Cambodia
Again, I'm late on posting pictures, but I've been quite busy lately.
Cambodia was one of the unexpected surprises on the entire trip. It ranked pretty highly on the places and things I saw. Over the course of the last decade, Cambodia has been a rapidly developing country. Because of the turmoil in the country throughout its history, tourism is only starting to pick up. In the short time that we were there, we saw a number of new hotels and resorts sprouting up around Siem Reap. The great thing about this for tourists is that things are EXTREMELY cheap. The most expensive dish at our hotel restaurant was $4.75 USD. In addition, the people there were extremely nice.
We had hired a tour guide and driver for the two days that we were there. For the 7 of us, it only costed a total of about $250. Our tour guide was amazing. Tour guides in Cambodia have to be licensed by the Tourism Bureau. The guy that we had knew a lot about the country. You could really tell he loved the country and really wanted to share his passion with us. Once we landed, he greeted us at the airport and immediately started our tour since he knew we were only there for a short span of time. We drove down a 2 laned "highway." Supposedly, this was the biggest highway in the entire country connecting Vietnam with Thailand. It consisted of two lanes shared by trucks, buses, vans, cars, motorcycles, bicycle, pedestrians, and cows.
Along the way, our tour guide was explaining to us about the Tonle Sap Floating Village. The floating village consists of 55,000 residents living on house boats. We're not talking about fiberglass enclosed houseboats, but rather little houses built on little boats both made of trees and branches. (Surprisingly though, we found some houses with tvs and generators.) The village even had floating grocery stores and a floating school with a basketball court. Tonle Sap is a large lake that th villagers reside on. During the dry season, the lake covers an area of 2,700 sq km area with a depth of about 1 meter. During the rain season, the lake swells up to cover 16,000 sq kms with a depth of 9 meters. Basically, during the wet season, the lake expands to cover half of the entire country of Cambodia. Throughout the year, the entire village has to move at least 8 times so that they are not stuck out int he middle of the lake nor stranded on dry land. We also watched the sunset from the middle of the lake.
The next morning, we woke up pre-sunrise to head up to Ankor Wat. Our tour guide took us to the back entrance through darken woods to avoid the crowd and to get a better view of the sunrise. Once at the site, we climbed up these steep staircase up about 65 feet to a perch at the south eastern corner of the main temple structure and watched the sunrise from there. Along with approaching the Grand Canyon for the first time, seeing Hawaii from the top of an extinct volcano, and overlooking the canopy of Tikal, this ranked high up there in terms of amazing once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
It is actually quite surprising (and a lot of Cambodians that we talked to lamented about it), that Ankor Wat did not make the list of "New 7 Wonders of the World". Our guide was explaining how the vote was unfair because only a million people visited Cambodia each year and many of the Cambodians don't have internet to vote. I definitely think it should have and would have beat out "Christ Redeamer" in Brazil and the Colosseum in Italy.
Anyways, here are the photos:
(LtoR: Largest Highway in Cambodia, Guy bathing in the muddy waters of floating village, sunrise atop Ankor Wat)
(LtoR: Ankor Wat, Banyan Temple, Celebrating End of Tour)
(LtoR: Village boy, Ankor Wat Facade, Relief at another temple)