Frank and I are enjoying our last full day in Siem Reap before we peace out to Laos bright and early tomorrow morning. A lot has happened since I last posted, so I'll try to give you a thorough but unboring rundown.
Wednesday was deemed a recovery day considering we had just traveled from across the world and had to bridge an 11 hour time difference. While Frank went off in search of a fancy gym and 4-hand massage, I decided to wander the streets of Siem Reap and take in the scenery while most of the tourists evac'd for the temples. First things first, as per my usual I wandered into the first Irish bar I stumbled upon and settled down with a Guinness (miss you Kelly!) and my guidebook to lay out my day. Appealingly, SR has a lot of socially responsible organisations in town, so I hit up a local artisan workshop and Seeing Hands Massage by the Blind, which provides blind locals with a legitimate income beyond begging, and at $6/hour was well worth it. As I wandered up to the open-air shack, 4 half naked children alerted the blind masseurs to my arrival, and provided auditory entertainment with a constant pitter-patter running back and forth through the ordeal.
In the afternoon, Frank and I took a boat trip out on the Tonle Sap (literal translation: freshwater lake; implication: largest freshwater lake in SE Asia) which dramatically changes depth and sheer size depending on the season, necessitating many villagers to put their homes on tall stakes to avoid flooding, and others to live on houseboats, creating floating villages complete with shops, basketball courts, schools, and churches.
After a lackluster dinner under a lackluster sunset, we returned to SR and decided to partake in one of the many "fish massages" that permeate the main drag in town. Here, some Khmer hawkers lure you in with the promise of a relaxing foot massage that will all clean your feet of dead skin, all for ~$2/20 minutes. Now what a fish massage actually is is somewhere around 50-100 little starving toothless fish swimming around in a gross 30 gallon tank with a cushion around the edge for seating. As soon as you drop your feet in, the little sons of bitches swarm your feet, sucking violently on your dead skin to extract whatever nourishment they can. Seriously, I am one of the least ticklish people out there, and I was giggling like an absolute dipshit for the entire 10 minutes I had my feet in the tank. The Khmer women chilling in front of the place found this absolutely hilarious, by the way. Frank totally bitched out after less than 10 seconds because he couldn't take it, like a bitch, for the record.
Thursday morning we met our super awesome Khmer guide Khin Leang and began our ancient temple-based sightseeing, and started with a brief hike up a local mountain to view the Kbal Spaen, home of the "River of a Thousand Lingas" - I'll get to what that is in a minute. If I could pass on one lesson from this jaunt, it would be that the jungle is opportunistic as anything I have ever seen. It will suck the nutrients right out of a bare rock, and will do it in the most interesting way possible. My two favs: little leaves sprouting from a moss-covered boulder, and this tree spooning a boulder in a way I can absolutely appreciate:
At the top of the mountain is this amazing carved bedrock riverbed from the, like, 10th or 11th century (at this point don't believe any dates I assign things because I don't care to look them up; pretty much all this stuff is from the 10th-12th centuries, and for our intents and purposes it doesn't really matter which one, all are pretty baller). Lingas are Hindu phallic images. The riverbed is carved into repeating patterns of circles, the current appearance of which indicate the phallices they were modeled after were either, a) um, lacking, b) that the river has weathered them down significantly over a millennium, or c) they're actually just a circle pattern. Seriously, though, I was amazed at how well preserved and not weathered down the carvings were on the mountain given what I know about rock weathering and soil formation in tropical environments (thanks Rox 1!).
Around the carved riverbed there are several other awesome rock carvings of Hindu deities, including one of the 4-faced god, Brahma, the front face of which has been removed.
This brings me to brief Angkor history lesson interlude I call...
Losing Face
A lot of the statues and bas reliefs around the Angkorian temples are missing their faces or more in some cases. The three principle reasons that I heard for this are:
1) When the invading Siamese (Thais) captured the Angkor kingdom, they knocked the faces off the lion statues adorning some of the temples as a symbol of removing the Khmers' power. What a bunch of assholes.
2) When the new Hindu king took power after the building of Angkor Thom, he defaced or fully removed many of the Buddha images from the Buddhist temple. Typical.
3) Modern antiquities theft. The most blatant of this was a Frenchman (quelle surprise) who was later appointed Minister of Culture by Charles de Gaulle. So French (cf. the entire f'ing Louvre).
Alright, enough about Kbal Spaen. On the hike down I saw a neat little salamander living in a water-filled hole in a rock.
After lunch we visited a couple of the older Angkor temples, Bantei Srei and Preah Rup. Highlights from these visits include the intricacies and incredible preservation of the sandstone carvings, and Frank racing Khin Leang up the steeeeep stone stairs. Frank was super bummed that he and KL actually hit the top at the EXACT same second. Video replay confirms this.
A stop at the Landmine Museum was very moving. A former Khmer Rouge kidnapped orphan child soldier who spent his childhood laying mines around Siem Reap has devoted his life to clearing mines and unexploded ordinance (which regularly maims/kills children and the like all over the world's most densely mined nation) and uses donations to his museum to fund an orphanage and school he has set up for child mine victims. Take a few moments to look into the past 40 years of Cambodian history. In brief, it had the living hell bombed out of it during the Vietnam War, experienced 4 years of heavy Khmer Rouge-inflicted genocide, and went through a 19 year civil war which put many children, included our guide, Khin Leang, at the forefront of battle, and ensured that an entire generation experienced nothing but misery, famine, and war. Incredibly sad, and incredibly moving to think of how far the country and its people have come since the Khmer Rouge were considered officially completely defeated in 1998. Yes, 1998.
After the museum we went to our last temple stop of the day, viewing sunset from a hill temple overlooking the Angkor Wat general area, an ungodly collection of tourists that make me NEVER want to come here in the high season. Seriously, the heat/humidity hasn't been THAT bad, and the place is already tourist city in the low season. Before we went up we fed a big bunch of bananas to two lovely elephants. Swoon.
Sunset itself was lackluster, buuut Frankie spotted a Tuck insignia on a guy's shirt from a distance, so we approached him and it was none other than a fellow T13 chap named Andreas who I had never met before but previously worked with two friends of mine, Amy and Tyler, in NY! What a small world! It just so happened that another T13 that I knew about was also in town that evening and we decided to all get dinner together at a super authentic Khmer BBQ place recommended to us by two separate Khmer dudes, where we were somehow the only non-locals. After good times and good conversation, Frank retired, and my future classmates and I wandered into town to have a drink and eat some roadside fried crickets, which were surprisingly delicious and not at all disgusting, although I was glad to have some liquid courage in me for the undertaking. See daytime picture:
Alright so I'm tired and have to catch a flight to Laos in a few hours but there are two more riveting SR days to cover so stay tuned! Lemon out!
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