pictures from Cambodia

dec 30 2001 - jan 5 2002

This is the second half of some pictures from a trip to thailand and cambodia. The first half is at pictures from thailand. these pictures are a little better i think. but i missed a lot of good ones.

it's adam among lots of statues in angkor wat.

it's matt and adam standing in front of angkor wat. this morning we had gotten up at 5 to see sunrise there. it was pretty cool i guess. i was more interested in all the people who thought they were hardcore for having gone there. there were an amazing number of people there taking pictures of the sun. it is fun bumbling around thousand year old temples in the dark.

most of the nice stuff from angkor wat has already been stolen, and anything that was left after the war ended was taken to a museum in phnom phen. but there is still some pretty cool stuff there, in addition to just the architecture.

supposedly, the temples were built with three levels, the outside is hell, the middle is earth, and the top is heaven. the stairs get steeper and steeper as you get closer to heaven.

we went to see the sunset on top of this temple that had the steepest steps you can imagine. also, before that, we had walked up a very steep dry riverbed with huge rocks in it. the top was totally packed. lots of people taking pictures of the sun there as well. it was a nice view, you could see some other temples around. they also had elephant rides to the top. also the normal 16 year old girls selling 2$ t-shirts and film and water.

me, matt, and mike at bayon, in front of some elephants. little kids who wanted to be guides accosted us and followed us around for 20 minutes, trying to explain things. it sounded like they'd gotten a tape of some tour of angkor and tried to memorize it, without actually knowing any english. then they'd ask for money. i gave them some thai baht, but not enough evidently, because he started yelling at me.

these kids tried to sell us bracelets and little postcards. one scheme they had was to draw some little art on the back of a postcard, just a sad flower or something, and then sign their name in english. it was pitiful, you couldn't help but buy some bracelets or something from them. i thought they were poor at the time, but i reconsidered after what i saw later.

these kids were really nice, me and mike just bought some water from them and then sat down, and they were just playing marble games in the sand around us. then mike started reading something out loud in a monotonic voice, and the boy with no shirt on just couldn't take it, so he just started jabbering 'blahblahblahblah'. they all cracked up, and so did we. so then we started talking to them. turns out they already know the numbers of english sufficient to bargain with. they don't know much other english though. but, they said that when japanese people come there, they don't know the numbers so they can't bargain with them.
so, we taught them japanese numbers, and they taught us khmer numbers. they were very nice, and seemed to be in pretty good shape. behind their little stalls, we saw some people that looked like their parents sleeping. i guess the kids were cuter, so they put them to work. that's how it is all over cambodia, the only people trying to sell things are boys from about 5 to 12 and girls from 5 to 20. you don't really see people of other ages in tourist areas.

mike and some water buffalo. i showed this picture to my kids at school, and they had a good time trying to guess what the animals were in the back. the most popular guess was "ino-shishi", which are like warthogs. they still live around here, and i think i ate some at my last work party.

these guys are great, first the three on the left came over. the most left one speaks no english, but the one next to him is really great. he told us all sorts of things about what he does, when he goes to pray, etc. he said he only started studying english 9 months ago. now, he has really good english. he seemed like a pretty smart guy. he has no money, but whenever he has a day off from being a monk, he goes to angkor wat and practices on tourists. i wish he were my student...
the guy on the right was really funny, he was smoking a cigarette. i didn't know monks were allowed to do that. i guess since every male in cambodia has to become a monk at some time, you get all kinds.

most of the heads had been stolen off these statues. someone had fixed them up and replaced the missing parts with concrete.

this is one of the unrestored temples, called "the jungle temple". it was great, the whole center had fallen down except for some passages remaining in the rubble. there were lots of huge trees everywhere growing in the rock.

this is our guide in cambodia. his name is "bigman". he speaks pretty good english. he loves drinking, he was always trying to get us to drink. the day we got up at 5 am, he came back at 10 am with a trunk full of beers and tried to give them to us. he is super rich for cambodia, he has his own car, house, cell phone, etc. it's 20$ a day to have him drive you around, and that includes any time from 5 am to 8 at night. in the picture, he was taking us out on a boat into the middle of this lake to see the sunset. however, on the way out there we saw the most shocking things, it was just a horrible place with garbage everywhere and people living in little huts. i didn't feel like looking at the sunset at all.

oh, but they did have a floating catholic church.

this picture actually came out well.

I don't know how this worked, people living out on the lake on floating houses. the ones out on the lake didn't look so bad, but back on shore it was horrible.

this is a fake mcdonald's in siem reap, the city near angkor wat where we stayed. the guys there sold me a t-shirt for 4$. i approve of fake mcdonalds.

this is the street in siem reap. this is a good section of the road, usually there are huge holes in it. this is in front of our guesthouse.