Nov 242011
 

Siem Reap

Battambang is a large town surrounded by rural farming areas.

Siem Reap is a small city next to a large tourist attraction – the largest in Cambodia, and one of the largest in the world.

In Battambang, it’s possible to be one of only a handful of tourists during the off-season. During the peak season, the tourist presence is annoying, but it does not take over the character of the town.

In Siem Reap, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a bunch of tourists. Although it’s the peak season right now, the recent floods caused many would-be tourists to cancel plans, making it more a peak-season-light…and still there are more tourists in a single Siem Reap restaurant than there were in all of Battambang during October.

The Siem Reap tourist population must number in the thousands – many, many thousands. Japanese and Koreans are packaged into groups, hauled around by fleets of tour buses. Australians, Brits, French, and other Western tourists are distributed amongst the hundreds of tuk-tuks and bicycles that populate the city.

As to hotels and guesthouses, there are more of these, per capita, than there are churches in the American Bible Belt. Many of the hotels are no-kidding, five-star joints, certainly among the best in Southeast Asia.

Hotels and guesthouses are only outnumbered by the restaurants using English menus with Denny’s-style pictures of food.

Because it’s such a tourist-focused city, loads of local Khmers speak English – many better than me (not that that’s too difficult, given that I’m a product of the Louisiana school system). In many ways, it’s easier for us to not speak any Khmer in Siem Reap, as doing so often confuses the conversation. Some of this is due to the locals anticipating us speaking English; not Khmer. Some of this is apparently due to us learning Khmer with a Battambang accent.

Downtown, next to the Psar Chaa (a market), is a complex of restaurants catering exclusively to tourists. The restaurants are packed into a dense area – asshole to belly button – with narrow pathways to negotiate the maze. It’s all nice and clean and lit, with signs and banners in English, menus on stands in front of each establishment, and greeters to answer your questions and coax you to a seat. In some ways, the restaurant complex reminds me of Old Town in San Diego, or The Riverwalk in San Antonio, if only for the lights at night and the number of dining options.

And because of all this, I feel like we are no longer actually in Cambodia. Siem Reap is to experiencing Cambodia, what Orlando, Florida is to experiencing the United States.

 

Costs

Like any other tourist hotspot, the difference between Siem Reap and the rest of the country is reflected in cost.

Some businesses work on an exchange rate of 4300 Cambodian riel to the US dollar, meaning that unless you pay in US currency, you lose 7% on the purchase (the common math used in the rest of the country is 4000 riel to the dollar).

Beer – my standard gauge for costs – runs 2500 riel for a can of Anchor or Angkor in a roadside shop. Everywhere else we’ve been in Cambodia, it’s 2000 riel. That’s a 25% cost increase in a basic commodity.

Dinner for two runs into the US Dollar mid-teens – about twice the cost of an equivalent meal in Battambang. Some of the restaurants at which we ate were Cafe Moi Moi, Thai Thai Restaurant, Sugar Palm Restaurant, Le Tigre de Papier Restaurant, Chamkar Restaurant, and our hotel’s restaurant (go to the “Eat in Cambodia” category to view our reviews).

Unlike everywhere else in Cambodia, a tourist can’t rent a motorbike in Siem Reap. We got around this by having a bike arranged for us in Battambang, but we still can’t use it to transport ourselves inside the Angkor temple areas. Tourists are forced to hire tuk-tuk drivers or rent bicycles. With a tuk-tuk running US $15 and up for a day, this adds significantly to overall costs. The tuk-tuk drivers’ union must have a pretty good lobbying team.

For accommodations, we stayed at the Kool Hotel. It’s affiliated with the Sanctuary Villa in Battambang, where we stayed quite a long time, so we got a pretty good deal. (Click here to read about the Kool Hotel.)

 

The Angkor Temples

We went to several of the temple ruins in the Angkor complex, including Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, Banteay Kdei, and the Roluos Temples (Preah Ko, Bakong, and Lolei).

The ruins are, of course, impressive. We had already been to Sukhothai in Thailand, Champasak in Laos, and a host of other ancient ruins in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. The ruins around Angkor are more intense in concentration and size.

The downside to visiting Angkor is, of course, the number of other tourists. They are legion. Walking the causeway into Angkor Wat is liking driving the I-5 in Los Angeles during rush hour. At Ta Prohm, lauded for the trees that have intertwined their roots with the stone walls, the glut of tour groups often made it impossible to move through the narrow passageways.

To avoid the traffic at Ta Prohm, and give Jen half a chance at getting some photographs, we returned in the morning at sunrise. The tourist traffic was much lighter, but we were still not alone.

In this article, and on Jen’s Flickr page, you will find photographs she took at the Angkor temples. Just because you don’t see a bunch of tourists in the shots, don’t think it’s all peace and tranquility and meditative at the ruins. There was a lot of waiting for a break in foot traffic, and shooting over the heads of the masses, involved in getting these pictures.

The street sellers run amok at the ruins. Whenever our tuk-tuk stopped outside a temple entrance, the hawkers descended on us like flies in Australia; and they didn’t readily take “no” for an answer. We would be followed by a handful of women or children, repeatedly asking if we wanted this or that, while we kept walking and saying “no, thanks,” over and over again in Khmer.

The pathways from the entrances through the temple perimeter walls, to the temple buildings, were typically lined with more sales people, pushing books, flutes, postcards, shirts, scarves, and bad art that looked like 1970’s-era stuff intended to be viewed under black light. This is where a little knowledge of Khmer did pay off, as saying “no, thanks” or “we do not want it” or “we already have one” in the local language seemed to end the harassment a bit faster.

We did cave in to a couple of pitchmen, though. One was a guy hawking handmade bamboo mouth harps. Being a Southerner, I am genetically incapable of resisting a mouth harp.

The other was an eleven-year-old girl named Sarem. We initially rejected her efforts. Later, when she saw that I had purchased the mouth harps, she was visibly hurt. But, business is business, and we still didn’t buy any of her wares. Later, she ran into us again. Undaunted, she sat down and started explaining the immense value we would derive from her products – flutes, postcards, papers birds, and bracelets. She also threw in the personal touch, explaining that she needed the money to pay to go to school (teachers in this country often extract a fee from students to supplement their income). That’s when I relented – as she struck my coal-black, cynical heart as being exceptionally sincere – and bought a flute and some bracelets. We threw in an additional day’s teacher bribe money in recognition of her superior salesmanship.

It was not just salesmanship that made Sarem impressive. It was also her English speaking ability. She was very much at the conversational level. An eleven-year-old girl, in a poor country, who sales trinkets, some of which likely pay for schooling, and who speaks a second language at the conversational level – well, it still impresses the hell out of me. You see a good deal of this in Cambodia, but almost no equivalent in the States, and in this regard Cambodia is kicking America’s ass.

Back to other pitchmen…

On the pathways in several of the temple ruins are musical ensembles of amputees, prosthetics displayed beside them. Their signs say they are victims of land mines, which are a persistent legacy of the conflicts in Cambodia. All the groups have CD’s for sale. All the groups also seem to be playing the same song – with slight variation, but the same song, nonetheless. Click the player below to hear a clip of one of the groups.

 

 

So, that’s the temples of Angkor – hordes of tourists, parking lots full of tuk-tuks and tour buses, tuk-tuk drivers sleeping in hammocks while they wait for the return of their passengers, hawkers pitching food and drink and trinketry, amputee musical groups playing the same tune over and over again. That’s not to say you shouldn’t visit Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. It’s just to say that it’s a lot closer to being at Disneyland than it is to being in the next sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Tomb Raider. Anyone who has waited in line to ride Pirates of the Caribbean, on a holiday weekend, will know what I’m talking about.

By the way, we grabbed breakfast at a roadside food stall within the temple complex. Jen soon had a case of traveler’s diarrhea – one of many we have contracted over the last few months. In Cambodia and Laos, it is just plain risky to eat at other than tourist-oriented restaurants. In Thailand, you can usually eat in food stalls or on the street without much concern, but not so in Cambodia and Laos.

 

Breaking a Sweat

Prior to Siem Reap, we spent twenty-eight days in Battambang trying to regain some of the physical conditioning we had lost during the previous five months on the road. We weren’t about stop in Siem Reap. Finding a swimming pool and a workable set of gym equipment was a top priority.

Our first effort was made at the Lotus Resort and Spa. They have a decent lap pool, but the gym is all but useless – a couple of cheap treadmills, a cheap cycling machine, no weights other than some dumbbells. To use this, they charged us US $5 each.

The next day, we headed to the Raffles hotel – also known as the Grand Hotel d’Angkor, which is a no-kidding luxury hotel. Here, we hit pay dirt, negotiating a half-month spa membership that gave us use of the swimming pool, gym, and all spa facilities. It also included a one-hour massage for each of us, which offset the US $100 cost of the half-month couples membership (by the way, a one-month couples membership costs US $200).

The per-day cost came to just US $1.50 more than it cost us to swim and hit the gym in Battambang, and that’s without factoring in the two free massages.

The Raffles pool is great for laps, and we pretty much had it to ourselves in the morning. The gym is small, but the cardio machines and weight equipment are high-quality, and support just about anything you may want to do.

The massages we got were relaxing, but not the best either of of has had – more like in the bottom third of the spectrum. We both received Swedish-style oil massages. The masseuses were pleasant, and the massages were nice rub-downs, but they were not really muscle-workers. Had we paid full price for them, we would have felt overcharged.

Nonetheless, a spa membership at Raffles is a good deal for anyone staying in Siem Reap for an extended period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:18 pm