Cambodia and Angkor Waaaat?

The last post left our crew in a retro bus for a 13-hour trip t o Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Thanks to either sketchiness or derpage on the part of the bus company, the trip ended up taking closer to 19 hours. This made us more than a little bit cranky; on the other hand, it added to our already extensive list of crazy transportation stories from Vietnam. Getting from point A to point B here is fairly simple, thanks to the universally helpful hostel staff that we have encountered. On the other hand, placing your travel plans in the hands of the front desk when you ask for a bus reservation sometimes means getting crazy buses or bus drivers--which gets us back to our first night bus, the purple bus with the lace curtains and the bathroom (read: bucket) under the stairs in the luggage compartment.

We left HCMC after a long day of eating and lounging around--we went to at least five restaurants or cafes over the course of a day, then sat around the hostel waiting for our bus to depart. The hostel owner said that the bus would come to us and did not get more specific when pressed. As our hostel was located in a warren of narrow back alleys, it was not entirely clear how our bus would find us. Personally, I was hoping for the Knight Bus of Harry Potter fame, but instead a man came weaving through the streets to find us and take us to...a curb. Where we sat with everybody else waiting for the bus, hoping ours would not be the purple monstrosity across the street.

The bus departed at midnight and arrived at the Cambodian border some time around dawn, but we never figured out why we stopped for several hours on the side of the road in the middle of the night.  Getting through the border could charitably be called a Vietnamese fire drill: we exited the bus when the driver started yelling at us, stood in line to get our passports from the driver, went through Vietnamese customs, and got back on the bus to curl up and try to go back to sleep.  We drove all of 100 meters before the driver was once again yelling at us to exit the bus, this time to go through Cambodian customs.

The rest of the trip was uneventful if long, but it was interesting how apparent were the differences between Cambodia and Vietnam--visible even from the window of a bus.  As soon as we crossed the border the towns looked poorer, with more bicycles and fewer motorbikes.  Children often were not wearing shoes in Cambodia, where in Vietnam almost everybody was.  There were also pools of muddy water everywhere, some with water buffalo sitting in them, which answered the question of why malaria would be such a big concern.

The next day we hired a driver in Siem Reap and went to visit Angkor Wat.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the ruins at Angkor Wat would honestly be hard to describe even with a thousand words.  So here are some pictures, possibly with witty comments in small fonts underneath!

We call them the "Nathan Team"

I'm not short, I'm fun-sized!

You want me to eat what?

This is a temple in the Angkor style before carving - they would build it out of square blocks and then  shape everything.

(Objects not to scale)

Extreeme!

I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts.

The inner sanctuary at Angkor Wat

You did wat?

Rule #1 of famous monuments - they must always be under construction.

Angkor Wat made me feel time more acutely than almost anywhere else that I've been.  Some of the temples are in ruins, with the jungle encroaching and vines climbing over the stones.  Others are actively being restored by the governments of nations from across the world, including India and Japan.  The temple at Angkor Wat itself has been in continuous use almost since its construction, and is absolutely magnificent.

All of the descriptions of the temples include a bit of history about when they were built or rebuilt, and by which kings or princes.  After restoration those buildings will probably be there for centuries more, and someday more people will stand there and read about how "after the temples fell into disrepair they were eventually rebuilt by the Japanese in the 1990s, before subsiding into the jungle again..."

And the cycle continues.