Angkor Wat: the seventh or eighth man made wonder of the world. Despite the hoards of tourists (2 million each year making it one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world), it is still an absolutely incredible place. It is huge and every piece of sandstone is intricately carved. Angkor had a population of something like 1 million people when london was just a village of 30 thousand in wooden buildings!! We hired a guide and tuk tuk to hoon around in- initially we weregoing to ride bikes, but it was a bit far for jack and lots of traffic so we got the tuk tukwhich was a nice way to cruise around between exploring temples. Our guide was very knowledgable about the temples and i'd recommend if anyone is visiting Angkor Wat that you get an official trained guide as you get much more out of it. The guides cost about $25 for the day, which i think is an OK daily wage for Cambodia, but there is a lot of competition for tourists so life is very hard for most people. Despite the Cambodians being to hell and back with the PolPot and Khmer Rouge, civil war and various border wars and landmines, the people are generally very friendly and smile a lot. Probably more smiles for tourists i suppose but still the Khmers are wonderful people. Once the most prosperous empire on the planet and now one of the poorest countries on earth, i think they deserve better, but things are progressing although the biggest challenge is corruption, which our taxi drivers complained about consistently. We went to one drivers house on the way to Beng Melea temple, and he lived in a one room rented place with his family, next door to a cess pool of black water and rubbish, which he had to pay $40 a month for. A bit of an eye opener, and he is probably better off than many!
So we spent 4 days in Siem Reap, as that was about the limit for the kids and temples. We were going to head down south to the coast next, but thought we would get out of the tourist areas a bit, so we opted for Battambang, which isnt too touristy at all and more of a provincial Cambodian town.
Travelling on Cambdian roads is a step up in insanity from Thai and Laos roads. Really more of an extreme sport than transport. The main roads are actually quite good however the big buses just rifle down the centre of the road and everything else just gets out the way - size matters most. Throw in motorbikes with several live pigs and twenty chickens hanging of the side, motorbikes with many young kids hanging off, street stalls on the side, utes packed four times higher than the car itself with no windscreen and the odd tourist crammed in somwhere, and you start to get the picture. Road fatalities are the number one cause of deaths in Cambodia. one tip for travelling that we picked up is to make sure the taxi is left hand drive if you are commuting between cities, as there are many right hand drive cars, which have absolutely no line of sight when pulling outfrom behind a truck to overtake - daytona 500 in real life! And apparently its cheaper to register a right hand drive car - go figure!