12-14 February 2015

Trip to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat

Judy Wu and Henry Tsz are friends from our days together in Hong Kong thirty years ago. They now live in Taiwan but came for a visit to Cambodia and we arranged to meet in Siem Reap to catch up. On the way there from Phnom Penh, the van stopped in Kampong Thom and I took a picture of the bridges. We use photos like this to show deaf people with no identity as we try to determine where they are from.

The trip to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh was 6½ hours. When I arrived, I worked in the guest house room until Henry and Judy finished the grand circuit of Siem Reap temples and then we went out to eat supper.

	Henry took care of a lot of the logistics for this trip and was chief navigator and negotiator. Here he explains to a tuk-tuk driver the plan for the day while Judy looks on.
	About a half hour south of the town of Siem Reap is a boarding area for boats going out to the floating village on Tonle Sap Lake. It is a really popular excursion for the tourists after a day of clambering over temple ruins. It's not very ecological, though. Instead of filling each boat to capacity, just two or three people will make the trip in a large boat.
	After traveling five kilometers on the Siem Reap River from the boarding area, the boats reach the huge lake and the floating village. It seemed about 100+ floating houses and businesses and schools and churches were anchored there. The circle of poles in the water is an anchor to keep the village in place.
	Here is one floating home. Some are quite small and simple. Others are rather large and solidly built, even with a second story. One house had a floating pigpen tied to it. The entire village moves to other parts of the lake according to the water level at different times of the year.
	On the far edge of the floating village, out in the lake, there are several commercial tourist centers set up where the tour boats can dock and their passengers "go ashore" for soft drinks and souvenirs. This center also had this observation deck and a cage of snakes to put around one's neck for photos plus a wooden submerged cage with crocodiles.
	On our trip around the village, we passed two floating churches. This is the Catholic parish church of Chong Khnies, the name of the shore area. Probably most, if not all, the inhabitants of the floating village are Vietnamese who have concentrated for several generations along the lake and Mekong River, and they are largely Catholic.
	On the way back to the area for disembarking, our guide got out of the boat and waded ashore to work on his grandmother's grave before the Lunar New Year this week. It's a strange situation because the graves are covered by water every year as the lake rises thirty to forty feet. That seems particularly abhorrent in my understanding of Chinese funeral traditions.
	Back in town, we ate lunch and then walked along the Siem Reap River which flows through the middle of the town. Siem Reap is a small, picturesque town with a lot of remaining colonial architecture. I am sure it is an image of what Phnom Penh looked like fifty or seventy-five years ago.
	Then we went to the National Museum. It is particularly known for its presentation of statuary from the various epochs of Cambodia's history. We spent about three hours there, finally leaving when it closed at 6:30 PM.

	As part of his navigation duties, Henry would occasionally check the map on the wall of the Bun Kao Guest House. Here he gets help from Mr. Bun Kao, the guest house owner, in locating a destination.
	Today was my day to return to Phnom Penh and I was at the VGS Express van terminus at 6:40 AM. It was the same van I two days ago to Siem Reap. The van's wi-fi didn't work coming to Siem Reap and--after two days--it didn't work on the trip home either.
	The van stops twice on the trip between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. The trip took 6:45 hours. At this first stop, there was an old colonial-era building behind the restaurant where we stopped. It looks empty now. These beautiful old buildings are rapidly disappearing.
	This is the outdoors kitchen for the restaurant at the rest stop. Because most Cambodians eat on the road when they are on a trip, places like this restaurant can serve a quick bowl of rice or noodles and the passengers are back on the road in twenty minutes.

	I left Henry and Judy in Siem Reap on Saturday and they toured two more days and then came to Phnom Penh. Today they came to the Deaf Development Programme. Judy was a long-term volunteer with the Catholic deaf group in Hong Kong when I worked there.
	That evening we met at the Independence Monument in Phnom Penh and then went to dinner nearby. The traffic was--and is--terrible at this time of day.
	The next day we met at Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum, and took a tour. Here Judy looks at photos of people who were executed. The next morning Henry and Judy went to the Killing Fields and then in the afternoon it was back to Taiwan.

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