Travels with Hayley

We ventured out into the pitch blackness today at 5am to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world. We sat on the wall bordering the moat surrounding it, trying to pick out the shapes of the temples in the distance out of the gloom.

Gradually the sky began to turn the most beautiful shades of pink and violet, melting into peach, orange and smokey blue as the sun began to rise and the outline of the temples became to emerge from the darkness. Sarah and I were sharing earphones and listening to some meditation style music and dozens of dragonflies were dancing around in the air above us, the whole thing was an almost out of body experience, you couldn’t possibly not be moved by the majesty of nature and by the incredible achievement of these people who built these magnificent structures so many years ago.

On a more prosaic note, I knew however enchanted people would be by the majesty of the occasion, they’d still get hungry at that time of the morning so I’d stocked up with biscuits to hand round – I’m known as the snack lady so much now that when I produced them Luigi said “ah good I knew you would have snacks so I didn’t worry to bring any” 😂 Never underestimate the restorative power of a biscuit, I suspect that might be in my epitaph!

A few quick facts about Angkor Wat – it was built around 900 years ago, it’s 60 metres high and the complex is 1.5 x 1.3 km square with the moat stretching 5km around it. It was built for Krishna the Hindu god but at some point along it’s timeline, around the 17th century it moved into being a temple for Buddhism. They think a lot of it was painted gold with some white and red and it has huge carved friezes telling historical stories and parables of the time around many of the walls along with early examples of Cambodian writing engraved on them too.

Of course, for our resident You Tubers this amazing spectacle on it’s own would not be enough for their followers, what they needed to do was pick the prime photo spot and then spend ten minutes contorting themselves into various yoga poses for their photographer to capture. Don’t worry about one of the 7 original wonders of the world behind you love, let’s all look at how bendy you are shall we… I lost my rag in the end as Sarah and Kate wanted a quick picture in the same place and we’d waited through half an hour of yoga class at this point so I loudly ordered her to move along in no uncertain terms. Again, no common language (I think they were maybe Eastern European) but she got the idea and shifted!

Another day, another hundreds of temple stairs but there was no way I was missing out on the vista so I made it to the top and looked around. The view was amazing, it was lovely to get to see the complex from the very peak vantage point, totally worth the climb. Speaking of, I went casual and did it in trainers, unlike the lady ahead of me…see shoes in picture below…

Interestingly, apart from the sunrise, I didn’t feel moved in the same way as yesterday at all, bearing in mind this is the biggest and most famous of all of the temples. I think it was a mixture of it being so well kept as in it didn’t feel like an organic part of nature as the ones yesterday had, plus the sheer volume of tourists there. I still really enjoyed it but it didn’t touch me in the same way. You just never know what’s going to be the highlight of these trips, it’s so often the things you wouldn’t particularly have chosen to do given a totally free choice that end up being the most special.

Back for a huge breakfast as it was really lunchtime to my tummy at that point and spent a lovely few hours laying by the deserted hotel pool in the shade, looking at all of the pictures from the last few days and catching up with my diaries.

But a whole day can’t be wasted lazing about, not even if you got up at 4.30am so at 12.30 Kerry, Luigi and I piled into a tuk tuk that Luigi had booked via Grab (like Uber for tuk tuks, how brilliant is that 😂) and headed out to the Angkor Wat zip lines (spoiler alert, they are just in the forest owned by the Wat, you don’t get to whizz over the temple itself, funnily enough I don’t see UNESCO going for that although I will admit it took me checking out the pictures online first to realise that…)

We trundled along for about 40 minutes passing all of the normal baffling things – dozens of motorbikes parked up in the trees by the size of the road with the riders milling about and hammocks strung throughout the trees. Hells Angels meeting? Lunch and snooze spot for the local couriers? Cult headquarters? Who knows!

You have to have a ticket to enter the Angkor Wat conservation area which is huge and they are super, super hot on ensuring no one sneaks in or shares tickets – you have to have your photo printed directly onto the ticket itself and I think within the 2 days I must have passed through at least a dozen checkpoints where they checked it thoroughly. We successfully got into the protected area and then the tuk tuk turned down a rugged, orange clay road, through a construction site and then down, down, into ever deeper forest and worsening road. At one point we became stuck in the boggy red earth and I had a horrible feeling we would have to get out and push – not the time to have changed into white trainers! Fortunately the driver managed to get the bike free without our assistance and we carried on to the very, very end of the track where I feel certain no human has been in living memory. At this point he gets off the bike and indicates yes, we’re here! I cannot stress how in the middle of nowhere we were at this point, why he could think we possibly wanted to be dropped there…

Very luckily Luigi has a SIM card in his phone that works here (the rest of us are relying on WiFi which shockingly, was not available in the middle of nowheresville) and checking the map online managed to convey to the driver he’d taken a wrong turn and we should be about a mile parallel down the road – on an actual road and not the track to the abyss! We set off again but this time we hit a big stone hidden in the track surface which made a terrible noise and every time we swayed to the right thereafter there was a horrible grinding noise. Kerry diagnosed a bent axel – the poor guy, this was not his most successful day as a taxi driver I would guess!

By this point we were running quite late but when we eventually arrived they couldn’t have been nicer about it.

We were the only ones there so we took our time, had a complimentary cup of fruit tea – after which I inevitably needed the toilet which turned out to be a mile and a half up the road so they popped us on the back of a truck and took us there and back – without any sense that this was in the least bit annoying to them! Finally, about 40 minutes after the show was due to start, it was time to get kitted up and hit the lines.

It was such a lovely experience. The lines were a lot shorter than the ones I did in Costa Rica, the longest one here was 300m compared to 1.5km over there but the experience was so different. In CR there had been hundreds of people there so you queued up the stairs at every line and it was more of a conveyer belt feel. Here we were moving through the very peak of the tree tops just the three of us plus our two instructors. Such lovely guys, in their early twenties and spoke beautiful English. They wanted to know everything about where we’d been on our trip so far, what we’d eaten and seen and then gave us lots of tips about the upcoming journey to our next location, what to look out for and try. Apparently Battambang, our location tomorrow is famous for bbq rat so that’s on the list to look out for!

We whizzed down zip lines, across swaying rope bridges and just generally enjoyed the peace and calm. Another group was a way behind us and you could occasionally hear a whoop and on one memorable occasion we saw through the trees a guy get stuck on the middle of the line, having to just forlornly hang there 35m up in the air while the guide went to winch him back with a rope!

Halfway round the course we got to one of the treetop platforms where there was a wooden box waiting m from which the guides produced paper cups and bottled water and we all stopped for a cool drink and a chat, it was so civilised 100+ feet above the ground! The guys were telling us that each morning, two rangers go round the whole course and do a safety inspection – sometimes overnight squirrels and rats have made nests on the platforms – and sometimes halfway along the lines, pit vipers have curled themselves around them! This is quite the dilemma, what to do – can’t go over them, can’t go under them, can’t go through them (messy 😬) – some poor ranger has to take their turn unwrapping the poisonous serpent that’s just been rudely awaken from a nice snooze and is righteously decidedly grumpy!

They wanted to know if we had done the sunrise over Angkor Wat yet and were so sweetly pleased and excited that we had been there that morning. I asked one of them if he still finds it moving or is it just normal now, having lived there all his life. He told me “whenever I see it, every time I feel – is amazing. Always is so amazing”. I love that 😍

We finished the course with a finale of no hands zipping and being suspended mid air for pictures before being lowered to the ground. Walking back to the base through the woods, we were treated to a natural history lesson as the guides pointed out tarantula and scorpion holes, termite mounds and the compadres of the red ants that I had eaten on my first night here! They also pointed out a tree that has waterproof sap that people used to coat their boats with (it’s illegal to cut the trees now) and an information board all about the different types of gibbon in the forest – very sadly we not bump into any actual gibbons along the way though. Next time.

Getting back into our tuk tuk which had waited for us (without us asking him to, smart man, we were in the middle of nowhere, he knew a guaranteed customer when he saw one!) we thanked the rangers for a lovely experience and promised to hunt down that (apparently porky tasting) barbequed rat at our next locarion!

Back to the hotel past all the temples along the way – Luigi remarked some of them almost looked like ones you’d find in a theme park and I know exactly what he means. They don’t really feel like they can possibly be real.

Sat by the pool on my return with Kerry and Juliet came to join us – she’d been to the ‘hero rat’ experience in town while we had been zipping.

Tanzanian rats are trained up and then sent over here to sniff out landlines so they can then be disarmed (the land mine, not the rat. The rat keeps its arms 😜 Thank you, I’m here all week) Rats are perfect for the job as they’re light and less likely to trigger the mines. She shared some pictures with us including one of her cuddling one of these hero rodents (which are huge, almost like a small cat) which apparently ‘kissed’ her on the mouth, bleurgh. Apparently it’s not the first time she’s kissed a dirty rat – amen sister!

She and Kerry headed off to watch a circus/dance performance which I hadn’t signed up for as I suspected I would be pretty tired from my 4.30 wake up call and I was right. I was very tempted to just have dinner at the hotel but forced myself to put my shoes back on and get out of the door – memories very rarely being made sitting alone in an empty hotel restaurant. And it’s lucky I did as the universe rewarded me in spades for not taking the lazy option!

I walked up the road towards a restaurant Sarah had recommended and came across this amazing street performance – there’s a water festival starting this weekend so I assume it had something to do with that? A big screen was stretched across the street with a huge fire burning coconut shells on one side. On the other side was a bunch of young guys in matching red harem pants and white t-shirts who were performing a show with these flat, intricately cut out leather puppets, interspersed with occasional choreographed fighting and acrobatics.

A group of musicians sat all along the side playing instruments that bar a glockenspiel I couldn’t even guess to identify, providing the soundtrack to this beautiful spectacle.

The crowd was huge, mostly local with a sprinkling of curious tourists, sitting barefoot on rush matting with their shoes neatly lined up along the outside and standing crowed around the edges. I couldn’t follow much of what was happening in the performance but I did understand when someone got mauled by a tiger!

Capturing the action for posterity were two monks, one barefoot carrying a huge, professional grade camera and one in his flip flops in charge of the video taking – monks here are really very different to back home I’m learning. Although saying that – I don’t know any monks at home do I, perhaps they are all up to date with the latest in audio visual technology too!

I went round the back to see the fire and the guys who were waiting in the wings as it were, one suddenly leapt into the air utterly a very shocked and high pitched squeal. I started laughing and he turned to me, very shamefaced and embarrassed and admitted ‘cricket!’ Poor guy had stood directly onto a cricket that was running along the floor!

I dragged myself away after half an hour or so and headed back towards the recommended restaurant but got distracted by another one along the way that was full of Cambodian families and looked hectic and fun so I took a chance and went in. I sat upstairs, right at the edge of the room which was open to the elements and looked down onto the enormous, crazily busy Saturday market going on along the riverbank. The menu was only about £2.50 per main course so I thought I’d hedge my bets and order two in case I didn’t like one. Turned out I didn’t like either 😂 The mango salad had huge lumps of dried fish in it, so hard I almost cracked a tooth and what I thought was a minced pork and aubergine paste dish (similar to something I’d had and loved in Thailand) turned out in fact to be very greasy slices of aubergine with even greasier, chewy chunks of pork in a sauce totally devoid of flavour.

I picked out the mango and left the rest – the £5 bill was more than worth it for the rental of the seat though, as well as watching what was going on outside, I could also people watch all the families having dinner inside the restaurant. Some kids were playing hopscotch on the chequered floor, the owner’s kids were running about collecting money for the bills and it was all so bustling and good natured, just lovely to be a part of even for a moment.

After a while, beginning to feel slightly self conscious about the barely touched food in front of me, I took my leave and stepped out into the chaos that was the night market. The street had been shut to traffic and everywhere you looked thronged thousands of Cambodians of every age, enjoying the food stalls, party vibes and weekend shenanigans. A fairground blaring music at screaming pitch provided the soundtrack and the scent of 100 different foods hung heavily in the night air. Not being able to face the embarrassment of choosing another food I may potentially not like, I grabbed a banana chocolate pancake from a street cart – it was only 1 USD but it was pretty tiny – one of the little 3 inch long finger bananas and less than a teaspoon of Nutella – Americans would be utterly appalled by the inbuilt portion control at play here 😂

I had thought the market the night before had been busy but this was on a whole other scale, it felt like every single person in town was out and at least half of them were selling something! Huge piles of fried silkworms, fried and sugary treats, snails, fruit, pick your own pot of pickles bar, cocktail and beer carts – it was endless. After half an hour of absorbing as much as I could, I very reluctantly headed back to the hotel through the heaving town centre, where people were still spilling out of restaurants and bars (by far the most popular were the Korean style bbq joints where you cook your own meat over a mini grill in the middle of the table, they were all full to bursting – the heat coming off of all of those grills even out in the street was immense, how they could sit in there and eat…) and the road was still bumper to bumper with cars, mopeds and tuk tuks all vying for space and making up whatever rules of the road they fancied!

I stopped at a tiny hole in the wall shop on the way home to buy some emergency snacks – I don’t know exactly what kind of custom the owner is used to but he kept saying to me “just two? Just two?” and pointing at the single packet each of crisps and biscuits I had put in front of him. Once it had been established I wasn’t playing an elaborate practical joke on him with my meagre purchases he gave a bemused shrug with a definite ‘bleurgh, foreigners’ subtext and I was permitted to leave and head back to the hotel. A quick side note on crisps while we’re around the subject – all crisp bags are blown up tight with air here so they look like mini balloons – why is this? I get it maybe makes them look like there’s more in them but surely transportation is a nightmare? Or do they come flat and the shop owner has to reinflate them somehow 😂 Anyway, we’ll just add that to the list of ‘things I’ll never know the answer to in this fascinating country’.

I’ll leave you now with another edition in the series of ‘weird signs I’ve seen in Cambodia’ and will update you tomorrow about the next set of adventures!

Hope you are all doing well, lots of love as always xxx