::A Geek in Korea::

We had to shower after we got to the guest house. The dust on Cambodian roads loved to stick to our sun tan lotion, so we needed to wash our hands and legs before we took a nap. We slept off the hottest part of the day, like many Cambodians do. After that we were refreshed enough to keep up our pace.

We ended up going at least 40 kilometers outside of Siem Reap to a temple complex called Banteay Srei. The tuk tuk driver sighed when we told him the destination for the afternoon. It was a really far drive through rural Cambodia.

Along the roads people would have arranged plastic bottles filled with a yellow liquid. It turns out that these are the local “gas stations”. Bigger places in the country might have an entire 55 gallon drum of fuel, and possibly diesel fuel, but the majority were simply a rack of plastic cola bottles filled with gasoline. The tuk tuk driver stopped at one of these places to refill the tank along the way. My wife handed out candy to the children that came up to greet us. They were so excited and ate it immediately. We rode for over an hour to arrive at the temple. We hadn’t really planned to go out from the city right away, but we didn’t have a guide book, only a list of locations from the tour guide at the time.

Upon arriving at our destination, we were greeted by a group of children selling guide books. We needed a guide book, because we were simply walking through the different locations without any sense of what they were about, or what they represented to the culture. I talked a boy down to half his initial price, which was the highest percentage haggling we accomplished, but I still ended up paying the same amount for my guide book as I did for the guest room for a night. $14 for a map and some history and some great pictures? I’m fine with it.

We also bought a fresh coconut for our driver and ourselves. 2 coconuts for a dollar. It’s the first time I drank from a coconut. At least I can say I’ve done it, so I won’t need to every do it again. It tasted like stale water, not like a coconut that I can remember. Banteay Srei temple is unique in that it is sort of “miniature” in scale compared to the others we had visited. It was still elaborately decorated and had lots to see, it’s just that everything was half as tall.

We went during the late afternoon, which was good because the sun made the red stone glow. We walked around with the guide book, and listened to some of the Korean tours that were nearby as well. I think Korean tour guides can make up pretty much anything, as people completely lack any context to what they are seeing. I didn’t see any tour patron with anything other than a camera, so they trusted their guides word.

After we left Banteay Srei, we rode back the hour into town. Every tourist attraction closes around 5:30, so we were rushing back to try to make it to Phnom Bakheng, a mountain top temple. We wanted to watch the sunset over the jungle. We missed the entry to the mountain pass to see the temple by 15 minutes. We vowed to return the next day.

We remounted the tuk tuk and went for the Old Market area of town. We wanted some fruit for breakfast the next day. My wife adores mangoes, and I am a fan of mangosteen ever since Thailand introduced me to the fruit. We walked around the market, which was much like a Korean market, except with more people, more noise, and 100x more motorcycles parked everywhere. We found some fruit for breakfast, then went back to the guest house via tuk tuk. We agreed to hire the tuk tuk for another day, and paid him the $13 dollars he was owed for the day of driving.

He left, and we walked to a tourist friendly restaurant around the corner right as a series of tuk tuks dropped off their tour. We drank 1.5 liters of water with our meal and still couldn’t feel like we had drank our fill. We were sweating all day, but it wasn’t that humid compared to Korea in August. We expected much worse from what the tours had told us.

We had a decent dinner for the $10.20 dollar price.They added a Value Added Tax that we never saw on any other purchase in the country. I think this was the “tourist” tax. We ended up getting change in Cambodian Riel. The exchange rate was close to 4000 riel to the US dollar. We never saw anything smaller than 100 riel, and no coins.

We went to a local gas station convenience store to pick up some snacks and more bottled water for our second day. We found Korean Pop Sensation “Rain” was a spokesperson for yogurt, and you can get Vanilla Coke, and Root Beer in Cambodia which is still not available in Korea. After showering to get the accumulated dirt and sun tan lotion off our skin for the second time in the day, we crashed in the guest house in anticipation of another day in Cambodia exploring the ruins.