Here’s the post on the sites that bring the tourists to Cambodia, and for good reason.  I can’t imagine taking a trip to Cambodia and not seeing the ancient Khmer ruins.  When I was a kid, I had this really cool map hanging up in my room (now it’s in storage in the basement of my condo).  Though it sits under glass, it appears brown, crinkled, and very old.  And, it’s illustrated with various famous sites all around the world.  The map is titled “Wonders of the World” and includes natural as well as man-made wonders.  I can clearly visualize Angkor Wat displayed on the lower center part of the map.  And, I recall often looking at that map and imagining what those places, including Angkor Wat, must be like.

The funny thing is that whenever I go on these trips, I do little in depth reading of what I’m about to see.  The same thing with climbing trips.  I never fool with too much detailed beta (my partners usually do that).  But, I notice that I enjoy reading these details after I visit a place.  Strangely enough, I usually purchase my guidebooks either during my visit or after.  Weird, huh?

Well, I had no idea that the system of temples in this area was so vast.  I assumed there were a couple of big ones and then several small ones, maybe consisting of a small courtyard and a pagoda.  No.  The short guidebook provided by the owner of the guest house showed maybe 50-75 temples in the nearby area, all of them quite big.  Some of them are like small cities.  Angkor Wat, of course, is the single largest structure and is well-preserved.  It sits on it’s own island surrounded by a wide moat.  The image that we’re all familiar with is just the main area, but there are outer walls that enclose a much bigger area complete with the original streets.  There’s not much to see anymore on the outskirts other than jungle, but it’s a pleasant walk.

I was warned that I would be “templed out” by day three and this was certainly true.  We only spent a half day seeing temples on the last day, the main one being Beng Mealea, which was a two-hour drive on decent dirt roads from Siem Reap.  I hear it’s often impossible to get to during the rainy season without a boat.  The neat thing about Beng Melea is that much of it is still wild and dominated by the jungle.  The locals talked this place up about how you can crawl around and explore.  Well, it wasn’t nearly that wild; since there’s a $5 entrance fee, there’s also a guide provided who will take you around the most expiditious route.  I probably got on his nerves some by often slowing down and wandering off on my own, climbing on some unsafe roof, or whatever.  I behaved, for the most part.

(Above) Panoramas of Angkor Temples

If I had to pick a favorite temple, hmm, it would probably be Bayon, which is part of the huge fortified city called Angkor Thom, right down the road from Angkor Wat.  This is the site with all the big smiling faces – over two hundred of them!  It was so neat because it was big, well-preserved, and loaded with passageways, steep stairs leading to numerous towers, and hidden alcoves.

But, of course, each temple had it’s own charm. Ta Phrom was made famous from that awful “Tomb Raider” movie (yes, I endured watching it after returning from Cambodia).  With various trees supporting the crumbling walls, it has some of the best “temple” atmosphere in all of Cambodia.  Angkor Wat, of course, is by far the biggest single structure.  It’s a chore looking at all the carvings on one side of the structure, and there are four sides!  If you love that sort of thing, you will go nuts over Angkor Wat.  There are just too many to mention and some of the others started blending together in my head by day three.

(Above) Lots of images from the Angkor Temples

I sat on the east side of the plane and, because the rising sun was so intense, I kept my window shut. When I did open it, I looked down on Cambodia and realized we were banking along the northern edge of Tonle Sap, or “big freshwater lake” in the Khmer colloquial language. Siem Reap sits on this northern edge while the capital, Phnom Penh, sits on the southern edge. Exiting the craft, we were delighted at the perfectly comfortable temperature at 8am. This was certainly a pleasant change from Kuala Lumpur, but it was not to last. The sun becomes intense around 10:30 and the day is hot thereafter. Of all countries so far, Cambodia had the most complex entry requirements. Well, it was easy enough, but there is more attention paid in the entry and exit forms. In fact, the agent staples it to your passport. Also, a visa is required. We used the Cambodia eVisa site, which was a piece of cake, but you can get one at the airport (not recommended since you have to wait in a line). A guest house representative was supposed to be there and, sure enough, when we left the cute little airport, there was someone holding a “Mr. Theron” sign. He spoke no English, but introduced us to our driver for the trip who’s English was functional enough.

We drove into Siem Reap and met the owner of the “Yaklom Angkor” Guest House. I have to have thank my friend, Suzanne from Portland, who recommended this spot.  It was inexpensive, comfortable, clean, and the staff was delightful.  Our room was a minimalistic setup with two twin beds running $28 per night.  It had an attached useable bathroom.  It was plenty good for us and, splitting the cost, $14 a day was a great price, though I’ve heard that prices have risen quite a bit.  It’s true; Cambodia is cheap, but perhaps not stupid cheap the way it was about five years ago.

One of the things that struck me about Siem Reap was that it resembled and average sized town in the US.  In what way you ask?  Probably because most of city seemed to consist of outskirts.  Riding in, we passed various small building after building, hotels, restaurants or clubs, and so on.  Each sat on it’s own lot separated from others.  So, without a car or certainly a bike, getting around would be hard.  Of course, there is an “old town” where most of the fun is (markets, restaurants, and most guest houses).  Besides walking, the main form of transportation for tourists is the “tuk tuk”, which is a two-wheeled carriage capable of carrying up to four people pulled by a motorcycle.  Everything destination within the town seemed to cost “two dollars”, which is overpriced.  One dollar is too, but that’s what we paid usually.  The town is small enough that you can walk much of it.

I was struck at the number of westerners in Siem Reap.  Of course, it makes sense; it’s home of one of the world’s great religious monuments, Angkor Wat, but still, on some sections of streets and in many restaurants, one was hard-pressed to find someone who was not western.  Siem Reap is very friendly and easy for English speakers to get around in.  It’s a fairly safe city too, unlike Phnom Penh.

We avoided the more expensive restaurants and ate most of our meals here on the street, with the locals.  The tourist restaurants, with their big fancy five dollar entries were just too upscale for folks like us.  On the street, each meal and drink was almost always $1.  Most meals consisted of either fried rice or barbecued noodles with your choice of meat or just vegetables.  The “Angkor” beer brand is quite popular, but beer has never refreshed me much.  Spending all day in those temples, often under the hot sun, I needed something more refreshing.  Since those tropical shakes were so popular, that’s basically all I had.  We ususally had our more fancy meals somewhere around one of the temples.  When I could get it, I would order a dish cooked in with the “Amok” spice, which was reminded me of a Thai peanut flavored dish.  It was delicious.

Overall, Cambodia is more depressed and poor than China.  Though there are paved roads in key places, most of these roads are no more than two years old.  Our driver was proud to point out to us who had commissioned and funded the roads (usually the Japanese or Koreans it seemed) and how old they were.  I believe only a few were more than five years old.

By the way, “Siem Reap” means, “Siam Defeated”.  Think the visiting Thais feel bad?

Another Chinese New Year upon us!  That means: time to travel.  I can’t believe this is my third Chinese New Year spent in Asia.  My first trip was to Guilin and environs.  My second was to the Yunnan Province.  This year, well, though there is still plenty to see in China, it was time to leave the country.  The Plan:  Cambodia, a place that I’d wanted to visit ever since I was a kid.  Reliable Li Zhen was my traveling partner again and he booked the air tickets to go.  Because there was no direct flight to Siem Reap from Shenzhen, we connected through Kuala Lumpur.  Because Li Zhen told me that our layover would be overnight, I lobbied for us to spend two nights and see the city.  Good call.  Kuala Lumpur, like Cambodia, had a certain exotic ring to it, which was why I was so interested in a vist.  For some reason, the creepy opening scenes of the one of the early seasons of 24, set in Kuala Lumpur, is what sticks in my mind most.

However, this trip was far from creep.  We stayed in a posh hotel, the Traders in KLCC, in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL” as the locals like to call it) while Cambodia was much more lower end (but still quite comfortable).  The hotel is very affordable though and the view of the Petronas Towers is unbeatable.  Kuala Lumpur is a very easy city to get around in for English speakers, way easier than China.  I mean there’s not even any comparison.  English is widely spoken.  I only encountered a few people who could speak any English, and yet there was always someone nearby to help out.  So, want an easy taste of Southeast Asia?  Try here.

However, make sure you enjoy oppressive tropical heat.  In January, it was hot and humid with temperatures pushing into the 90′s.

After dropping off our bags, we headed out.  Our first stop was to find some food and we settled on a sit down Lebanese place.  Later on we found the highly-sought-after food street and made our eating home here for the rest of the trip.  The food was cheap (do I daresay cheaper than China?) and tasty.  It’s a nice blend of many Asian cuisines.  Same for the tropical drinks; they were numerous, cheap, and refreshing.  My favorite was some sort of coconut drink with a sweet tangy brown substance that you mixed up.  Also, as is popular in Asia, was some sort of green tapioca substance which you could suck up through the straw.  Weird stuff, never tasted anything like it before, but it was good.

It seems I’ve been visiting various tall towers of the world lately, Shanghai being the latest – and best, so I felt we needed to go up into the Petronas Tower, but this was a big waste. I knew that we were only allowed to go up into the Skybridge, but this might be cool, right?!  “NO!”  It’s not that high up, and getting the stupid tickets is absurd.  They’re free, but you have to wait in line.  And I’m shocked at how long I waited in line with hoardes of other people to get them.  And yes, they did “sell out” for the day after I got our tickets.  But, before you go up, you get to watch a movie.  Pretty cool, right?  “NO!” again.  It’s a long propaganda film about how great the Malaysian Petronas company, an oil and gas company by the way, is.  Then, we go up in the Skybridge and take a few pics.  Li Zhen summed it up well when he asked, “Is that all?”

Fortunately, we got our good view shots from the hotel and from the KL Tower, a tall telecommunications tower which affords the best views of the city.  We did this at night, and by the end of this day, we had marched over a large section of Kuala Lumpur (it’s really not that big) and were beat.  We picked a relatively expensive “executive cab” to take us back to the hotel.

We spent much of the next day wandering around a large park/garden area just north of KL Central station.  We took the train to get to KL Central, then, against the advice of a security guard, opted to walk our way to the gardens.  It was quite convoluted, crossing major roads, going through a museum exhibit of ancient weapons, and a tunnel before we arrived.  A neat thing about the city is that there are various places that monkeys run wild, and the garden, of course, is a great place for them to hang out.  We ended up finding our way to both the bird pavilion and butterfly pavilion, both of which were fun tourist destinations.  The bird pavilion boasts that it is the largest walk-through bird park in the world.  Maybe it is; we were there quite a while.  The butterfly pavilion is much smaller, but a densely packed tropical enclosure with butterflies.  I still don’t think it was as good as Callaway Garden’s butterfly conservatory, but they had a collection of BUGS that was awesome – and disgusting.  They had plenty of displays of pinned down monstrous bugs, including some abominations that I thought, until now, only were found in movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”, but they had some live specimens too:  foot long brutes that fortunately were labeled as “rare”.

After the gardens, we hopped a cheap taxi to go over to China town.  Strangely enough, I couldn’t find much native Malaysian food outside of China town, but I did find some within China town.  We didn’t wander too long there.  Much of it was quite similar to parts of China, although the salesmen all spoke English.

We decided to turn in early since Li Zhen had booked us super early departure tickets for Siem Reap.  Because it was a 7am departure, we had to get up at 3:30am in order to be at the airport in time to catch the flight.  The distance from the city center to the airport is absurd.  And you thought the Denver airport was bad.  The Kuala Lumpur airport is at least three times as far away.  And the strange thing is that there seems to be a grid of highways that we cross over to get there.  Not sure where all those roads go to, but we sure did get on and off a lot of exit and entry ramps.

By the way, do you know how to pronounce:  “Kuala Lumpur”?  No, it isn’t Koala Lumpur, as in Koala bear.  The “Kua” sound is one syllable and sounds like “Kwah”.  Everything else is how it’s written.

Oh yes, and I need to thank Robert for his various tips on Kuala Lumpur.  He told me about the “Nasilama” food (see pictures), the big gardens, and various time saving tips.

Part of our trip to Shanghai was spent as a day trip to Suzhou, one of the many canal cities to the west of Shanghai.  I’d wanted to see one of these towns ever since seeing the end scenes from Mission Impossible III.  True to the warnings of the guidebook and some locals, the scenic spots did take some effort to find; much of the old town is surrounded by ugly, smell, or industrial parts.

Buying the train ticket was easy and cheap.  And, we were happy to discover that our $4 fare was for the comfortable and spacious first class cabin.  Not bad.  Approximately one hour later, we pulled in to Suzhou, then began a long walk to the scenic parts of town.  First we crossed a stinking stagnant canal on a bridge crowded with street merchants.  After a couple of wrong turns into the ugly parts of town, we steered in the right direction and found the first guidebook landmark – the silk museum, which, from nearly being over run by vines and creepers, appeared to not have had a visitor in years.  I was worried that the rest of the city might look no better.  But it didn’t; eventually we found some good stuff:  The Temple of Mystery, The Twin Pagodas, and even some quality canal views, though they were nothing close to what can be seen in the city of Li Jiang in the Yunnan province.  I especially enjoyed the food.  We never sat down for a meal, but instead dined on street snacks, the favorite being sort of a Chinese pizza – a crust with ground meat and spices on top.  It was delicious and only 3 RMB (under 50 cents).  There was plenty of milk tea stands, much like Shanghai, to choose from as well.

We ended up hitting all major sections of the city, ending the day in the southwest corner.  After so much walking, we opted to use a rickshaw to make our way back to the center of town.  Unfortunately, we suddenly realized that we only had a few minutes to catch the train back to Shanghai.  We ran to the busiest street, caught a cab to the train station, ran through the gate, and boarded with two minutes to spare.  The nap on the ride back to Shanghai was a perfect ending.