Scorpiosail Blog

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I’m not particularly surprised that there is something fishy about Cambodia. I had kind of been expecting something, but I had no idea what it would turn out to be!

Siem Reap after dark is all rock and roll. The action is concentrated to a few blocks around 8th Street, today usually called Pub Street. The first bar opened only 12 years ago, which is difficult to understand when you experience the area today.

Here are probably hundreds of bars and restaurants. The Khmer food is excellent and cheap (2-3 USD per dish) and you can have a draft beer for 50 cents US.

Pub Street area is also where it gets fishy, and I’m not talking about gastronomic extravaganza. Otside several of the bars and restaurants you will find aquarium-like pools where you can dip your tired feet for a relaxing treatment by, yes, Doctor Fish! (Click photo for larger fish)

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Cambodia has gradually recovered from the Khmer Rouge regime, although the psychological scars remain for survivors and their families. Cambodia now has a very young population, and (already by 2005), 75% of Cambodians were too young to remember the holocaust, which ended in 1979.

For most people of my generation, Cambodia has been a symbol of something dark and horrible. The Red Khmers, led by Pol Pot, committed probably the largest genocide in history – killing more than 20% of their fellow contrymen. The enormity of this terrible crime is simply impossible for most of us to understand.

Sofar on our journey there has been little evidence of the horrific Khmere Rouge era, except for the present undeveloped state of all infrastructure and the apparent poverty, particularly on the countryside. (Click on any photo of this post for a larger image)

Today, when we had a walk in the Old Market area of downtown Siem Reap, we got our first worrying encounters with people who are still suffering because of the old regime. During a couple of hours we were approach by a dozen of crippled persons, who had lost either a leg, or both legs or an arm – either during the civil war, or for stepping on land mines afterwards. We were touched by the dignity that most of these unfortunate souls showed. They try desperately not to appear as beggars and instead try to give us visitors a chance to pretend that we are paying for a service or a souvenier.

The man with Malla and me on the photo above is Phung, he is 46 years old and lost his leg on a land mine in 1989 – and he tells us that he has five children to support. I can’t help wondering why he made five children despite his condition. If you would like to see how he presents himself on the sign shown in the photo, please click HERE.

An other type of encounter, familiar from many other parts of the world, is the mother carrying a nearly newborn child and asking for money. They are here too. I tried to do the right thing by bringing the couple with me in to a store and buing her a tin of milk powder. But I hate myself for suspecting that she will sell the can and get money for something else that the child might not benefit from at all.

However, this blog post is not intended to be a negative one, actually I think that the Kingdom of Cambodia (yes the King is back!) will be developing very quickly. Because: the tourists are arriving and this is probably a good thing as it is the fastest way for a better living for the common people.

I include the following photos of wedding couples, which we encountered at Angkor Wat. I think they look very happy concerning their future!

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Actually it’s name is Angkor Wat, but the brain of a cruiser immediately made a connection.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Angkor Archeological Park encompasses an amazing number of millennium-old ruins of the Angkorian-era Khmer Empire (9th to 12th centuries AD). As a whole, this area is in a class with the Pyramids, Machu Pichu and the Taj Mahal.

For us, it became a long day, waking up at 4:00 in Kuala Lumpur for an early flight to Cambodia, and more specificially to Siem Reap, the gateway to the ruins. Long before noon, after having been first taken to the wrong hotel, we were already on our way to Angkor Wat, the most famous of the sites. We were riding a tuk-tuk, the local moped version of a motorized rickshaw – actually it is a two-wheel trailer hooked to a moped.

The rest of the day we explored several of the temple sites, including Bayon, Ta Phrom and of course Angkor Wat. This massive temple covers more than 1 km square and the lotus-like towers rise 65 metres from the ground (almost one Helsinki Stadium tower – see earlier blog: The real measure of hights). The walls of the temples are covered inside and out with thousands of bas-reliefs and carvings.

The giant stone faces of Bayon have become one of the most recogizable images connected to classic Khmer art and architecture (photo above – click on it), but we were particularly amazed by the jungle overgrowth at Ta Phrom, where massive fig and silk-cotton trees are taking over the temple. I’ve been told that this temple was used in the film Toomb Raider. Look at the photo (below), it’s almost as if that tree was a giant octopus, sliding down from above (click on it).