deafening levels in some spots, monkeys playing around, and a gorgeus blue sky backdrop. I've been told this before going, but this is absolutely true: It's like Indiana Jones, but real life. And it's true. These temples are absolutely HUGE; some of them, 1 km by 1 km. There's statues, carvings, stone enscriptions, and in some places, relics, just lying around on the ground. And the tourists have free reign to just trample wherever we want. It's almost sad that we can do this, as certainly the temples have been disrespected over the years... I've come to the conclusion that the US$ going into the government and these poor people's hands are worth the temporary immediate access to these temples. If this place existed in the US, it would most certainly be completely roped off and there might be a few tours through a couple of them. But certainly not Europeans throwing their garbage on the ground and people climbing and stepping onto ancient enscrypted boulders (which pretty much everyone does, including us).
The other overwhelming thing I've discovered about Cambodia is the people. They've undergone mass genocide just 25-30 years ago, with 3 million killed by the Khmer Rouge. Khmer Rouge was the communist rebels that overthrew the government, deciding it would be wise to kill off all the educated. Wonderful. As a result, the country is wildly underdeveloped, and people are poor. Like Sally Struthers poor, the kind of stuff you see on TV at midnight. As a result, everyone is looking for an angle to make a buck, and children are littered all over the temple region trying to sell you crap. I'm not kidding when I say a total of 200-300 kids in different places today came up to us during the 10 hours we were out there. I've discovered they actually go to school half the day, the other half, selling these junky tourist things. Then they flip-flop. You'll hear things like, "Give me dollar so I go school." This is from kids 4, 5 years old... Pretty sad, as I've been to a lot of cities, but not seen poverty like this. They actually live in the jungles in huts and this is their day to day existence. Pretty wild.
We continued on to see about 8 temples today, as some of them actually can take hours to go through. We actually had a guide for $20 a day initially, but had to "fire" him about 5 minutes into the tour because we couldn't understand a word of his English. Later to find out, our hotel hired him although he was only a student of English. This was the first mark against Jasmine Guest House...
After a full day, we climbed 250 feet to the top of a ridge to the top of a temple was itself at least 300 feet tall, viewing the sunset over the Cambodian countryside. Very cool. Upon return, we had a great spicy dinner at the lodge... Beef curry with veggies and spring rolls.... Yummy.
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