We were 2 men down on day 3 in Cambodia. Both Tim and Ol weren’t well, so the other 6 of us trekked out on our own.
We went back to do a half day at the temples with the same tuktuk drivers we’d used a few days before. We also organised with and paid them directly, as we learned the hotels take 60% of all the tuktuk drivers pay. Boooo!
We stopped at a little bakery en route and had a decadent breakfast of macaron and pastries. The French influence really pays off in this case.
First stop was Bayon temple, it sits in the middle of Angkor Thom, a different temple complex with several temples. Built in the 12th century by King Jayavarman VII, it was built as his base instead of Angkor Wat, which was a Hindu temple, and *this* King was Buddhist.
There are over 200 large, smiling faces carved into each side of the towers which makes it stand out from the others, whose towers are generally plain. They say it has 54 towers because there used to be 54 provinces in Cambodia (now only 24 I think) but I didn’t count them and am not sure it actually has in reality.
When we got to Bayon, it was overrun with monkeys. I really hate monkeys, they are just overly confident and aggressive, stealing your shit and running at you. The kids were delighted, obviously!
It was a right effort trying to keep the kids from getting too close to them, Crickett in particular. Luckily she was the only one we paid the full course of rabies vaccinations for, because I knew something like this would happen and we’d be hopeless at containing her!
As we were walking through, one of the monkeys JUMPED on me and held on to my leg. FFS. I managed to shake it off and it bloody did it again! Jonathan was useless, just watching while I lost it.
I was holding a drink – which it wanted – so I just threw it (unfortunately, at Soph), shouted some expletives and the damn thing let go and went and drank the drink. Honestly hate them.
Jonathan was keen to leave monkey temple as he hates them as much as me. But if you ask them, it was entirely the best thing about Cambodia for Bo and Rai.
It was another hot day, about 40* so we only had a certain amount of good grace from everyone before we were just TOO HOT.
We headed towards the Terrace of the Elephants, with near lifesize elephant carvings and a 350m royal walkway/platform, then back to the tuktuk.
I showed the little ones some small fern like plants that close up when you tap them, which a guide showed me 20 years ago. They spent ages finding as many plants as possible to make them all close.
Next stop was Pre Rup temple, which I had not been to before but read it was good for climbing. It wasn’t a patch on Ta Keo for steep steps unfortunately, but it was different in that it was built from small bricks made from dirt rather than the huge stone slabs from Kulen mountain. This temple was built in the 9th century and was used for cremations (in the towers).
We had a little smoothie break and then headed to another small temple, which I forget the name of, before heading back to the hotel for a swim. We got back just in time before the heavens opened, but didn’t stop us getting in the pool.
We went out to grab a quick snack; we had seen a Thai pancake stall a few days ago and we’d all been banging on about it since then. But much to our collective disappointment, it wasn’t there 😭
Jonathan was hangry and thus indecisive – but as he was also the one who wanted to go out for a snack – I made him decide what we did next.
This wasn’t a good move, because he is incapable of making decisions when he is hangry. Which is how we ended up in a very local pizza place, when no one wanted pizza, and accidentally ended up with a tiny crab and prawn pizza between us all. And a second sweetcorn pizza which no one ordered. Jonathan hates prawns. We also asked for a knife to cut the pizza, received 3 forks and just gave up.
In the evening we went to Phare circus, a local performance of acrobatics in a circus tent which the kids enjoyed. The highlight for me was that it was accompanied by live musicians throughout.
We struggled to get dinner by the time we got home, as everywhere by us was closed, so we ended up with a Grab (Asian Uber eats) KFC at 11pm – as it was allegedly the quickest thing to get to us, 13mins so it said, however, it arrived 45mins later, while it was hammering down.
On our last day we had a taxi booked to the airport at 3pm, so we had another bougie brunch and then I took Tim to the western walk in clinic to get him checked over. They prescribed 3 different things inc some antibiotics, so hoping he’ll be back to normal quite quickly.
Before we headed to the airport we had a little visit to the Apopo centre, a education centre where they explain how they use trained rats to locate land mines.
It was really informative and we got to see a live demonstration and even handle the rats, which were more like hamster-possums.
They are African rats. Each one takes a year to fully train before they can be used professionally, at a cost of about $6,000 per rat. They’ve found over 7,000 un detonated land mines so far. If a local person thinks there may be lands mines on their land or village, Apopo will surgery and clear it for free.
After that we headed to the airport for our 5th flight in 10 days, back to Hanoi in Vietnam to start working our way south.
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