Siem Reap and Angkor

We arrived here on Wednesday after a 6 hour bus journey on a lovely new air conditioned bus. It's a new service set up this year to make the journey a bit easier. Plenty of legroom on the a/c bus and you can make your reservation on the Internet. Only flaw with their plan is that no one checks tickets or collects money , so we got a free journey. We did tell them we hadn't paid but no one was in the position to collect the money so we still haven't paid and have to wait until we're back in PP. it annoys me as money is so hard for them to come by and they let $ 26 go.

Siem Reap is the main tourist area in Cambodia being the closest town to Angkor and its hundreds of temples. The Angkor site is vast spread out 20-30 km north of town.

Siem Reap is a really busy tourist town with hundreds of hotels spread around the place. As with every Asian tourist city there are tons of markets and night markets to extract your cash. The centre is quite small and has been taken over a little by pub street - which is a retrograde step IMO - it's a small street with pubs playing really loud music not a nice place to shop or get a meal. You would think it would scare off the middle age tourists on which this place thrives.

Another thing which Ang and I have noticed is the shift in tourists since we were last here. The vast majority are now Asian - Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Far less European/Americans . It obviously reflects the global economic changes and the rising middle classes in Asia - it also indicates how little European influence there is becoming here. From rulers to irrelevance in a hundred years.

The map above shows the main Angkor site. There are other temple sites spread further north and others which are not open - as they have work to prepare them. Another issue for them to overcome is land mines and cluster bombs. There are still huge numbers in Cambodia and until these are cleared the temples cannot be worked on.

Also when you visit a temple the work is generally being paid for by Japanese, Korea, Chinese, India, even German, Czech. A) there is so much to do Nd the sites are vast and b) these sites are religiously important to those countries.

The Angor area was built from the 8th to 12th centuries. At that time the Khmer empire controlled large area of SEAsia bordering China and Chamak (Vietnam) . The successive kings built temples and cities in different locations over that period. As above.

On Thursday we did what's called the short circuit. Our tuk tuk driver - Polans- who is doing all our driving - took us around the circuit above through Angkor Wat, Angkor Thomas ( which is an enormous area with lots to see) and Ta Phrom ( famous for featuring in the tomb raider films).

 

 

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