Weekend 16 - 17 October

The week pass quickly by with daily walks around Siem Reap, looking at market stalls, visiting new restaunts an the last couple of days trying to find out the hidden secrets of getting mail from the Post Office staff.  We went to visit the Post Office to find out how to post cards to Australia and to find mail coming into Cambodia.  Well.............., it appears that there is 3 different books that you need to look in when trying to find a parcel.  They detail the name of the recipient and the country the parcel came from.  After spending 5 minutes look at these, we were informed that only registered parcels were entered there and  that letters where in a pile in the corner of the post office.  We went and started sorting through them and noted that some of the letters were very old, we were then told be the same lady that they were the old letters and then she opened yet another cupboard and in there were the more recent letters.  Of course none of the mail we were looking for.   We have now been informed that it takes about one month for mail to get here!!

Saturday morning was spent at one of the absolute nicest temples.  It is great now as we are beginning to know our students and we have a number of Tuk Tuk drivers, so we are using them to take us around.  We were taken on a 20 minute ride through the country to Angkor Thom which was build between 1181 - 1219.  At its height, it may have supported a population of one million people in the surrounding area.  Inside the walled enclosure are the city's most important monuments, including Bayon, Baphuon, the Royal Enclosure and the Terrace of Elephants.  We spent ages there and we have all decided that without a doubt this is the best of all the temples.   The elephant in the picture below takes visitors on a lovely slow walk around the outside of the ruins.  The wonderful face (not mine) is just a small sample of the carved heads and the final one is just one of the beautiful ruins.

Saturday night saw five of us sitting in the theatre of the Hospital Jayavarman VII listening to Dr Beatocello play his cello and tell the audience about the wonderful work his has done over the last 40 years, building children's hospital in Phnom Pehn and Siem Reap so that he can help with the treatment of TB and Dengue fever.  The Dr has done a fantastic job and he needs to raise $5million every year to keep his hospitals operating.  There is no cost at all to the patients and just one of his hospitals manages to see over 2,000 outpatients every day.  His cello playing leaves a lot to be desired but what he has done in Cambodia is amazing.  Not sure why he has not got the Peace prize.

   

We have just had a week of solid rain and the whole area from here to the Thai border is flooded, some of our students have not been able to come into school as the water around their huts is chest high and of course all their belongings etc are soaked. On Friday night, I had no students for one of my lessons, which was great as we were all rained in and we turned one of the classrooms into a bar and settled in for the night.

Cambodian Border

Flooded Paddy field



One of the many Casinos in no mans land



It was funny yesterday, people were fishing in their yards around Siem Reap,  with bamboo poles and in the water ways with nets.  It seems that the whole water area are home to little fish about 5 cm in length and the locals catch them and eat them whole.  As we drove to the border and back Sunday, there were groups of children swimming and parents fishing and others just cooking the fish on the side of the road.  It reminded me of when I was young and the families went crabbing and we cooked the crabs in big pots on the beach and ate them warm.

You must be asking why we went to the Thai border, even if you weren't I will tell you.  Two of the ladies need to renew their visas, so the easiest thing is to travel 333K round trip to the border, cross over into the land between Thailand and Cambodia,  then come back, this takes about 6 hours.  We of course did not do that, we went into Thailand through their immigration centre (1 hour), travelled into the nearest town and visited their upmarket shopping complex(2 hours),  we then came back through the Thai border into no-mans land and spent about 1 hour one of the Casinos and then returned to Cambodia and met up with our driver who had been waiting and came home.  It was a ten hour trip.  The top speed allowed on the roads here is 60 Km although it would be seldom that we got to that speed.  The road to the Border is a lovely new highway which was paid for by the Thai Government, it makes a great difference from the normal pot holed roads everywhere else.

Casinos are legal in Thailand, so they have set up about 8 hugh Casinos in between the two countries, we went in there, the exchange rate was way over the top as you could only use Baht in the pokies and believe me it about 20 minutes to go through $20US.  The pokies are very old and many of them are the same as at home, there are a lot of gambling tables and the one we went into was 3 stories high and there are also nice eating places, expensive duty free shops and hotels rooms, there is a Grand Casino similar to Melbourne without the fire shooting into the sky.

We got home late Sunday evening and of course had to sit down and plan our lessons for the next day.


We are beginning to notice an increase in the number of tourist visiting Siem Reap over the last few weeks.  I hope that a huge number come as the Tuk Tuk drivers are finding it very hard at the moment as there are not the number of people wanting to ride and the hotels are empty.


At least the locals are starting to recognise us and leave us alone as we wander around the streets.  It is funny now as we walk around our students are calling out 'hello teacher' and when the 6 of us walk around it seems that it is a constant call.  I guess considering that during the day we have 240 students passing through.