Cambodia Tour - Day 2 - July 15

Unfortunately, after crashing hard last night I was inexplicably wide awake at 3:00 am – and never got back to sleep!   I was so happy when four hours later I could wake everyone else up to get started on the day.  Sokoeurn and Chhen

picked us up at 8:30 am for our second day of touring, this time out to the mountain of Phnom Kulen.  It took about an hour to drive the 65 km to the mountain, and then a half hour to drive up to the top along a difficult dirt road.  The mountain was a quarry of sandstone providing much of what sent down river and dragged by elephants to make the temples we saw yesterday.  It is also considered a holy mountain, religiously significant to Buddhists and Hindus.

 

Our first stop was a big reclining Buddha (the largest in Cambodia at 8 feet tall) carved into the stone at the very top of the mountain in the 16^th century.  Most visitors were locals praying to the Buddha.  There were also Hindu statues and people playing music.  It was a pretty festive site. 

We then drove to the site of the thousand lingas, which were carved into the riverbed in 802 AD.  When the river runs over the lingas it becomes blessed, creating holy water downstream. 

Next we went to the 35m high waterfall featured in the Tomb Raider movie.  It was also very popular with locals and tourists.  We first stopped at a set of small falls that I was worried were our destination spot (nice but not super impressive) but then our guide took us down another path and a long set of stairs to get to the bottom of the much more impressive falls.   It was a pretty entrepreneurial scene, with a couple of printers set up under a rock outcropping manned by loud teenagers who, rather than just being hooligans, were running a photo printing business from the bottom of the waterfall.  There was also a changing area you could pay to use. 

Jim and the girls decided to swim to the falls, while I wasn’t interested, knowing it would take me days to get dry in that humidity.  The cold water and the biting fish didn’t do much to lure me in either.  They weren’t the cute fish that nibble at dead skin gently, they were more like mini piranhas (not quite big enough to leave a mark) but certainly scary enough to lead to many shrieking tourists.  Despite all the hullabaloo, it is a beautiful scene.  

We then drove down from the mountain and another hour out to Beng Mealea, stopping for lunch just outside the temple.  The drives along the way gave us much time to talk about the Khmer culture and see much of Khmer village life.  Jim was particularly fascinated by the “electric cow” they have converted from a tractor that gets used both to plow the fields and as a vehicle for towing a cart and carrying things.  

I was very interested in how rice is actually grown.  I have images of rice paddies in my mind but when I really thought about it, I didn’t know anything about the process of getting rice out of those paddies.  Luckily our guide grew up in a village growing rice with his family.  He is one of six siblings (though two died – both very young).  He says everyone in Cambodia is either a farmer or works in tourism, and seemed glad to have made the switch though lives a 3-hour bus ride from his family. As we were touring the Beng Mealea temple (possibly my favorite), there were farmers nearby transplanting rice (an important part of the process) so he walked us down to the edge of where they were working and explained what we were seeing.  

The style of Beng Mealea is identical to Angkor Wat, so it thought to come from the same period in the early 12^th century.  It remains much as it was found with trees growing in and around the ruins like Ta Prohm, but this one is even more jungle-like in appearance.  They have built walkways to walk above the ruins since no restoration has been done and rocks remain piled in heaps where they fell. 

Our driver was great about stopping the car and getting out to show us things we had been discussing.  They were trying to explain how they grow two types of tapioca here (which looks like a sweet potato, who knew?), one edible and one they can’t eat.  He stopped twice to pull the leaves of the two different plants to show us how to tell the difference (we could barely see the difference up close, but they could tell even while whizzing by the plants on the road which was which).  He also stopped for us to try a roadside delicacy -- sticky rice and black beans cooked inside bamboo – that locals have as a midday snack, meaning that rice is part of all three meals plus snacks and dessert.

We got back to the hotel around 5:00 and the girls decided we should watch the Tomb Raider movie before dinner with fresh images of the real locations in our minds.  The movie was pretty bad – Julia slept and I blogged while Rachel and Jim watched, drawing our attention when the temples or waterfall were featured.  We then walked over to the Night Market and through the stalls of clothes and handicrafts.  We stopped for dinner at an Indian restaurant (still always a reliable choice for us!), and ended up buying a couple pieces of art we all liked and hopefully will still like when we get them back home.