Advice for Angkor Wat

The temples! These will take up most of your time while you are here, especially if you want to make the most of your expensive tickets. Also, without a doubt, visit the Land Mine Museum, run by a man who (I think this is how the story goes) was orphaned when the Khmer Rouge killed his parents, then taken by them and made to set land mines, then taken prisoner by the Vietnames and made to set land mines for them. Now he runs this museum that displays different types of weapons with a very detailed history about each one and information about land mines and the campaign to eliminate them from use.

Quick Tips:

I bought the three day pass for . This gave me enough time to see all the temples I could handle, as well as make a longer trip to one of the more distant temples. Hire a motorbike driver the first day you go to see the temples and keep him for the rest of your stay. They know where everything is and some background, but don't expect too much. The good thing is that they're friendly and probably will give you a better deal since they know you will be faithful for the next few days. They also recommend the best times of day to see certain temples, which is valuable for getting nice pictures. You will take many, many, many, way too many pictures.

Best Way To Get Around:

I'll talk about getting there and away in another entry, since it is a serious topic for this place. Like I said, hire a motorbike driver for your whole stay. You won't need or want to go very far in town.

Smiley Guesthouse was a nice place with very nice people running it. They had a good laundry service and excellent food. Some dishes included American favorites that I kind of missed, like a hamburger, and pumpkin soup that was delicious, as well as the usual rice and noodle and curry dishes. It was a good place to hang out at night. Within walking distance of the market and town center. They sent a van to pick us up where the riverboat landed, very helpful because it is quite far. They also arranged my trip back to Thailand (the boat ride, actually). Also very clean with mosquito nets, but no warm water.

In Siem Reap I would stick to the guesthouse's menu. When I ventured for some "authentic" Khmer food, I ended up at the night market with a bowl of some sort of cold, curried, noodle and leg-or-animal soup. If somebody tries to give you something like this, don't eat it. There is also a pizza place called Happy Pizza, which seems to be a chain because there is one in Phnom Penh as well. This isn't your basic Pizza Hut or Little Caeser's, though. No, this place has a special ingredient. They are famous among travelers in Cambodia for adding marijuana to the dough before they make the pizza. This makes people happy. I didn't eat there myself, but I saw it, and they have shirts for sale, which is pretty cool.

My guesthouse had really good food, so I think that is your best bet. They had Asian food but also some foreign fvorites, like spaghetti, cheeseburgers and garlic bread. They also had a very tasty pumpkin soup. Everything was cheap, and you wrote down your tab so you didn't have to pay until the last day.

There will come a time when you want to take a break from the temple scene. Head to the Land Mine Museum, your motorbike driver will know where it is.

The museum is outdoors on a small, enclosed property. There is a hut sort of shelter that houses all sorts of land mine and bomb shells, each of which has had the explosives removed. Alongside the piles of ammunition are descriptions of how they functioned and their history and uses. There are also some big guns and rifles in another smaller shelter. There is a "garden" type display, roped off, which displays all the different types of mines as they would look on the ground as they were set. This is pretty interesting, but it is difficult to make out where each one is. Also, if you've been searching for that Cambodian police uniform, you'll find it here in the little gift area.

The really cool thing about the museum is the story about the guy who started it and still runs it. There is a pamphlet that describes his past at the museum. If I remember correctly, his parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge and they forced him to lay landmines. Then The Vietnamese captured him and forced him to do the same for them. Now he has dedicated his life to getting rid of landmines.

The temples are why you come here in the first place. There are so many that you won't possibly be able to, or want to, see them all in one trip. Luckily, they are varied enough for you to see several and then be able to see more of your favorite type. There are the ones you have to see, like the huge Angkor Wat, there are the ones that have been overgrown by the jungle and have half crumbled to pieces, and then there are the ones that escaped, for the most part, the looting that degraded some of the other temples.

I came from Phnom Penh in the south. I definitely recommend seeing Phnom Penh either before or after Siem Reap. For one thing, you get to see Phnom Penh, which is very much worth it. Of course, you only have to travel that hellish road between Siem Reap and Thailand once. From Phnom Penh take a bus to Sihanoukville and then a boat to the Thai border at Koh Kong.

From Phnom Penh take the riverboat up the river to Siem Reap. This is safe, and you can even sit on the roof and watch the scenery, and it only got rough when we reached Cambodia's huge lake, Tonle Sap. The guesthouse manager in Phnom Penh will tell you how to get there. Many of the guesthouses in one city have an affiliation with the guesthouse in the other city. In Phnom Penh I stayed at Narrin Guesthouse, and Narrin himself recommended Smiley Guesthouse, owned by his cousin or something. So as we were getting off the boat at Siem Reap, I just looked for a sign that said Smiley Guesthouse on the shore because they had called ahead and arranged transportation.

Leaving Siem Reap was a different story. I went back to Thailand because I was heading to Laos next. I didn't want to go overland the whole way because of what I had heqard about the horrendous ride, so I took another boat to Battambang, almost halfway, and got in a truck there. The trucks don't have suspension systems really, and the roads are horrible, cratered and bumpy. Plus you are either crammed into the cab or the back of the truck. Expect traffic jams from trucks getting stuck in the mud and pray that it isn't your own, because if it is, you're gonna be pushing. So I finally got to Poipet, just in time to cross the border before it closed. Try to do this as well, although you won't need my encouragement when you see what it is like there. Not a very nice place, especially when Thailand is a short walk away.