Cambodia Archives

A Siem Reap Weekend Trip And Photography Tour

Matt — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:42:34 +0000

THIS POST WAS CREATED IN PARTNERSHIP WITHYOUR HOLIDAY EXPERTS FOR UNIQUE TRAVEL EXPERIENCES
kkday.com

My girlfriend and I were looking for a place to visit on a long weekend in early December. Being in Bangkok, we had lots of cool nearby options. When she told me she hadn’t been to Angkor Wat, I was like, “In that case, we definitely have to have to go.”

I’d been there once before (you can read about that trip here) and had been blown away.

Note: I’m in some places (like the title) I refer Angkor Wat for convenience because that’s what most people know it as, even though Angkor Wat is actually only one temple in the much larger city, which is called Angkor Thom (the great city).

Angkor Thom is one most impressive historical sites in the world. In its heyday (around the 9th to 15th century AD) to say it was the largest civilization in the world is an understatement. The city covered 1000 square kilometers making it bigger than modern-day Paris and several times larger than the next biggest city of the time (Tikal, Guatemala) and its temples and buildings used more stones than all the pyramids in Egypt.

December is also a pretty ideal time to visit because it’s both one of the driest and coolest months.

We were looking for a relaxing getaway, so we didn’t want to overbook ourselves with activities. So, we arranged this itinerary:

Day 1: Arrive in the afternoon, check in to the hotel, and relax.
Day 2: Full-day Angkor Wat photography tour from 5am to 6pm.
Day 3: Sunset cruise on Tonle Sap Lake from 4pm – 8pm

So, the first thing we did when arrived was check in to our hotel for some R&R.

Chilling Out At Tresor D’Angkor

I was very happy when we arrived at our hotel, the Tresor D’Angkor. It’s only 10 minutes from downtown Siem Reap, but the location is perfectly isolated from the busy city, quiet, and tranquil.

I’m not a hotel guy. To me, a room is a room, but the design of this resort really struck me. It reminded me of the Jetwing Hotels in Sri Lanka designed by Geoffrey Bawa, which are probably the most striking buildings I’ve ever seen. The Tresor D’Angkor was so similar in style and atmosphere to Bawa hotels that I asked several people whether or not it was intentional. Nobody on staff knew.

After a chill afternoon at the resort, we turned in early to get ready for our 5 am photography tour pickup.

Tresor D’Angkor Info

Address: ICF Rd, Phum Krous, Sangkat Svay Dangkum Siem Reap, Cambodia
Map: https://goo.gl/maps/NKhebUTpNDL2
Phone: +855 63-900-168
Email: assistant@tresordangkorsuite.com
Website: www.tresordangkorsuite.com

The Photography Tour: A Different Look At Angkor Wat

I was a bit concerned about this tour. We were committing to more than 12 hours with a tour guide who we hadn’t spoken to in advance. I really didn’t want to go and visit the usual photo spots — especially Angkor Wat at sunrise, which is usually a swarmed with a mob of tourists all jockeying for position to get the same iconic shot.

I wanted to explore lesser-known parts of the complex.

I was in luck. Our guide turned out to be awesome. His name was Kimleng Sang. He’s not only a great photographer who knows the area intimately, but he’s also a passionate photographer endlessly interested in finding new places to shoot and new ways to look at familiar ones.

The day was an excellent mix of off-the-path spots and must-see temples and buildings. Whether it was because of the places he took us, or angles and framings he pointed out, I owe most of my best photos to Kimleng’s help.

Here are few I couldn’t have gotten without him.

This one I definitely owe to Kimleng, because he took it for us.

This is a totally random spot not far from one of the main temples, that had no path to it and you’d never think to check out. Kimleng, however, insisted we visit it and told us we wouldn’t regret it. We didn’t.

Even after three trips to the famous Bayon Temple, I was never satisfied with my photos of it. Even standing right in front of this shot, Kimleng had to point it out and guide me to find the proper framing. I learned a lot from that guy.

Here are a few more of the photos I took that day.

Big thanks to our guide, Kimleng, who really made the day!

Want to try this tour?

You can book it on KKDay here. But, they have more than one photography tour guide. If you want the same guide who helped me get these shots make sure that you request Kimleng Sang. Tell them that Xpat Matt sent you!

VIEW THIS TOUR NOW

A Sunset Cruise On Tonle Sap Lake

We knew this was going to be a bit of a touristy activity, but after our long day exploring Angor Thom we wanted something relaxing. A 4-hour cruise and few beers sounded just right. We also booked this trip through KKDay.

We showed up at the pier to crowds of tourists piling onto big boats. We were super lucky, though, that our tour was on a small boat with only about 8 seats, and we were the only two passengers. I opened a beer, took out my camera, and snapped some photos as we cruised down the river.

At the end, we stopped at a floating restaurant where enterprising young kids who live on the lake would paddle over in makeshift boats (see the girl in the pail below) and charge tourists for photos with them or — on some occasions — with them and their pet snake.

The restaurant was, of course, a tourist trap with lots of knick-knacks on sale, and you could try exotic foods like snake and crocodile. I gave the crocodile a taste. It was pretty good; tender like chicken with a slightly fishy flavor.

One Other Thing

No trip to Siem Reap is complete without a stroll through pub street, which is a super touristy area with tons of restaurants, bars, and shops.

Fish foot massages are pretty common in Taiwan and I tried them many times. Noey had never tried one, so after dinner one night I took her to try.

I don’t take the best care of my feet. I run a lot — often barefoot on the beach. This makes them very dry and calloused. Turns out that’s something that the fish love because they swarmed my feet like crazy! I’d never seen anything like it. Check it out.

Have you been to Siem Reap? What would you recommend if you were only there for a few days?

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Life And Death And Angkor Wat

Matt — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 15:00:07 +0000

The sun was sinking into the jungle turning the horizon orange and throwing long shadows across the ancient ruin. Drenched in sweat, I rushed around the surprisingly empty rear portion of Angkor Wat, snapping as many photos as I could during the golden hour. I left the temple and headed toward the exit. With a few minutes to spare before the ruin closed for the night, I walked along the outer wall toward the jungle.

As the sun went down a high-pitched scream slowly rose from the jungle like a sound-effect from a horror movie. As the ancient ruin darkened, and the scream filled the night, the moist night air felt thick with ghosts.

As I rode my mountain bike back to town, I turned off the road into a rice field to record the sound. In the distance, a khmer flute began to play.

This is what it sounded like.

This is the recording of the insects that I took. The flute was too faint for my microphone to pick up, so I’ve added one that sounds almost exactly the same by khmerangkor on YouTube.

Death and sadness seemed to hang in the air.

Some trips cannot be separated from the circumstances under which they took place. My trip to the ancient city of Angkor was one of them.

Three years before I visited Angkor Wat, I moved from home from Tainan, Taiwan back to Canada when my father nearly died from heart problems. Eventually, he got better. Then, just when I was ready to move back to Taiwan, my girlfriend’s sister was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, so, instead, we moved to California to help care for her.

Two very difficult and grief stricken years later, my girlfriend and I broke up. No longer having any reason to stay in North America, I decided to return home to South East Asia. I put all my things in a storage locker, packed my bags, and one month later I was laying on a hard bed under a fan in a guesthouse room in Siem Reap that I’d rented for 10 days.

Gaining distance from the events of the preceding years gave me opportunity to reflect on them.

So, when I say that Angkor Wat is a haunted place, I can’t tell you whether I was given that impression only by the grand ancient Hindu structures slowly being eroded by the elements and consumed by the jungle, or by my reflections on a family that was robbed of a kind-hearted young mother, sister, and daughter.

It was probably a bit of both.

Angkor’s eerieness had no quality of fear. It was a still sadness. A melancholy calm settled on the ruins each evening. As the sun set the azure sky turned orange, and then yellow, and then purple. As the dusk dissipated and night flooded in a scream from the jungle would gradually and steadily grow to a maddening pitch. Then it would rise and fall unceasingly—the sound of the insects in the humid jungle night.

I rented a mountain bike for my ten days in Siem Reap. Most days I would work until about 2 or 3pm. Then I would get on the mountain bike and ride 10km to the ancient city which, was, historians say, the largest city on Earth before the industrial revolution. It is said to sprawl across 1000 square kilometres and dwarfs the next-largest ancient city in the world, the Mayan city of Tikal, which covers just 150.

I wandered the ruins alone for 5 or 6 hours most days, returning to the city only when it got too dark to take photos. I had a lot of time to think. I often found myself thinking about the mystery surrounding the fall of Angkor. There are several theories about why the city was abandoned, most of which involve catastrophes such as plagues, earthquakes, and war.

I also thought about the holocaust that brutalized the country less than 30 years earlier, and the enduring poverty experienced by the survivors.

I would spend the hours before sunset exploring the ancient ruins on my bicycle. After I’d seen most of the major temples, I began riding down random paths into the jungle to see what was there.

I found half-buried statues of lions, strange artifacts that I couldn’t explain, and small, seemingly unvisited temples. I found unrecognizable structures choked in tree roots and overgrown with vegetation that were slowly being devoured by the jungle.

Each night I would ride my bike back to town on the narrow strip of pavement that split the thick jungle, light dwindling, sky turning yellow, orange, and purple, the jungle the insects screaming all around me.

During my trip I struggled to find some kind of lesson in the morbid unfairness and suffering that I’d seen during the preceding years. The experience was too awful to have been in vain. I must have learned something from it.

I don’t think they’re very profound—and they’re certainly not unique—but these are the conclusions I reached.

Death is inevitable, and therefore not worth worrying about. And, although it may sometimes feel that way, the inevitability of death doesn’t remove the meaning from life.

The jungle consumes all. With enough time, it will devour the greatest city in the world, but that doesn’t mean the city isn’t worth building. The act itself is a thing of beauty. And, if it’s built well, it will be remembered and appreciated for a long time.

There is only one worthwhile thing we can do in life: build temples to the people and ideas that we love.

The jungle consumes all, and it will consume me. The best I can do is leave behind my own slowly eroding, root-choked temples.

If I’ve built them well, then it will mean two things:

First, it will mean that I lived a purposeful life and stayed true to those things that mattered most.

Second, it will mean that, just maybe, my temples will be appreciated and remembered…for a while at least.

The jungle will eventually consume them too, but that matters not, for the act of creating them was a thing of beauty, and that is something not even the jungle can erase.

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Cenote Hunting in Cambodia

Kristin Addis — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:00:01 +0000

The day started with an AM taxi ride out to Kampot from Sihanoukville in Cambodia. The trunk was full of SCUBA tanks and other required diving gear. We were hunting for a water-filled cave in the jungle, after all.

Sandwiched between the driver and a Cambodian woman, with more gear and three grown men in the back, I did my best not do bump the gearshift and send us into reverse. As the driver sped down the wrong side of the street to avoid slower traffic in front of us, I silently thought to myself that if we were to crash, I would be the first out the windshield. As we narrowly missed clipping another cab with nine passengers, I felt a little less fear about our six.

Two hours later we arrived in Kampot, ready to trek to Cambodia’s version of a Cenote – a never-before-dove cave.

Kampot. Photo by fusuma automatiko

First, we had to procure motorbikes. Oh, and a guide. That in itself took a few hours to sort out. After all, we were on Cambodian time. I hopped on behind Marcin, Dive Shop Cambodia’s resident dive master.

“Don’t kill us, Marcin,” I said to him as we started off.

He promised to do his best.

The trek started out innocently enough. We rode through the town center and for the first time, I saw beautiful mountains in an otherwise flat Cambodia. This must be the Bokhor Mountains I had heard so much about.

Suddenly, we veered off of the nice, paved road onto a sandy, wet excuse for a trail.

This was uncharted territory we were heading into, as evidenced by even our guide taking pictures of the trek with his phone.

We were going on nothing more than a rumor. We were going on a hunch.

We drove through thick puddles of mud and every now and then, miniature bodies of water, surrounded by nothing but the occasional shack and the natural beauty that surrounds Kampot. Whenever I felt the ride getting particularly bumpy, I let go of the back handles and held onto Marcin’s shoulder – capable moto driver that he was – my other hand always filming. After all, I had to document this endeavor of sheer lunacy.

Fishermen near Kampot. Photo by EyeofJ

Once we got to the point that the road was no longer any semblance of a road, it was time to continue on foot. This part of the trek involved pushing aside vines, letting the bare-foot and shirtless guide in front of us hack away vegetation with his machete, and generally climbing hand and foot over rocks.

Once we reached the waterfall, I finally understood the meaning of the saying “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

We had reached a beautiful apex, complete with trees growing out of rocks, and evidence that very few others had reached this point in the jungle. After all, there was hardly a trail.

We were sad to realize there was no underwater cave. There was no Cambodian version of a Cenote for us to dive. It was a heartbreaking realization, but nonetheless, we trekked where few have boldly trekked before. That, in itself, was adventure enough for me.

We may not have discovered Cambodia’s first cenote, but we had one hell of an adventure. Big thanks to Dive Shop Cambodia for taking me on a trek that very few others get to experience. In any event, we made up for the lack of cenote diving by taking two amazing dives off of Koh Rong, an island close to Sihanoukville.

That night, I dined on my fried beef luc lac, feeling that I had earned it during my day’s work.

Though I know the Dive Shop Cambodia keeps the dream alive to find a cenote, I enjoyed my time simply hunting for one. My fingers are crossed that one day, they are successful.

For a better idea of what the journey looked like, checkout my video at the top of the page.

Lead image by EyeofJ

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