Angkor

Saturday Oct 2, 2004

On one of these days Bill and I ate with Tara and she told us about her trip down from Bangkok a few days earlier. She had also gone to Khao San road to arrange travel, and also had simply picked a random tour group and bought a bus ticket. However, on her way down, the bus didn’t take her to the official border crossing. Instead it took her to some place with lots of military guys with rifles, and charged her double for her visa. There was apparently no passport check. There was also no other transportation for sale there, and not many people around. So evidently it’s a fake border crossing setup to scam people, and she got unlucky and was taken there. I think she said it took them like 10 hours to make the crossing, I don’t know if from driving or if the scammers let the tourists sit around and weigh their nonexistent options some to soften them up. Anyway it didn’t sound like fun and I’m glad Bill and I didn’t get hit with it. Tara said that scam had been written up in the paper a couple times already, but she hadn’t expected it to still be happening.

Banteay Srei (Citadel of Women) had everything down-sized by half, but had the most intricate carvings.

A monk. Banteay Srei (Citadel of Women) Inscriptions

Intricate carvings. Part of Banteay Srei (maybe a library).

Ley showed me an interesting plant that reacted to touch, here’s a video.

A Cambodian house. Another Cambodian house.

A boy on the way back from Angkor. Some water buffalo along the road.

The Preah Khan (Secret Sword) Temple was another favorite of mine. I liked the feel of the spacious and dramatic back courtyard. Unfortunately it also highlights the damage done to the temples by people stealing statues, mostly by decapitating them.

Ley and I at Preah Khan. Back courtyard at Preah Khan.Some fig trees at Preah Khan.

Ley at Preah Khan.

Here’s a video panning around this courtyard.

This pig dropped on its side and fell almost instantly asleep when Ley scratched it.

A storm clearing over Ba Kong. Moat clearing workers at Ba Kong. Ba Kong

A Ba Kong courtyard tower.

I took a few videos of bands playing outside the temples, here are links: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4.

At the end of this day Ley took me to a place to buy some souvenirs. It was pretty expensive. That night I went to the Indochine Restaurant for dinner, it was totally empty, probably due to the high prices.

Bill had gone to Phnom Penh this day, and I was going to take a boat down the Tonle Sap river and meet him the next day, so I gave him a call to let him know when I’d be arriving. I used a public pay-phone, which is a guy sitting around with a cell phone! These are the most common types of pay-phones. Wherever one of these people are, there’s a sticker that shows what area codes they’ll dial.