Temple RUN - A day exploring Angkor

Brellowgirl
Feb 23, 2016
9 min read

Cambodia wasn't in my plans but I'm damn glad I came.

2.9.16

Bangkok air is the best airline! Waiting for my flight to Bangkok from Lampang and there were all kinds of free little snacks at the airport. I think I ate my weight in mini banana muffins (they kept looking at me but I was starving). Plus there was food on the plane even though the flight was JUST an hour and twenty minutes!! We got little flatbreads with chicken and cheese and cut fruit. Then I had to run to grab my bag and check in to my next flight to Siem Reap which was a THIRTY-FIVE MINUTE flight and we got MORE food! A green noodle salad with pieces of chicken and a glass noodle salad with veggies and chilis. I could taste the lemongrass! There was a yummy coconut jelly dessert with pineapple pieces too. Delicious. It made me so happy! When we landed I fast walked to the airport because I knew there was going to be a line for visas on arrival. I got in line fairly quickly with only 5 or so people ahead of me and the process was so fast and painless. In Cambodia I am "lady" passing by. Everyone calls out to you, “lady, lady, tuk tuk”. I prefer to walk so I head straight to my hostel. I booked a few nights at a hostel called One Stop Hostel. There are two so I picked the newer one right in front of the Angkor Night Market. I am so not disappointed, this place is beautiful! It’s so clean looking with all white everything, a huge lobby area with comfortable seating, a kitchen with all day breakfast and friendly service. I check in, drop off my laundry and head out to walk around the market. The market here isn’t like Thailand’s. In Thailand you can find street food everywhere. In this market there are more restaurants. There are tons of vendors though selling everything from hammered metal jewelry, paintings, clothing and other souvenirs. I sat in a restaurant away from the hustle and facetimed with Kirk a bit before going back to the hostel.

2.10.16

I have a lazy day today writing and reading the day away. The guys got into Siem Reap today (they took a bus all the way from Pai to Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then over the border into Cambodia. I didn’t have that much time to spare since my visa was expiring so I had to fly so I wouldn’t get in trouble). Kirk reminded me that it was Ash Wednesday (I hardly ever know what day it is anymore) so I found myself a Catholic church in Siem Reap and took a walk there for mass. It was a great experience to have with the locals. The church was a wooden structure with a thatched roof. The door was open and there were bamboo and straw mats that were rolled out for people to sit on. I wore a dress to mass since that’s what you do on Holy days of obligation…wrong. I had to sit in a weird position wearing my dress the whole time. The mass was in Khmer (the language spoken here) and in English. So everything was in Khmer and then the Gospel and the homily were repeated in English. We received our ashes first then had communion, overall it was really cool to sit through a Khmer mass. I met up with the guys after church and we had dinner together then walked around the market to pick up souvenirs. It was crazy how many people stopped me to tell me that I had something on my forehead. Even after I told them that I knew and it was because of Ash Wednesday and I had gotten them at church only half of them knew what I was talking about and out of those half there were two people that wanted to know more so I talked to them a bit about the significance. It was cute though, people were running after me to tell me that I had smutz on my face ha.

2.11.16

Today was adventure day in the Angkor temples! Sunrise at Angkor Wat is not something to be missed so we got there around 4:45am to make sure we got a good spot to watch. There were already plenty of people there when we arrived but the guys were able to squeeze in between some people and sit on the ground to get good pictures. We waited for about an hour and a half before the sun came up. It really was a sight to see as the sky changed colors over and over. The sky got bright and people started leaving but the sun still hadn’t come up over the temple yet. All of a sudden there were slivers of light that started peeking from behind the giant wat. It was really something else. We grabbed some food and half of the guys took turns taking naps on their hammocks while I went to explore the temples with the other half. The temples are absolutely amazing. There are about 1,000 in the 400 sq. km area, that’s just crazy to me. We walked around the main temple for a bit and then explored some smaller ones in the woods and then walked back to get the other guys. I ended up just walking around with Juan and got to know him better. I was talking about my brothers, like I always do, and mentioned that David was competing for the Hult Prize and Juan just so happened to be good friends with one of the team members that won the Hult Prize just last year and put them in contact. I thought that was the coolest thing ever and just goes to show you that everything happens for a reason, meaning that I was meant to meet these guys and travel around with them for a bit =] They were seriously the funniest guys ever and cracked me up so hard 24/7. Half of the time I had no idea what they were talking about but I implored them to keep conversing in Spanish just so I could hear it and pick up some new words. What really made me laugh every time was all the times that they were near Chinese tourists and would interject in a conversation in Chinese and the Chinese people would just look at them in disbelief or start laughing thinking that they were hearing things. There’s nothing funnier to me than catching people off guard like that. Speaking three languages each though is really something cool, they’re all little smarty pants-es.

So, I can take a sec to introduce them since we’ve been spending some time together.

Roberto was the first one I met in Pai, Thailand when we were at Purple Monkey. He’s the crazy one who invited me to tag along with them originally in Laos but then plans changed within hours and we were off to Cambodia.

Alejandro was the voice of reason of the group and was cool cause I got to practice my Portuguese with him. Please note that he’s from Guatemala, not El Salvador =]

Juan, my homie, spent some time living in the states so we bonded over that. We had very similar taste in music and laughed over the stupidest shit when we were together.

Oscar was my photo buddy. You know how everyone loses me because I always stop to take pictures of everything? That’s Oscar. Even I would lose him, that’s when you know it’s bad. That’s besides the point though. Oscar is a great photographer and he and Chupis really taught me some cool basics so I can practice with my camera.

Chupis. Chupis comes in last over here JUST because he thinks I liked him the least. It’s actually cause all he did the whole time was make fun of me. Just kidding. Chupis made me laugh so hard with all the weird laughs that he did. He and Juan were my personal photographers when I got tired of carrying my camera. It was actually really really great cause Chupis likes photography and I never have any pictures of myself so between him and Oscar I now have a bunch of great shots of exploring the ancient ruins.

So we started at Angkor Wat and then headed to another temple to see the Bayon smiling faces at Angkor Thom. I can’t explain how cool these temples were. It was like being in temple run or tomb raider. The faces were massive. I can’t believe they were built by people, so incredible and mystifying. After the Bayon faces we went to Ta Prohm which was the temple used in the Laura Croft film. Ta Prohm is one of the more popular temples visited by tourists because it still has been relatively untouched. It’s amazing to see nature reclaiming the temple walls and trees growing out from in between stone, their roots possessing whole temples. If this place stays in this state it would really be amazing to see in another 50, 100 years. We stayed there for sunset, running through the openings of the temples to see where they led. There was no one else around and we stayed past closing time but didn’t get caught. It was eerily quiet and a bit spooky walking in the ruins and turning corners and seeing shadows of hanging trees and climbing roots. I’m so grateful for the guys because staying there late is something I totally wouldn’t have done without them yet was so cool. The story of the day however had nothing to do with the temples but all to do with Juan’s pants. He had a pair of Thai pants, ya know, the pants that every single Thai vendor tries to sell. So his got a huge hole in the crotch towards the beginning of the day-don’t know how. He thought he could save them and walk around for a bit more but in climbing all the steep stairs we did the hole only got bigger. There were vendors near the temples that we had walked through earlier and they were happy to see us return to buy something. Juan made the lady selling pants laugh so hard when she saw the hole I was practically crying laughing so hard. Even funnier was that evening when we returned to the vendor that he had originally bought his pants from. When he retold them about his day walking around with a hole in his pants they were in tears too. Something about language barriers always makes stories funnier.

In walking around Angkor night market the woman selling fruit shakes gave me some rambutan to try. Rambutan look pretty much like lychees but hairier. When you peel them the peel comes off easier than a lychee and it’s a bit waxy inside. It tastes just like a lychee though, so yummy!

Here in Siem Reap there’s a bar road called “Pub Street”. It’s just a row of bars/clubs where all the tourists go. The guys wanted to check it out but half of them fell asleep so I went with Juan and Chupis after shooting some games of pool with them. It was super ratchet. I mean just gross. The guys ended up bumping into some friends so we stayed for a bit to dance and I ended up having fun but it was just grimy all around. When we were leaving we stood outside for a bit to regroup and I saw something that caught my eye. There was a little boy and a little girl, probably no older than 5 sitting on the curb rummaging through big black garbage bags. They were pulling out the plastics and metals probably to collect and take to a recycling facility for money. Some people in passing felt bad and gave them money and others actually kicked the trash around right in front of them. My heart broke into millions of pieces. How could you let your child sit on the street and do that? ESPECIALLY on this street with drunk tourists when Cambodia of all countries has a bad reputation for pedophilia. I know it’s probably because some tourists will hand them money but that’s not solving anything for these young children. They should have been sleeping so they could get up early for school the next day. I was deeply upset by seeing this. An adult is one thing but a child is something totally different.

2.12.16

Lazy day today. I wrote during the day and met up with the guys at their hostel in the late afternoon. We had Indian food for dinner and then took a night bus to Phnom Penh. This bus was supposed to be a VIP luxury hotel bus HA. It was totally not. However, I thought I was gonna have to sleep next to some rando cause the seats were smaller than full sized beds for two people with no divider or anything. However, we got on last after they had assigned seats to everyone so we all sat towards the back and Juan and I raced to the back of the bus where there was a big area and we got that to ourselves. We had to take our shoes off when we got on the bus and they gave us little bags to put them in. I got my laptop out and played the only movie I had saved on my desktop-The Interview lol. We all crammed in the back of the bus to watch and ended up falling asleep 20 minutes into it. We didn’t get blankets so I woke up freezing in the middle of the night. Of course, Juan had left his jacket folded next to me just in case I needed it. The bus ride was bumpy and uncomfortable. I thought we were going to die a few times.

When we got into Phnom Penh we spent the day touring the killing fields and S21 which I've dedicated its own entry to. I'll be posting that tomorrow.

Much love,

Cas