No hope and Angkor

To get from Battambang to Siem Reap we took a boat all the way up the river to Tonle Sap Lake. It was a long journey, the wooden seats were a bit hard and there were only about ten life vests for 30-odd passengers, but it made a pleasant change to not be on a stuffy bus. We left really early which meant we got to see the locals performing their morning ablutions in the river - like we were cruising through a massive communal bathroom. The waterway was busy and every now and then we'd have to avoid an oncoming boat or someone's fishing nets as we made our way to the lake. As well as ferrying us tourists, the boat we were on carried locals, along with various goods and produce, which were delivered to some of the floating villages we came across. Little rowing boats would come out to meet us and leave again with some books or pineapples or a pensioner. It wasn't all plain sailing however. At one point our route took us through some flooded trees and bushes that got a little too close for comfort and we got a nice thwack in the face by the branches before being showered in leaves and red ants. Then the engine died a couple of times. This was fixed the first time by our teenage driver, who carefully bashed it a few times with a big spanner. The second time, he had to pinch a car battery out of a police boat at one of the floating villages. We arrived at our destination six hours later, exhausted and with sunburn down one arm. It was still better than a bus though.

We were met by a tuk tuk driver, sent by our guest house, waving a bit of paper with our names on - that cheered us up no end. He warned us that the road into town wasn't very good which turned out to be one of the biggest understatements ever understated. There were potholes the size of meteor craters and ruts like canyons and the resulting effect was like off-roading in a wheelbarrow. At one point, almost as if they thought it wasn't bumpy enough, there was a big mechanical digger churning up the only bit of tarmac we'd seen for three miles. Did they not want us to get to town?

Siem Reap is a small but lively town inhabited almost entirely by tourists as they wait to visit the famous temples of Angkor. Herds of tuk tuk drivers roam the streets trying to convince you that their tuk tuk is the one you want to go in to visit the sights. To stand out from the crowd, some of them have customised their tuk tuks - with varying degrees of success - and you can't walk for more than 30 seconds without someone trying to cajole you into a "Cambodian Ferrari" or three-wheeled "Batmobile". There also seem to be more bars, pubs and restaurants in Siem Reap than there are in the rest of Cambodia put together. One street, actually named "Pub Street", is lined with bars all selling beer for 50 cents each. It's hard to go out and not get drunk!

When you do actually get to the temples there are literally hundreds of them. The first few you visit blow you away with their beauty and size, and you marvel at the centuries old carvings and workmanship. By about the fourth or fifth one you're just wondering why there are so many bloody temples. And at each one, you are besieged by swarms of little urchin children all desperately trying to sell you postcards and guide books. At first you feel sorry for them and politely decline but by the end of the day you just want to tell them to stop whining and leave you alone. But you don't of course. That would be inappropriate. We visited so many temples that after a while they started to blend into one. Especially when some of them are nearly identical but might have, for example, elephant statues at the entrance rather than lion statues. There are, of course, the stand-out temples (Bayon with its giant faces or Ta Prohm, overgrown with tree roots and made famous by the Tomb Raider movie) but by the time you eventually get to the grand finale of Angkor Wat itself, the Optimus Prime of temples, it's a bit of an anticlimax. Yes, it's amazing but so were the previous fifteen temples. Yes, it's big but that just means further to walk and more steps to climb. We were, as you can tell, a bit templed out.

Another reason we were here was to await the arrival of our friend Terry who, along with 70 other women, had taken leave of all her senses and was cycling 420km from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Angkor Wat for charity. We decided, in a display of solidarity, to rent out a couple of bikes of our own and cycle out to greet her at the finish. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Angkor Wat is the name of the big famous temple. But it's also the generic name used to describe the whole complex of temples in the area - a complex the size of a city. So trying to work out exactly where they'd be finishing proved to be a bit tricky - especially as we were on rubbish shopping bikes with baskets on the front. We eventually got to the finish line with just a few minutes to spare before the real cyclists arrived. We waved our home-made banners and cheered as they rode to the finish with big smiles on their faces - something I'd struggled to do for the 6km from town. It was an amazing achievement (Terry's not mine) and we were so very proud of her. And as if all that pedalling wasn't enough of an endurance trial, they then had to fend off the army of little kids peddling postcards and guide books. That should be a sponsored event in itself.