Where are Tinus and Barrie?

The last time you read the latest news from your favourite monkey and beaver travelers we were at Siem Reap, exploring the beautiful ruins of Angkor. I’m typing these words from the very place we started in Cambodia: the Teahouse hotel in Phnom Penh. We’re only here for a night though, tomorrow we’ll be leaving for Kratie in the northeast, and after that, we’re going up north to the 4000 islands in Laos.

Angkor and Siem Reap

Obligatory beaver and monkey at Angkor Wat photograph

But let’s continue where i left you ten days ago. The second day in Siem Reap we decided to explore Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom on bicycle. The two biggest sites we didn’t see yet. I especially liked the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom, or “the 200 faces temple”. Everywhere you look, big smiling faces are staring at you, just like they did for the last thousand years.

Unfortunately, cycling on the sun-bathed complex around noon proved to be a little too much for Tinus, so we went back to the hotel at 15.00 or so. The next day, we took a ‘relax day’ and finally tried the famous “Seeing Hands” blind masseurs for $6 per hour. If you ever wanted to know how it feels like to be a string of spaghetti i can recommend their Japanese shaitsu massage.

The last day we finally swore off our bicycles and hired a tuk-tuk with driver for a day instead of pedaling in the hot sun. Because we (well, mostly Tinus, but i’ve learned this vacation to trust her instincts) wanted to see sunrise at Angkor we got up at 4.30 (no, not a typo) in the morning.

Weather was cloudy, so we didn’t see the actual sun rise above the temple complex, but there’s something utterly beautiful and organic about hearing all the sounds of the jungle when the day breaks at Angkor. We had an interesting talk with a guide here as well. He told us that the majority of tourists visiting Angkor are Asian, mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

Cambodians have an understandable dislike for Korean tour groups. Apparently the Korean bring in everything needed for a tour themselves. The guides are Korean, the buses are Korean, even the food might be imported from Korea. The only thing Cambodia gets back from them, in financial terms, is the entrance fee to Angkor (of which very little is used for conservation of the monuments, and even less goes to normal Cambodians). The Cambodian people are disrespectfully called “toilet guys” because that’s the only moment a Korean will have contact with a Cambodian: to inquire for directions to the nearest toilet. It somehow makes you proud that as an independent traveler you’re at least giving back to the country, and talking to Cambodians about more things than the location of the toilet.

Battambang

Riding the bamboo train

After almost a week of Siem Reap we traveled to Battambang. A far cry from the touristic city around Angkor, Battambang is a sleepy provincial town that’s nevertheless charming. We stayed at a wonderful guesthouse called Battambang My Homestay, led by the friendly Mr. Kum, who had an army of good speaking English tuk tuk drivers around his venue.

We got Mr. Lim, a young tuk tuk driver who drove us to the most important sites around Battambang. Speaking excellent English, we also learned a lot about the country and the current political situation from him. The first day we went to the very touristic (but nevertheless lovely) bamboo train. It’s a warped 15-kilometer railroad track (a relic from the French past) that is being driven with trains that are little more than a slab of bamboo, two pairs of wheels, and a motor that resembles something that you would have on a lawnmower.

Bats

The bamboo train is single track, so what happens when you have another train from the opposite direction? Here’s the stroke of genius with this system: the carts can be easily disassembled in a minute, the train with the most people ‘wins’, drives on, and the other train is reassembled further down the tracks.

We also choose to have a ‘relax day’ in Battambang, taking a cooking class at Nary’s Kitchen to discover the secrets of Khmer cuisine. It was very interesting to learn about all the vegetables and herbs they have at the local market. We made spring rolls (you know, loempia’s), lok lok and of course the inevitable fish amok. Although it sounds a bit pretentious for a first-time Khmer cook, we thought our own (well, Mr. Toot didn’t allow for much creativity from our side, so it’s mostly his) fish amok was the best we tasted in Cambodia.

Tuk tuk

After that we did something rather silly: there are photo studious all over the city (not just Battambang, all Cambodian cities have these) where you can get your picture taken in traditional dress. We heard this was supposed to be big fun, so we asked around and got a $9 deal for three photographs. Tinus was given an excruciating make-up sessions with false eyelashes, deep yellow Khmer makeup (not quite right for the bleak European skin) and a costume that needed to be tied with lots of pins at her back because they have little choice for woman longer than 1.60 here. I got lucky and only needed to wear an Elvis-like costume.

Kampot

A shame they don’t put durian monuments on roundabouts in the Netherlands

We decided to go from Battambang (at the west end of the country) to Kampot (at the southeast) in a day. Little did we know that the road between Phnom Penh and Kampot would be so bad that this journey would take 8 hours over bumpy roads that are barely passable. So, 16 hours after leaving Battambang at 7 in the morning, we finally arrived in Kampot.

Our hotel didn’t exactly match our expectations. For $15 a night, we expected something better than a room without windows, a used condom wrapper under the bed, lots of people getting drunk next doors and a general vibe of insecurity. The final straw was a giant cockroach that peeped up from behind the bed, telling us that we should either find another place to sleep, or be content with no sleep at all.

We were very lucky that a hotel that didn’t have a room when we called a day earlier (Mea Culpa) had a no-show and offered to pick us up at 11 in the evening. Kampot is a really sleepy town, and 11 in the evening might as well be 3 in the morning for them. We felt a bit bad for the people running the hotel we left because they were extremely friendly and acknowledged the problems, but unfortunately friendliness doesn’t kill cockroaches or creates windows in dark rooms.

Kampot proved to be even less touristic than Battambang, one of the few sights in town is a giant statue of a durian(!) fruit on the middle of a roundabout. In contrast to the real thing, this one didn’t smell as bad. We did an evening boat trip up the river to see fireflies. If you didn’t know better you would guess that they put in a bunch of flickering Christmas lights in some trees. We hired a moto (scooter) for a day to drive to Kep (where they have a giant statue of a crab, to compete with the durian in Kampot i suppose), which is not so good for your legs if you sit on the back, so we took another Seeing Hands massage here as well.

To be continued…

So, that’s it for now. We’re going to Kratie tomorrow, and hopefully on Monday evening we’ll finally arrive in Laos, where we travel for another three weeks or so. Same same, but different!

As a reward to reading this complete blog post you’ll be getting some more photographs!

A sign that will surely refrain guys from committing domestic violence

Cooking classes in Battambang.

Driving our moto in Kampot.