SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA

 NOT JUST A TEMPLE TOWN

We traveled recently to Cambodia on a five-day post-trip after our 3-week adventure in Vietnam with the small group travel company, Overseas Adventure Tours. OAT limits tours to just 16 travelers and our Vietnam trip had just 14 people. On our post-trip to SIem Reap Cambodia there was just four of us.

Cambodia was a vast open unexplored place for us, and apart from knowing a bit of the nightmarish history of the Khmer Rouge, and a slight familiarity with the majestic, massive Hindu/Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat that we culled from pictures in a travelogue, we did not know what to expect.

IT’S GREEK TO ME

OAT flew us from Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap the second largest city in the Kingdom of Cambodia after Phnom Penh. The carrier was Cambodia National Airlines and the flight in a propeller plane took just over an hour. Thankfully the leader boards at the HCMC airport rotated between English, Cambodian and Vietnamese so we could find our gate.

At least in Vietnam you could read things, but Khmer, the official name of the Cambodian language is indecipherable to the novice eye. There are 74 squiggly nonsensical letters, and, well, it’s complicated. Thankfully when our OAT guide handed out our little cheat sheet of things to say, like “hello,” or “how much?” it was printed out phonetically with English letters. Also, a lot of signage is listed in both Khmer and English, like the stop signs. Although still shaped like the universal red octagon, at least you don’t have to guess what “បហ្ឈប់” means, with “stop” shown just below.

Anyway, here’s a great video on the Khmer / Cambodian language:  

VIDEO ON KHMER LANGUAGE

WELCOME

This language accommodation is convenient as Siem Reap is a very touristed destination, mainly because of its proximity to the Angkor Archaeological Park, the home of Angkor Wat and several other notable temples. Tourism in Cambodia is a multi-billion-dollar industry attracting millions of foreign visitors to the Kingdom and the temple complex is just a short drive out of Siem Reap. These temples are the main “attraction”, but Siem Reap itself is a vibrant town of French colonial architecture. It has a lively night scene along Pub Street, and there are plenty of restaurants and luxury hotels. The Angkor National Museum explores the history of the Khmer Empire and is worth a visit, just expect to see a lot of Buddhas.

ANGKOR NATIONAL MUSEUM

Opposite of the serenity of Buddha it is possible to visit several war related museums in Siem Reap, including the Landmine Museum and the Genocide Museum.

MAKING THE WORLD A SAFER PLACE

Instead of solely focusing on the horrors of that time though, our tour leader gave us a brief synopsis of that sad time and had us visit Wat Kesararam, a small temple where we were able to walk the grounds and receive a water blessing from the monk there.

There is a stupa containing the remains of victims of the Khmer Rouge on the grounds, but the overall visit felt like we were moving forward instead of embracing the past.

WAT KESARARAM, SIEM REAP

Another stop, albeit macabre, that is leading Cambodia and the world to a brighter future was a visit to the APOPO demining organization. APOPO and their trained African Giant Pouched Rats tackle the global issue of landmines left behind in conflicts by sniffing them out.  At the facility in Siem Reap we learned about these HeroRATs that can sense and help clear an area filled with landmines the size of a tennis court in just 30 minutes, compared to the four days a standard deminer with a metal detector would take to complete this same task.

HeroRAT

We were treated to a demonstration of a HeroRAT and its handlers and later had the chance to hold a critter. These working rats are big, but light enough to not trip a landmine and it was a positive stop to see how APOPO deals with the sobering reality of deadly landmines.

APOPO ORGANIZATION

APSARA

Modern day Aspara dancers mimic the carvings found on the walls of Angkor Wat. The performers wear ornate headdresses and silk clothing. They begin training at an early age to ensure flexibility of their hands and feet as their fingers bend backwards and toes flex upwards during the mesmerizing dance performances that were once only for the king’s pleasure.

In Siem Reap OAT had us attend a dinner/dance performance of Apsara and got us front row seats.

There’s a lot to do in Siem Reap beyond Angkor Wat.

Thanks for reading.

Love Janet and greg

© 2024 by Gregory Dunaj

A HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA

A LEAP OF FAITH

ANGKOR WAT - 5/24

Growing up during the Vietnam War had skewed my view of ever visiting the country. It was a horrific time for this young man and these United States. Decades later I still had misgivings about a trip to Vietnam and it was a “leap of faith” (and a slap to the back of my head by Janet) to agree to travel there.

I can report now, after spending three weeks traveling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City with several stops in between that Vietnam was one of the better trips in my lifetime. The country is beautiful, and the people of Vietnam are warm and friendly and genuinely pleased that we would ever return to their country in peace.

The ominous history of Vietnam was there, if you sought it out, and I have friends who fought in the war who were skeptical about our travels. There were too many bad memories for them, but overall, despite the past, the latter-day Vietnam left us with many fond memories.

YEAR ZERO

Cambodia was even more difficult to consider as a vacation destination, given the history of the Khmer Rouge and their frenzied genocide of the 70s. Pol Pot wanted to reset Cambodia to “Year Zero” and an agrarian state free from all foreign influence. Some estimates have the Khmer Rouge purging nearly 2 million people in four short years as the regime targeted middle-class citizens and intellectuals. People were rounded up by the military and sent to “reeducation” camps where they were forced into labor, starved, tortured and executed. There is a colloquial term for this: The Killing Fields.  

WHERE PEOPLE GET THINGS DONE

Although the Vietnam conflict consumed our attention, the chaos of Cambodia was even more unnerving. As the depraved murder spree by the Khmer Rouge was slowly revealed to the world the quagmire of Cambodia became fodder for sensationalistic films and sarcastic, derisive songs by punk rock groups. Watching the 1984 film “The Killing Fields” was eye-opening and frightening. How could this happen? I remember watching a documentary with the facts told from the Khmer Rouge’s viewpoint and was shaken to see the chilling cold-hearted approach children took to killing their neighbors to further Pol Pot’s revolution.

The Dead Kennedys took a snide approach to it in their 1980 song “A Holiday In Cambodia” eviscerating over-privileged college students who think they know it all and contrasting it with the brutal reality of the Khmer Rouge.

Sure, it’s punk rock and can be dismissed as such, but what happened in Cambodia was real.

POST-TRIP

APSARA DANCER

It was into this swirl of memories that we decided to tack on a post-trip to Cambodia with Overseas Adventure Tours (OAT), a small-group tour company that we discovered in researching Vietnam. OAT offered a pre-trip and this post-trip to Cambodia. Our trip to Cambodia was particularly small with just another couple staying after the “Inside Vietnam” portion of the OAT trip.

The five-day trip included roundtrip airfare from HCMC to Siem Reap, which is the gateway to Angkor Wat. This massive Buddhist temple was first built as a Hindu temple and is depicted on the flag of Cambodia.

We stayed in one hotel and made daytrips to Angkor Wat and several other temples, received a water blessing from a Buddhist monk who was also an IT specialist, waded into the revelry of Pub Street for a few drinks, haggled with vendors in the night market for trinkets that we gained for astonishingly paltry amounts, cruised the massive Tonie Sap lake to see a floating village, attended a show of Apsara dancers, the traditional Cambodian art form, watched a family make rice noodles which we had a chance to sample, and learned how to fold lotus flowers to make an offering at a temple. 

SIEM REAP PUB STREET

It was a beautiful, relaxed trip and the Cambodian people are wonderful. It would have been easy to forget the past horrors of Cambodia, if not for the Stupa we saw that held the skeletal relics of those unfortunate souls.

Stupa, Siem Reap Cambodia

Thanks for reading.

Cambodian future

Love Janet and greg

OVERSEAS ADVENTURE TRAVEL

© 2024 by Gregory Dunaj

                                       Dead Kennedys / Holiday In Cambodia