Siam Reap, Angkor Wat & The Killing Fields

Once again it has been a while since I last visited this fascinating country which has such a sad history. I hope I can serve it justice with this recollection of my travels, and I hope to encounter the friendly people of this wonderful country once again soon. We only spent about a week in total in Cambodia, so naturally we were keen to cram everything in in as little time as possible...

As you can see from the picture above Siam Reap was absolutely flooded! The water in the roads was up to knee level but it made getting round a fun experience. We spent 3 days in Siam Reap where we were treated like king and queen in a guest house, the staff were so friendly (as were Cambodians in general). Siam Reap is a quiet yet backpacker friendly town, and its most famous landmark is the UNESCO World Heritage Site: Angkor Wat Temple. The words Angkor Wat themselves literally mean 'City Temple'.

It is often considered an ancient Buddhist temple as many other temples are in Cambodia (Buddhism is the main religion). However, the temple also shares some architectural similarities to ancient Hindu temples dating back to the same period. This is because it was originally constructed to be a Hindu temple, but was converted into a Buddist temple towards the end of the 12th century. For this reason you can see many smaller versions of the temple in other countries such as Indonesia and India. Angkor Wat is world renowned however for stories of its construction; a mystery to many purely due to the complexity of it's underground water system.

Angkor Wat

It was built in the early 12th century and is recognised as being built in the 'Khmer' style indigenous to Cambodia. The Khmer era king King Suryavarman II was the monarch of the country in the time who orchestrated the construction of the temple. The original name of the temple was Vrah Viṣṇuloka (in Sanskrit) or Brah Bisnulōk (the Cambodian equivalent) which means the 'sacred dwelling of Vishnu'. This again emphasises the Hindu influence of its original construction. However after visiting the local temples such as Angkor Wat (and of course others), followed by a night (or two) of partying, we decided to head to the capital of Phnom Penh to see the Killing Fields where many educated people like teachers and doctors lost their lives under the communist regime "Khmer Rogue" under the tyrannical despot named Pol Pot, who acted as a dictator of the country throughout the 1970's.

Phnom Penh and The Killing Fields:

Phnom Penh was a great capital city, not overly busy for a capital like Bangkok but still with a great buzz. Many bars overlook the pier so naturally we stayed around the bars a lot! The first night we ended up meeting a Scottish older gentleman and ended up spending most of the night with him. Unfortunately I decided to join him on the Johnnie Walker whiskey - my first ever trial of that particular brand - which resulted in walking round in circles for hours looking for our hotel. As the markets started to open we decided to get a tuk tuk taxi and he lead us straight to a place we had walked straight past a few times!

The day after we went to discover the darker side of Cambodia's horrific history by visiting the horrific sights of the Killing Fields, a place where prisoners were taken to be bludgeoned to death by clubs simply because bullets were too expensive. We were shocked by what we seen; skulls of the deceased and clothes all piled up amongst some other skulls belonging to girls as young as 15 and to women as old as 60+. It was an emotional but a compelling experience and a real eye-opener to how lucky some of us have it. On the route home our tuk tuk driver told us an emotional story of how his father had been one of those who had been arrested and killed so his family had to flee to the jungle as did many Cambodians.