Anyone for crickets?
Trip Start
May 03, 2008
1
15
47
Trip End
May 02, 2009
Siem Reap,
Cambodia
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
On our last day in Siem Reap I stopped by some market vendors and decided to try the local delicacy, fried crickets. I had been threatening to try them for days and offered that when I did get them, I'd get enough for everyone back in the hostel to try. I only meant to get six or seven of them (one each) and actually had to stop the old woman from shoveling more in, in the end I got 20 or 30 to feast on. we brought them back to the hostel and before heading out for the night I got the guys to sit at the bar with a beer (just in case) and we feasted. Had to ask the Cambodian bartender how to eat them as well, he said they were pretty tasty ones
Angkor Wat
. In case you're wondering they don't actually taste that bad, a sort of cross between peanut, sesame seeds and prawns if that makes any sense. I had about two then we gave the rest to the bartender who wolfed them down.I suppose I should talk about why we went to Siem Reap in the first place, that of visiting the ancient temples of Angkor namely Angkor Wat. After another long bus ride we arrived in Siem Reap to see the worse tout scrum I'd seen yet. We literally had to barrel though them to step down from the bus. Thankfully we had already booked our accommodation, it was a bit pricey but we heard it was a really good backpacker hostel. It turned out to be the best place we had stayed so far, we even ended up staying an extra day of rest there after we had finished the temples just because the idea of relaxing on hammocks or having an indoor pool all to yourself was so appealing. People there were really friendly as well.
We enlisted our bus company rep/ taxi driver to the hostel to be our guide for the temples. He drove us around the temples which was handy as it was probably a 20km round trip. Admittance to the temples actually costs a fortune compared to everything else, for the two days that we wanted, our temple ticket cost $40. What makes it worse is that only ten percent of that goes to the upkeep of the temples
Angkor Wat
. Fifteen percent goes to a Oil company which has a stake in the site and rest goes into the empty pockets of the government. Anyway we started out at Angkor Wat that morning and spent a few hours walking around it, it's massive. Our guide was more of a driver sadly who just sat in his tuk tuk and waited for us so we tried working it out for ourselves. Spotted a monkey walking the temple walls, he frightened the living daylights out of a poor Japanese tourist who didn't notice him until he was right beside him.Next up we visited Angkor Thom and Bayon temple. The Bayon temple is bit strange it is built with many pillars with large faces on each side of the pillars. Exploring the temples is not for the faint hearted there is lots of climbing involved and some of it is rock climbing up and down long, steep steps. We visited smaller temples that afternoon including the Temple that was used a Tomb Raider supposedly, not that we really cared. The interesting thing about that temple was that there were diagonally growing 50 foot trees growing off the top of the temples walls. A lot of foreign initiatives have gone on to try and rebuild the temples which has taken years. There is no one way to describe each temple but as a whole they are comparable to any other ancient temples in the world particularly the scale and the intricateness of the carving on the walls.
Angkor Wat
We decided to do a second day of temple seeing where we visited temples that were further out and more remote. We read in lonely planet that some were overgrown and this sounded interesting but to be honest they were a bit of a let down given what we had seen the day before and the exorbitant price.
One of the nights we went to a restaurant where we sat on the first floor on stilts above live crocodiles that they keep there. That night I ate frogs legs, again quite tasty so as not to antagonize them.
Next up is a journey along a dirt track back to Bangkok for a few days.
