Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 64

We took an unconventional route from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap: by car. Siem Reap is about 315 km north-west of Phnom Penh, which is about 200 miles. However, the drive time is about 5 hours due to the lack of anything bigger than a 2-lane road (it seems) in the country.

Siem Reap is both the name of a province in Cambodia, the 10th largest, and a city. The name "Siem Reap" literally means "Siam Defeated", a reminder of the centuries-old conflict between the Siamese (Thailand) and the Khmer.

Alot of these pictures are just countryside. It was dry season, so we saw alot of brown rice fields, that lay "dead" until wet season when they are filled with rice. There were a few green fields that our guide said was "dry season rice".

Our first stop along the way was this little market area. They had lots of things, including piles and piles of things like grilled tarantula. And they had a few little girls walking around with these live tarantulas climbing around on them.

Not the best picture, but this is in a roundabout in one of the towns that we went through, which this nice monument with 2 young people in it. I missed most of the monument, but I still think it was nice.

All along the route, there were what looked like houses that had these little drink-stands just up along-side the road.

I tried to get some house pictures as well, randomly along the route. They are all on stilts. I asked the guide about them, if they were on stilts due to the flooding in the rainy season, and he said no, saying that these are "dragon houses". The typical houses of Khmer people (Khmer being native Cambodian) outside of cities are rectangular wooden houses, and normally just one main floor. He talked about the roofs, which are the dragons .. there are the heads on one side of the roofline and the tail on the other end. The tiles on the roof look like the scales of the dragon. Most of them do not really have running water inside the homes. Cooking is done downstairs on the ground, and any animals (cows, chickens, etc) are kept below the house itself to protect them from the weather.

What looked to me to be a little restaurant along side the road

Then we stopped for lunch, alongside a branch of the Tonle Sap lake. We'll cover the actual lake in another week, since we did a boat trip on it. The restaurant that we stopped at was kinda nice, with these little individual thatch-roofed eating areas that would work well for small groups. We got this Khmer beef dish served inside of a pineapple and a chicken dish cooked/served in a lotus leaf. Both were really good. There was a little store (of course) with tourist things. Tom wanted to get a picture from our table of the animals that were out in the marshy area.

Siem Reap (the city) is the capital of the Siem Reap Province. It has a combination of French-colonial and Chinese-style architecture in the main part of the city, surrounding the Old Market. I'll give the history next week when we start talking about the temples. We stayed in a very nice hotel, where each room had a name (not a number) .. we stayed in the Cashew room. The hotel itself used to be the old French Governor's mansion. In the main courtyard from the street, you have a nice bar area and the main restaurant (upstairs). And of course, what is a SE Asian hotel without little lizards (I called them geckos but our guide said they weren't really geckos). We mainly saw them at night on the walls, although one night there was a little tiny baby one in our bathroom and he seemed terrified of us, so we tried to let him alone.

After arriving and getting checked in, we took a stroll around the Old Market and the area around it. Since Siem Reap now is mainly a tourist attraction with the temples, there are alot of restaurants and pubs around, including "Pub Street". The streets tend to be small and busy most of the time. The hotel was right on a little river and walking down the river, we saw a few groups of a couple people fishing. They take nets and, wading into the river, would throw the nets out, then haul them back in and pick the fish out.

The first night, they had booked us dinner here at the restaurant, since it is supposed to be one of the best restaurants in the city. We had a nice view from the 2nd floor balcony. From the balcony, we could see inside to the main room through the open windows and there were lots of old black-and-white photo's framed hanging around showing the city and area before.

Next blog ... TEMPLES!