The trip to Cambodia was sort of an extra addition to our trip while we were planning it a few months ago. We wanted to see all of Southeast Asia while we were there but its almost impossible to in 18 days. We decided to just plan an excursion to neighboring Cambodia, home of the beautiful, ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat. Before going to Cambodia I only knew a few things about the country: Angkor Wat is there, they have those dancers and the roofs of temples look cool. Other than that, it was like stepping back in time as we crossed the Cambodian border the next morning.

Vietnam and Cambodia are right next to each other but have very distinct differences in its people, culture and history. When we crossed the border, you could feel you were in Cambodia. It's a country with wood houses set two meters above the ground on stilts to prevent water and tigers from getting in, petrol sold in Pepsi bottles every hundred meters along the side of the road, kids selling books and gifts to tourists, adults selling fried spiders and crickets from plates balanced on their heads, men riding on the roof of a van because there's no more room inside, hundreds of chicken trussed up on the back of a single moto, cows wandering the marketplaces among fruit and open-air meat butchers, ornate gold-flecked temples with large Buddha statues, uniformed school children walking home in flocks, flat, rolling marshland with palm trees that reach storeys into the air and finally the slightly darker skinned people with their smiling eyes and an unfortunate past.

In case many of you didn't know, less than 40 years ago well over two millions Cambodians died from Genocide. It's a sad story and one you should look into. A good book to read is "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung. It was the book Callie and I were reading while we were in Cambodia and it makes you realize what the people went through and how they too, just like Vietnam, are rebuilding their country.

Anyways, on a less depressing note, I was able to see Cambodia and it's people first-hand on the 10-hour bus ride from Saigon to Siem Reap. We drove almost across the entire country, through villages, cities and the countryside. We stayed for three nights in Siem Reap and spent two full days exploring Angkor Wat. The name can be confusing as Angkor Wat (the temple complex) contains many other temples than just the famous picture of Angkor Wat (the main temple). For our first day exploring the temples we hired a tuk-tuk (like a moto with a passenger cabin) driver and a tour guide, which we highly recommend getting for your first day there. He brought us to all the main temples and explained a lot of the history and carvings of the temple. His english was fluent and I was amazed at all the other tour guides around us speaking fluent German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese! The Cambodians have a knack for languages. We explored Bayon and Baphoun with its endless corridors, carvings, and Buddha faces staring out from every corner. Then he took us to some other temples like Phimeanakas, "The palace of Heaven", Preah Palilay with its famous trees that were cut down a week earlier, the Terrace of the Leper King dedicated to Yamu, the God of Death, and the Terrace of Elephants which is where the Cambodian king would sit to watch horse-racing and elephant fighting. The last temple we went to was the biggest one, Angkor Wat with its hundreds and hundreds of meters of bas-relief carvings. We were glad to have our guide then so he could explain the epic stories in all the carvings, like how the monkey-king Hanuman raised his army and went to hell to kill all the demons and save Vishnu's wife. Hindu mythology is cool!

The second day we hired just the tuk-tuk driver and went exploring ourselves. We went to some further-flung temples like Banteay Srei with it's intricately detailed carving that took an hour to get to. One the way back we visited my 2nd favorite temple, the red-stoned Pre Rup with it's lofty, moss-ridden towers. After a quick lunch we went to my most favorite temple in Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm. It's the only temple left in its natural state and its where Tomb Raider was filmed. It lies in ruins with gigantic 400 year old silk cotton tree roots strangling the stone. It had an air of timelessness being in it and it was the one I enjoyed the most. We continued on to Ta Keo, the steepest temple which you had to climb on all fours to reach the top, and then to Preah Kahn, the second largest temple after Angkor Wat that used to be a large city. Our last stop was the water temple, Neak Pean which was commemorated to Budda achieving Nirvana.
Before leaving Siem Reap we had time to check out the amazing central and night markets where we picked up a few things. The backpackers motto, "Same same but different" definitely applies in these markets. Every single stall was selling the exact same thing at the "same" price (depending on how good you haggle) so it was frustrating trying to find something original. I still bought a few shirts and gifts for dirt cheap. The strange thing in Cambodia is that it's currency, the Riel, and the American dollar are both used. They're very interchangeable with $1 USD fixed at 4000 Riel. No coins are used so a 100 Riel bill is technically 2.5 cents.

After our three-day stay in Siem Reap we headed back to Phnom Penh to stay a night. We explored the markets there, the National museum, and randomly ran into Callie's friend from Kenya before heading to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum all together. It's a high school that was turned into a torture facility and it showed all the original rooms and torture instruments. It also gave a timeline of Pol Pot's regime and explained how it started and ended. We wanted to visit the Cambodian killing fields too but we had enough depression for one day. That night, we fought off the street kids in order to sit and chill on an outdoor patio and then, after a brief episode of losing my VISA card (I got it back the next morning) headed to bed for an early start. The next morning we took a bus back to Saigon, ending our short tour of Cambodia. I had come into the country four days earlier knowing nothing and left four days later grateful for the things I had seen, experienced and learned.

For more pictures, go to Callie's photos.