Scenes and Sights in Cambodia

Scenes and Sights in Cambodia

We had only four days in Cambodia, so we couldn’t go far, but here are a few scenes and sights beyond Angkor Wat. If you’re on Facebook, you’ve seen some of these photos before.

Arrival in Cambodia.  Our bus to Siem Reap, Cambodia, left Bangkok about 9am on December 5 and reached the border about 1pm. We had been advised to get our tourist visas at the border, and to pay the $30 fee in US currency. We were excited to arrive,and followed the signs to the first step.

The process wasn't as easy as the signs might lead you to believe. Inside the building, we lined up to be photographed and fill out paperwork for the visa, then stood in line again. The uniformed officials who scrutinized our passports and collected the fee told us it was $30 plus 100 baht – clearly, an arbitrary surcharge that would line their pockets.  Annoying, but we all paid it – since none of us can speak Khmer we thought was no hope of talking our way out of it, and 100 baht (about $3.25) is not a large sum – as the officials of course knew. Later I learned from someone who had been warned in advance of this scam that you must simply refuse to pay the 100 baht and they have to let you through. Live and learn!

Up to this point the lines had moved rather quickly, but now we stood in a long and slow-moving line with other tourists waiting to finish the process inside the little blue building you see below.

It took the better part of an hour to get inside the building, where the line split into four, one for each window at the far end. After another hour and a half, we finally got our passports back, with the visas in them, and were back on the bus for Siem Reap at about 5pm.

In the process of looking up other information, I learned that the name “Siem Reap” means “defeat Siam" -- a reference to times when all was not well between Thais and Khmers -- times that have not been forgotten on either side.

Views of Siem Reap.  Cambodia was part of French Indochina from 1887 until the mid-twentieth century. Many buildings reflect the French influence, as you can see in the pictures below.

View of our hostel in Siem Reap

View from 4th floor balcony of hostel

View from hostel balcony, looking across the street

 The red roofs, in particular, reminded me of roofs in France and Germany.  Streets in the town, however, are rather similar to streets in Thailand.

A difference between Siem Reap and similar towns in Thailand is that there are relatively fewer cars. Earning power in Cambodia is not high. Many Cambodians find work in Thailand and send money home to their families.

Khmer Traditional Dance.  We saw a sign announcing a free performance of Khmer Traditional Apsara Dance and were intrigued after seeing images of dancing apsara (female spirits) on temple walls in the ruins. Here is one we saw on quite a few walls.

The performance venue was a stage on the second floor of a restaurant in the town. There were no printed programs or announcements so we were on our own to interpret what we saw and heard. The dancers in the picture below, so beautifully dressed, look ready to spend a day with royalty. They performed a graceful dance that reminded me of both Thai and Indian traditional dances, but with its own character.

In the video below, you see dancers in the green butterfly costumes that were featured at the temple photo-op session (in the Angkor Wat post).

The next excerpt is from a longish dance that involved, as you see, two women, a horse, and a monkey. It was an amusing dance with many leaps and acrobatics, eliciting chuckles from the audience. I couldn’t follow everything, but it was clear that the monkey received his comeuppance at the end for some misbehavior or other.

Finally, here is an excerpt from a drama that seems to be about a harvest – at least, that’s my theory of what the large baskets are for.

We learned later that while these dances drew inspiration from apsara figures in the temple ruins, they are not medieval dances that were passed down through the centuries. In fact, many traditional art forms were lost during turbulent times in Cambodian history, most recently under the Khmer Rouge.  The dances as we see them today were revived and reinterpreted in the 20^th century.

 

Peace Corps in Cambodia.  There have been Peace Corps volunteers in Cambodia for about 8 years now.  By chance, we met some currently serving volunteers, one of whom invited us to visit her site. Her name is Olka; she is the first person on the left in the picture of us having breakfast, below. One member of our group, Nay (see below), accepted the invitation to go with her to meet her host family and tour her village. 

(L to R) Olka, Katherine, me, Charles, Angela, Nay, Tricia

Floating Village.  On our last day in Cambodia we took a late-afternoon tour of a so-called floating village. Of course, it isn’t literally floating, but the houses are on stilts and when the water is high, it appears that the houses are floating. Here we are on the boat with our guide and the boat’s driver.

 Our guide (seated next to me) told us he was 22, but seems younger. He said he went to school through grade 5 (the mandatory minimum, recently raised to grade 6), but didn’t continue because no further classes were available at his school and his family couldn’t afford to send him elsewhere. Cambodia is struggling to rebuild its educational system after almost everything was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.

Here are several photos of houses we saw along the way, and a boat approaching an area where there are businesses and amusements.

The pictures below are of the school, where our guides took as toward the end of the trip. They told us that quite a few students live at the school, because they don’t have parents. We were urged to donate money – perhaps you can read the sign in the second photo, which asks for charity to help the poor.  We gave them a few dollars but felt unsure as to whether the money would go toward food for the students or into someone’s personal slush fund.

 Here is a short video of children rowing a boat – obviously they learn this skill at a young age. According to our guide, few children in the floating village drown, no more than one per year.

Before concluding the tour, our guides wanted to show us these alligators, kept in a dirty cage under a pier.

We then went up on to the next level of the pier to view the sunset and met a group of Singaporeans having a cocktail party.  They were generous in sharing wine and snacks with us.

These are some highlights of our stay in Cambodia. Of course we spent time shopping (hey, we were tourists after all). We also went to a very good museum in Siem Reap, but couldn’t take pictures there.  Anyway, I now have quite a few mental pictures of Cambodia, which used to be pretty much a blank page in my inventory of places in the world.