October 22nd, Wednesday Angkor Temple Complex

 

We arrived at Siem Reap Cambodia Tuesday evening, and were met at the airport by Sen, who was our personal driver for the next 36 hours.   He took us to our hotel, the Pavilion d’ Orient, a small 36 room hotel, that has the feel of a colonial plantation.   We were greeted warmly in the open air lobby and offered a seat at a table, where they brought us hot tea and cold cloths to cool our face and hands.   They then gave us an orientation to the area and hotel, and loaned us a  Angkor Temple guide book to use during our stay.  Finally they checked us in, while we sat there enjoying the tea.  They then took us to our room, where the bags had already been delivered.  Our 2nd floor room had a balcony that overlooked one of the two salt water swimming pools lots of tropical vegetation around some ponds filled with koi and frogs. We then had a late dinner in the hotel dining room.

On Wednesday we came down to the open air dining room (third picture) for very nice breakfast.  This dinning room is next to the other swimming pool, pictured, and this reclining Buddha.

At 7:00 am we were met by our driver Sen and our guide Sevey.  They took us for the 10 minute drive to our first stop to see Angkor Wat.   Angkor Wat was built 900 years ago, over a period of 37 years, and has more stone in it then the Great Pyramid of Egypt.   It was very ornate when built, with carvings, relief panels, and statues everywhere.   While many still exist, 900 years of heat, humidity, wear and tear have been hard on the sandstone structure.   They dug a moat all the way around the temple, which helped separate it and protect it from the rest of the world.  The moat had the added benefit of creating a downward pressure all around the temple, which prevented the land under the temple from sinking under its weight.  The outer covering of the temple is sandstone, was relatively easy to carve.  Under the sandstone they used a lighter, but stronger volcanic rock, which you can see in the last picture.  The Angkor Wat complex covers an area of 1.3 by 1.5 kilometers. 

sin

While Angkor Wat is the largest and best known, and best preserved temples, it is just one of about a thousand temples and shrines in the 400 square kilometer Angkor historic district.  We went a couple of kilometers over, to the Angkor Thom section, where we toured the Bayon.  This temple is famous for having smiling Buddhas on all sides of the major ornamental features. I need to keep an eye on Nancy, as I caught her smooching with Buddha.

We then drove a couple of kilometers to Ta Prohm, which is smaller and more deteriorated temple.   Forests had grown up over all the temples, and at Ta Prohm, they have left the forest in place.  The trees make it a visually striking setting, and was used for a scene in the movie Tomb Raiders with Angelina Jolie.

Our guide took us to a nice air conditioned  restaurant still in the Angkor historic district, where we had an excellent  lunch.  Our guides then offered to take us anywhere we wanted to go.  So we went back into Siem Reap and checked out a couple of nice fair trade stores.  We went back to the hotel for a rest, and the at 5:00pm our driver took us to a excellent steak house/German restaurant, as we had a craving for non-Asian food.  At 7:00pm we went to the hotel spa for our reserved massages.  We both had an hour long herbal massage, which is described as a traditional therapeutic Khmer message with a soft touch of a steamed herbal ball (a hot rock) to treat muscular tension and the infusion of the herbs to penetrate into your body through the skin and reduce muscle ache.  Nancy then had a facial while I had a body wrap in green tea cream.  A very relaxing way to end a busy day.

Tomorrow is a travel day, so we won’t be posting a day specific blog.   Our driver Sen will be picking us up a 7:30 am and we will be flying back to Bangkok, and the on to Singapore to catch the cruise the following day.  We received our bill for the hotel, $417, which covered the lodging for two nights, two breakfasts and one dinner, the dedicated car and driver, the guide for one day, the two hours of massages for each of us, some sodas from the minibar, and a copy of the guide book we decided to purchase.  Cambodia is a great place for a reasonably priced trip, smiling, friendly people, and interesting history.  Just don’t go in September, the hottest month of the year!

October 21st Tuesday: Railway Market, Floating Market, Royal Palace and Temple, and reclining Buddha

We met Pu at 7:00am and she first took us to the railway market.  It is a wonderful market with lots of fresh vegetables, fish, frogs, meats, spices, and other food options.   Part of the market has expanded to this railway line, we are standing between the rails or looking down between them in all three of these pictures.  Every couple of hours a train comes through, if you want to see what happens, check out the YouTube link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH0VPW-PuEE

We then went to the floating market, which is part commercial market for the people and part tourist market.  At one point during our travels Nancy needed to use the toilet, and to the picture of the facilities, very clean and you must have a good sense of balance.

We then went to the Royal Palace and temple.  It was really amazing.  With a lot of statues carvings and symbols related to a epic battle between the demons (bad) and the monkeys (good).  (I wonder if this help sparked the idea of the Monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.)  We took pictures with a Palace guard, who can’t move like the British guards. The next to last picture in this series is the jade Buddha, the most important Buddha statue in the country.   The Buddha has three gold crowns and vestments, which are changed seasonally in a formal ceremony by the king.

We ended the day looking the reclining Buddha, the third largest reclining Buddha in the world.   Those are his toes in the last photo.  Got caught in a torrential rainstorm as we left the Reclining Buddha.

Pu and the driver took us to the airport for our flight to Cambodia.

October 20th, Monday Bridge on the River Kwai and Elephants

 

 

After a delicious buffet breakfast we met our tour guide Pu and driver Tony.  Pu is a delightful guide who was very gracious.   We rode in a mini van that had captains chairs and a setup for showing videos.  It was wonderful.

After a two and a half hours we arrived at the war museum which told the story of the death railway.   During world war II the Japanese needed a railway to transport raw material, including oil from Burma.   They used about 200,000 slave laborers, including some British, Australian and a few American POWs as part of the workforce, although most of the forced laborers were from Burma and other Asian countries.   As many as half died during the work due to inadequate food, cholera, dysentery, etc.  While the vast majority of the deaths were the Asian workers, only three graves were found for them.   They allowed graves and better record keeping for the POWs.  This is one of the cemeteries for the POWs and it contains 6,982 graves, mainly British and Australian.  There is a movie called the Railway Man, which is pretty accurate compared to the movie Bridge over the River Kwai, which is mainly fiction.  In the Railway Man, a key plot line is the use of a homemade radio, which did occur among the prisoners.    The issue was that the penalty for being caught with one of these radios was death.

After the cemetery we went to the Bridge on the River Kwai.    This was the main bridge, and there was a neighboring wooden bridge (that did not look like the one in the movie).   The bridge was damaged by allied bombing, but the movie is fictional in terms of any plot to destroy the bridge.  We walked on the bridge.

After our walk, we caught the train that went over the bridge and then on for about an hour and a half, going past fields of rice, sugar cane, and tapioca plants.

We had a nice lunch at a local restaurant and then rejoined our driver for the next leg of the adventure.  At one place we stopped for a group of 40-40 monkeys,   They brought corn to feed them, so they were running all over at our feet.   One jumped up on the car roof, he seemed to be the Alpha male.  He later was joined by a female, and …. let’s just say the drive in had nothing on these two…..

We then drove to the elephant camp, where Nancy and I had a half hour ride on a 25 year old, 3 month pregnant elephant.   She was very nice.   When you give the driver tip, you give it to the elephant, who takes it in her trunk and hands it to the driver….   Very cute.

 

We had about a three hour drive back to the hotel, getting in about 6:30pm.   We had a nice dinner in one of the hotels restaurants, and then went to our room for the evening.  At about 9:30pm, we could hear fire works, and we went out onto our balcony for a perfect view of a 10 minute fireworks display over the river.  The perfect end to a perfect day.

Saturday and Sunday October 18th and 19th, 2014

On Saturday we boarded our plane at JFK airport in New York and flew 15 hours to Hong Kong.   The route took us north, along the St. Lawrence River, on the eastern edge of Greenland, over the north pole, and then down across Siberia, Mongolia, and China.  We flew Cathay Pacific, which is a great airline.  We upgraded to premium economy seats, so they were a couple inches wider and had about four more inches of leg room then the regular seats.  We had set ourselves up to realize that the flight would seem forever, and as a result, it was not as horrific as you might think.   We enjoyed the free welcome aboard champagne and the noise cancelling headphones.
In Hong Kong, we caught the flight to Bangkok, which turned out to be the same plane and seats we had getting to Hong Kong, so the seats knew our butts well. 
We took a taxi to the hotel Chatrium, which has turned out to be wonderful.   After our free welcoming drink in the lobby, we were escorted to our room.  There are three towers, one of which is the hotel, one is a residence, and one is a condominium.   Looking at our large room, it looks like even the hotel was designed to be converted into a condo at some point   We were located on the 10th floor, and had a balcony the overlooked the 6th floor swimming pool and the river.

We went to bed early, as we were exhausted and were on our first tour on Monday at 7am.