It was an uneventful bus trip from Kratie to Siem Reap, apart from the road accident outside our lunch stop. Luckily, this time, there were no serious injuries or worse as is normally the case.
Siem Reap is a fairly unassuming place. Very dusty roads and pretty humid. A mixture of pickup trucks mixed with carts pulled by cows, transporting everything from furniture to rubbish about the place......all of it stacked high and precariously balanced.
The main trade here is the tourist one, since this town is the launching point for tours of the famous Angkor Wat and surrounding temples. There are tuk-tuk drivers dotted around most streets and the main mode of transport here, once again, is the humble moped.
The vast divide in fortunes can be easily seen here as there are a good smattering of highly-priced 4x4s including a good number of Lexus driven by the much, much more wealthy.
Corruption here is not an alien thing and the rewards are plainly visible. Not wanting to suggest that all of the gains here are ill gotten, but for such a poor country, the majority of which earn around 90 cents a day, you begin to wonder how someone so young could have saved so much in such a short space of time.
When we arrived at the bus station we were greeted by the sight of the usual crowd of Tuk-Tuk drivers and hotel touts all gathering around the bus as it parked. Something different happened here though. The bus reversed into a compound and a gate was closed leaving the touts shut outside. It was a much calmer way to arrive in a new place, not being pulled by the arm one way and then another before you've even got your bag on your back.
We were calmly getting our bags on when, at an unseen signal, the gate was opened and the whole group of twenty or thirty guys rushed towards us and the other passengers (it seems that the locals were not even immune), shouting in a bid to to gain our business. This time though we already had a tuk-tuk driver waiting for us. A very gentle guy named Kung. Since we were of no good to any of the touts we were left alone once again.
Kung patiently drove us from place to place trying to find a room with what turned out to be an illusive item - a mosquito net. We went to places recommended by our guide book and by him but, apart from the most rustic room there was, there were no mossie nets to be found.
We settled on a place of his recommendation, a newly opened, family run hotel-come-guest house. Perfect. We offered Kung some money for his troubles but he refused it. His only request being that we choose him as our Tuk-Tuk driver for our tour of the temples. So, we agreed and decided to start first thing the following morning.
It was not meant to be though. Some time during that night I woke up, shivering with cold. Not a good sign when you are in a hot country and aren't using the air-con. Chinny followed closely behind and fell ill the following day. We spent the next 9 days trying to get over whatever it was that had made us so ill. Finally, a visit to a day clinic and a day on an IV drip with various antibiotics and vitamins injected sorted us out. The family who run the hotel were extremely kind to us and looked after us where they could. They still keep in touch via email.
A couple of days later we were able to start our tour of the temples. They cover such a vast area that you could easily spend a week going to visit them all. We took a three day pass , chose a good few to visit and, along with recommendations from Kung, we trundled around and saw some amazing places. Some have been restored but the restoration work is so sympathetic it is difficult to tell what is original and what is not.
We were planning to see a bit more of Cambodia than we did but our 2 week stay in Siem Reap put pay to that and so we headed to Battembang by boat for a quick stop off before heading to the border.
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