Legends of the Hidden Temple - Siem Reap, Cambodia!

Welcome to Legends of the Hidden Temple / Indiana Jones!  This post is going to be pictures because most of my time in Siem Reap was spent temple hopping, so I'll keep the text brief.  Essentially, I spent 3 days here in between Vietnam and Thailand.  The temple complexes were absolutely unreal.  When I heard that you could bike to the temples, I immediately thought that's what I was going to do, but a good friend, McKenzie, had warned me that I may want to get a tuk-tuk driver to take me around instead of biking - boy was she right - I don't think I've wanted shade as badly as I did in Siem Reap!

Before I start, a few words on the Cambodian people.   They are incredibly friendly and their english is great.  Most of them have such a strong understanding of the language that they can crack jokes with you.  This warmth and their inclination to always be of service is even more amazing considering they had a genocide in the late 70's where almost 2M people were killed.  I wish I had more time in Cambodia, but I appreciated every minute I had while I was there.

Temples Day 1:  Johanna, an awesome German girl that I had met in northern Vietnam and had been hanging out with for two weeks as we worked our way down south in Vietnam, happened to overlap in Siem Reap with me for a day.  I also met a guy named Waqas in my hostel who happened to live in the financial district in Manhattan, so I coordinated between the three of us and arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to drive us around for a big day of temples starting at 7am to try to beat the heat and crowds.  Here are some of the highlights:

Angkor Thom: Actually the largest temple complex, made up of multiple smaller temples.

Bayon - this temple has over 200 faces inscribed on the stone

Me with one of the Bayon faces

Baphoun

Baphoun

At the top of Baphoun!

First sighting of multiple monks - so cool!

Phimeanakas

Thommanon

I love this one - a Buddhist man sleeping in front of his little Buddha with toss sticks burning in the background.

Ta Prohm - Where a lot of the Indiana Jones movie, Tomb Raider, was filmed - this one was super cool!  The trees were incredibly immense and were overgrowing everything.

Group shot :)

Johanna told me to take a jumping shot - hahaha!

Wow!!!

Angkor Wat - Part 1 - We were so tired from being out in the heat all day that we did this one rather quickly, more photos on day two...

End of Day 1: Group selfie with our tuk-tuk driver, Moeunran!

Day 2:  Waqas, myself and two other guys we met (Alex from San Francisco and Peter from London) decided to do the sunrise at Angkor Wat.  We left our hotel in our tuk tuk at 5am, saw the sunrise and then went to see some of the farther out temples until mid morning.  Important note about my wardrobe - I have fully embraced the traveling lifestyle and have purchased three of the amazing "elephant" pants that are incredibly comfortable, perfect for hot weather and have obnoxiously bright prints - perfect for me.  I decided to wear them today because some of the temples required more modest dress to enter, so I had to cover my knees.  After about two hours, there were sticking to me so much that they ripped a huge hole in the crotch!  It started out rather small, but by the end of the day, I had a nice large hole in the butt of my pants...haha.  Besides that, here are some scenes from the day:

Angkor Wat

Makes the 4:30am worth it - sunrise from Angkor Wat

Love how you can see the shadows from the sun still rising...

Same thing here...

The most decorative Buddhist shrine in Angkor Wat

Preah Kahn

One of my favorites because of the peach color of some of the stones that was a great contrast to the moss growing everywhere. 

View from the outside

 This is around 7am so the sun is still coming up.

Love the colors

Alex found a spot for us to shimmy up and climb to the top - super cool - me from the top of Preah Khan!

Ta Som

A few of the stacked rocks on the windowsill and outside - these rock stacks were all over the place - we're pretty sure its because its a Buddhist meditative activity

Bats!  We saw these in all of the cavernous ceilings in this one...

Pre Rup

Mr. Elephant!  There were elephants on all of the corners as if they were guarding the grounds.

Day 3:  This day was mostly about relaxing and getting organized for moving again.  One thing I learned while reading a book...if you sit still for too long, the little geckos will think you're a wall or a piece of furniture that they can crawl on...this was quiet frightening  I also had an amazing run-in with an AWST teammate - Sabrina!  She was a diver on our team in college and graduated 2 years before me.  I happened to see on facebook that she was in Siem Reap at the same time as me, so we met up for lunch.  Such a small world!

So great to see a familiar face!  

So long for now, Cambodia, it's off to Thailand!

Saigon from the back of a motor bike

To finish off my two weeks in Vietnam, I headed down to Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh City for two days.  I was really lucky in that I was able to experience the city through the eyes of locals and get out of the backpacker culture for a few days...one of my mom's friends from work has relatives that live in the city, and they welcomed me with open arms.  Instead of staying in a hostel and exploring on foot and bus with other tourists, I was the passenger on the back of a motor bike for two days - seeing the city through the eyes of a local and rarely seeing another foreigner.

I was greeted at the airport by Thanh and he had brought me beautiful flowers from his family as a welcome present.  We then jumped on his motor bike (somehow with all of my packs) and headed to drop me off at a hotel around the corner from their home and meet his parents.  They also had an adorable little dog, Tete, who was amazing to play with.  Tete and I obviously hit it off, which was apparently abnormal for strangers, so his dad started calling me part of the family....such a great welcome to their home!  After that Thanh and I went to his favorite pho spot for dinner where the owner chatted with us for the entire meal.

The next morning, we set out bright and early at 6am for the Cu Chi tunnels because it got sweltering hot by midday and we had a 90 min motorbike ride in each direction.  Wow, my butt was sore after that but those hours definitely made me infinitely more comfortable with the organized chaos of navigating Vietnam roads.  The Cu Chi tunnels have become famous because they are an extensive network of tunnels stretching from Saigon to the Cambodian border that helped the Viet Cong forces control a large rural area near the capital city.  Because we had started so early, we beat all the tourists and we essentially got a private tour. First we watched a quick movie about the history and use of the tunnels.  This was a little bizarre because there were some definite anti-American sentiments.  A sample quote... "Like a crazy bunch of devils, the Americans fired on schools, children, pots and pans and even Buddhas." We then went on a tour of the area...

"My hips don't lie" - this entrance to a bunker was a tight squeeze!

The cavity carved out in the ground by a big American B52 bomb.  While this one happened to be marked, chances are you could look around you and see another one within a 25 meter radius.

Me in one of the level 1 tunnels - I don't look it but it was incredibly claustrophobic and pretty scary being down there.  Not a lot of light, super hot, and I had to struggle to get through some places.  Oh, and there were bats.  Awesome.  The crazy part is that the level 1 tunnels are 9 feet underground, but there are also levels 2 and 3 which are 18 and 30 feet underground respectively...all of these were built by the Cu Chi people with tiny garden hoe like hand shovels.

-chilling in the captains quarters

After the tunnels, we visited the nearby memorial honoring all of the Vietnamese solider that lost their lives in the war.  It was an incredibly beautiful memorial with a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh in the center where the Vietnamese lit toss sticks to show their respects to him and their fallen countrymen.  Like many of the rest of the big memorials, shoes and pictures weren't allowed, but Thanh somehow convinced the guards to let me snap a quick shot :). 

Entrance to the memorial

I'm obsessed with the dragons...

Sneak peek inside the memorial at the golden statue of Ho Chi Minh.  The walls are inscribed with the names of the Vietnamese soldiers who died in the war. 

We made it!

After a full morning at the tunnels, we headed back for the long journey back to Saigon where we spent the rest of the day relaxing.   Later that night Thanh took me on a tour of the city followed by dinner and ice cream to cool off (Saigon is the same latitude same as parts of Columbia and Venezuela - aka it's sweltering, even in the beginning of May!)

On our final day together, I treated Thanh and his parents for breakfast at one of their favorite dim sum restaurants - it was $7 total for a delicious feast for four!

Us at breakfast!

mmm, so delicious!  They called the bread stick things "Chinese doughnuts" - you dip them in the soup and its amazing!

Thanh and I then went to the Jade Pagoda, a gem among Chinese temples representing both Buddhist and Taoist traditions. I actually thought we were in the wrong spot because I didn't see another foreigner - instead the multi room complex was filled smoke, elaborate statures and many Vietnamese who had come to show respect by praying and lighting joss sticks for the statues representing their divinities.  It was an incredibly cool experience and I was able to discretely take a few pictures after I saw a Vietnamese woman doing the same.

What you were greeted by when you walked in - as you'll see in these pictures, the combination of the light streaming through the rafters and the smoke made for a really cool atmosphere....

The main statue

Another view of the main one - it was magnificent!

Joss sticks burning on the roof - a very quite, meditative space where no one else was!

Another one of the many worshiping areas

Our next stop was the Vietnam War Remnants Museum.  This was really sad to see, especially as an American - obviously we learned about the Vietnam War in school and how it was not a good thing to be involved in, but seeing the story from the other side was quite the experience.  Maybe I just have a bad memory, but I had no idea that 3M Vietnamese people were killed; it's such a huge number of people for such a small country.  I think the hardest part for me was the real life evidence of the terrible effects of agent orange.  In addition to the exhibit displaying pictures of the victims of agent orange, they had about 5-6 real people sitting in the museum lobby who had been severely affected by this chemical (no pictures of this for obvious reasons). Those who were directly exposed were (relatively) better off than their offspring...apparently agent orange is a carcinogen that also affects a person's germ cells and thus their children and grandchildren were the ones born with serious functional and cognitive defects.  Given the amount of destruction that they experienced, its quite amazing to see how Vietnam recovered and moved on.  And as a visiting American, I felt welcomed and respected everywhere I went.  Below are a few pics of the American fighter planes on display at the museum...

Finally, Thanh and I topped off our city tour with a quick stop at the Ben Thanh markets.  This is mostly a place where tourists come to shop for cheap goods but locals shop on the edges to pick up fresh produce and more interestingly, fresh meats!  Here are some pics from the market...

After a busy day of seeing more of the city, Thanh and his father took me to the airport to see me off - I feel incredibly fortunate to have met their beautiful family and spent my last few days in Vietnam as more of a local.  A huge thanks to Kim Nguyen back in huge states for coordinating :)  Here are some scenes from the back of the motor bike, mostly to terrify my mother :).  Thanks again for everything Thanh - miss you all already!

 
Next stop....Siem Reap, Cambodia for Angkor Wat and the temple complexes!