After spending sometime in Thailand, we crossed the border on foot and went to Cambodia. It was an easy border crossing.
Note: If you apply for your Cambodia VISA online it costs $36, however if you come to the border and then apply for the VISA, it will cost you $30. So if you want to save 20% on the VISA fee, please walk to the border without an online VISA.
We were in a small van with 5 other Europeans.
The Krong Poi Pet Thai-Cambodia border is pretty crowded and things happened quite haphazardly.
We ended up in Siem Reap safely and successfully. Pub Street of Siem Reap offers decent food, music and beers.
We have now understood that every South East Asian city has a hippie/ traveler street. If one is craving for pizza, pasta, burgers or wants a break fromAsian food, then they can head here. :-)
We visited the Angkor museum before visiting the Angkor Wat the next day.
There were lots of Hindu idols and scriptures in this museum.
We realised that, just the Angkor Wat temple site is a huge place. And, the complete Angkor Old City was a 400 sq kms site. We were excited to visit it the next day.
Again the cleanliness and no-honking was a lovely surprise for us.
We left our hotel at 4:30 AM in the morning to reach Angkor Wat and be the first to see the sunrise.
Note: The best way to visit the old city of Angkor is to get a TukTuk, which is actually a trolly stuck behind a scooter and it will cost you $20 for the whole day!
Our hotel was good at pushing us to wake us up and dragging us out of our beds. Angkor Wat does look beautiful when the sun was about to rise and we were lucky to be in the first row.
A lot of people brought massive fancy cameras and lenses. We made some friends and they were pretty decent iPhone cameramen. ;-)
As we looked back at where we were standing, there were hundreds of people there, as the sun came up.
As we walked into the Wat, we saw the vastness of the place.
The symmetry of the place was unbelievable.
It felt like we were in the 10th century. It in fact is a ruin and has been kept as a ruin since many decades.
I loved how they had built this temple in the 10 century, knowing that we would visit it in 2024. How did they know that? Just how?
From Angkor, our driver took us to Bayon. We also saw the Amritmanthan where the Asuras and Devas churned Amrit from the sea.
A lot of countries have been helping Cambodia to safeguard and renovate the temples.
I loved the face of the kings on the temples.
Again, it feels like they built these massive temples and then just didn't take care of them.
There was another temple taken care by the Indian government and the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) has been helping Cambodia to rebuilding and renovation. This was the Ta Prohm temple, also know as the Tomb Raider Temple.
The temple is extremely old and now, nature has taken over this temple.
I also think, this temple wasn't completed. Some of the drawing seems to be just drawing and the carvings were unfortunately never completed.
Mother nature rules here.
Some sections are still okay to walk along though.
I loved this photo where the tree is towering over everything. In few centuries, even the wall that is standing at the back will fall.
As the sun came up in the sky, the heat became almost unbearable and we asked our guy to take us to the last temple. Banteay Kdei Temple was our last however one of the largest after Angkor.
We came back to the town and prepared for our next journey. For almost the whole journey, we both were quiet and just remember what would have happened during those years and how 33% of the population of a country was genocidally killed by the Khmer Rouge dictators.
One must try to take the day slow and I would suggest people to do these temples over 3-4 days.
The ruins are absolutely stunning.
We then left Siem Reap and went to Phnom Penh.
The National Museum of Cambodia was lovely. They also had a lot of idols from Siem Reap here.
I especially loved the idols of Kauravas and Pandavs.
It was beautiful and pretty lovely garden too.
We also visited the Prison-21 in Phnom Penh (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum). This was a prison and a torture camp for the people who didn't agree with the Communist Pol Pot regime on Cambodia. It was really tragic place to visit. However, the people of Phnom Penh don't ignore their history and want everyone to understand the mistakes made by previous leader and want the next generation to learn from those mistakes.
These were the last 14 prisoners left in the prison camp 21, when the Communist regime was toppled in 1979.
Few of the guys who survived the regime wrote their tales.
This was quite a moving place. But sometimes it's important for us to visit such places and learn from them.
Note: Please get an audio guide for this visit.
We then visited the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, also known as the Killing Fields of Cambodia. This was the scariest of times for Cambodians and it was very enlightening to see that we now have peace in the country and the people are moving forward.
Note: Please get an audio guide for this visit.
The memorial was beautiful from afar.
These were the fields where the Khmer Rouge killed people just because they could. Some of the stories we heard during our visit were extremely moving.
There was a tree, where the mothers and their kids were separated. And because the bullets were expensive the kids were killed by banging their heads on this tree. I haven't heard of such cruelty ever in my life.
Tribute to those who lost their lives and family members during this time.
Some of the human heads that were found here.
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