We leave for Siem Reap at 8.30am a daunting six-hour journey lies ahead of us. We are travelling on the Mekong Express and apart from the pick-up being slightly late due to heavy traffic, the service is very professional. This is the first bus we have caught that tags the luggage and issues a baggage receipt. The $11 fare includes two rather nice pastries and a bottle of water, an on-board stewardess, a film (at least for those at the front of the bus) and a toilet. We’ve also drawn the lucky straw and have extra leg room. We look set for a good trip.
The Phnom Penh traffic, even in the Monday rush hour is light compared to the frenetic chaos that is Hanoi or HCMC and most streets are empty. As the bus makes its way out of the city we spot a 4×4 with its roof rack laden with people and their personal belonging. It must be an uncomfortable and precarious ride up there, not to mention downright dangerous! North of Phnom Penh the countryside is flat and many of the fields alongside the road are flooded. Almost all the houses are built on stilts lifting them some 12 feet above ground level and rice paddies stretch out across the landscape.
Surprisingly, there is apparently a rice shortage in Cambodia and the local English language newspaper ‘The Cambodian Daily’ is running a Rice Crisis Campaign to help struggling families. Whether this situation is due to policies or climatic factors we don’t know. The countryside though is lush and green and dotted with beautiful and well-kept temples. Flowering water lilies grow in the ponds along the roadside and coconut palms soar skywards, whilst skinny white cows with bones protruding wander untethered or lie in the dust completely unphased by the little traffic that passes by. This lazy tropical idyll belies a harsh and poverty-stricken rural existence.
The bus journey passes remarkably swiftly and it hardly seems like six hours have elapsed when we pull into the bus depot in Siem Reap. Instead of being greeted by the usual crush of touting taxi drivers there is a very orderly queue to buy tickets and after paying $3 a tut tut driver is allocated to take us to our hotel. Mr Su is a very gentle mannered man who explains that he is paid a wage and doesn’t receive the three dollars and relies on getting additional business – would we employ him to take us to the temples? Mr Su speaks very good, if heavily accented, English and we negotiate a price of $45 for three days dawn til dusk. And as there’s no time like the present we arrange for him to pick us up at 4.30pm to see the sunset over Angkor ($5). A three-day pass costs $40 each and allows us free entry this evening as well, so we head for Phnom Bakheng which is set on the only hill for miles around and affords a good view of the Angkor park. Needless to say it is overrun with people with exactly the same idea and after scrambling up an almost perpendicular series of steps to the top of the ruins we attempt to position oursevles in order to get a clear view of the temples below. It’s a hazy evening and it is difficult at this distance to make out the temples in the jungle below. But the sunset is a beautiful start to our visit. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/phnom_bakheng