The Wild West of Asia

Even after my first few days in Cambodia I can tell that this is a much different place than either Thailand or Laos. It seems that almost anything goes here: gambling is prevelent, gun control is fairly lax, and it seems every taxi driver doubles as a drug dealer. It is also a place of great disparity, in the same sqaure mile you'll see five star resorts along with some of the poorest communities in the world. And I think cambodians see westerners as walking money machines. In the city its impossible to walk down the block without being overrun by hawkers selling anything from souvineers to taxi rides. This all adds up to make Cambodia a pretty wild place...keeps you on your toes!

I flew into Siem Reap from Laos five days ago; one of the more nerve-racking flights I've been on. I had heard that Lao Airlines doesn't have the greatest safety record but there weren't many options for flying out of the country. The little plane seemed to be made up of miscellaneous parts from other aircrafts. But to my surprise and relief we landed (quite roughly) in Siem Reap just fine.

I met an English guy and a Dutch couple on the flight over, we shared a taxi into Siem Reap and ended up spending the next couple days together. That first day we hired a boat to see the floating village just south of Siem Reap. Just after leaving the dock we ran into a traffic jam with 50 or so other boats trying to fit through a channel wide enough for only one or two at a time. Boats going both directions just piled up trying to squeeze their way through.

After an hour of this we finally made it out into this massive lake where the floating village is. The picture doesn't show it very well but there were thousands of shacks, built from wooden planks or bamboo, just floating out there on oil drums. I've never seen anything like it before, hard to believe people actually live like this. The boat driver was saying that many of the people who live out here are actually Vietnamese, I'd imagine that they were southern Vietnamese who fled the country after the war.
As we were getting ready to head back, a lady in a small boat with her four kids came up to the side of our boat. She kept saying the same thing over and over in Cambodian or Vietnamese while just blankly staring at us. And her son had a snake hanging around his neck (you can see in the picture); the whole thing was pretty disturbing.

The next moring we were up early to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. It was a remarkable thing to see and I don't think my pictures really do it much justice. After sunrise we began looking around at the other Angkor temples which cover a huge area. One of the walking tours was something like 25 kilometers long and people will spend days here trying to see it all. The stone carvings had incredible attention to detail and it seems unbelievable that they were capable of building something to this scale. I can understand now why it took 600 years to complete! All in all I'm glad to have seen it, but it probably would've been more interesting had I brushed up on the history beforehand. By noon, Ian (the english guy) and I were pretty templed-out and ready to head back for a nap.

After a couple days in Siem Reap I caught a night bus down to the southern coast which is where I'm at right now. The town I'm staying in is sorta trashy but the beach is really nice. More on that and some pictures next time