Siem Reap & Angkor Wat

After a flight from Jakarta, a day of walking and shopping in Bangkok, and a five-hour bus ride to the border, we arrived in Cambodia!  Our first Cambodian destination was Siem Reap, gateway to the world’s largest religious structure, Angkor Wat.  Going there mainly to see Angkor Wat, I didn’t have any expectations for Siem Reap itself, but it turned out to be a great town.  Getting out of the town and seeing some of the villages in the surrounding countryside, though, turned out to be the highlight of our time in the area, at least for me.

Siem Reap is perhaps Cambodia’s best-known town, home to about 172,000 people.  Parts of the town felt a lot like Europe, particularly in the architecture – leftover French influence, I guess.  (Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953.)  The area of town we stayed in was pretty happening, the streets lined with bars, restaurants, shops, and guesthouses, and filled with both Asians and Westerners.

Our hotel the Mandalay Inn, was great, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.  It was $18/night for a triple room, though it didn’t include breakfast.  We had an attached bathroom with hot water, a fan, AC, and TV (with CNN!), and the hotel even had a little gym on the roof.

Cambodian food is a bit different from Indonesian, but just as good, and everything we had in Siem Reap was delicious.  My favorite Cambodian dish so far is amok, which is a coconut curry-based sauce with vegetables and chicken, beef, or fish, served with rice.  Apparently Cambodians eat amok only with fish, and chicken and beef amok are served only because Cambodians realized foreigners like variety.  I also tried Cambodia’s Angkor beer, which was very good and cost only $0.50 during happy hour.

Another highlight was the night we ate at one of Siem Reap’s several BBQ restaurants.  For $5/person, we cooked noodles and pieces of raw meat and vegetables in extremely hot oil over a little grill at our table.  It was a fun experience, and the food was really good – though we skipped the crocodile and squid options, having just chicken, beef, and pork.

I can’t talk about Siem Reap’s dining scene, though, without talking about the street food: street food in Siem Reap is abundant, diverse, cheap, and delicious.  One of the main street dishes is fried noodles, which we ate one night while sitting on little stools on the curb.  Another staple of Siem Reap’s street food were the banana pancake carts, which were all over.  For $1, the vendor would pull out a lump of pre-made dough, fry it into a thin pancake, cook in some slices of banana, drizzle it with chocolate sauce, and wrap the whole thing in a piece of paper for easy eating on the go.  They were delicious.

Siem Reap also has quite a few very interesting markets, catering to both locals and visitors.  The best-known is the Angkor Night Market, which gets going around 4pm everyday.  It has tons of stalls with vendors selling all sorts of clothes, accessories, and souvenirs, as well as street food carts offering fried noodles, sliced fruit, and banana pancakes.  There were also multiple stalls set up as makeshift spas offering massages and other services.  We went to the same spa-stall for foot massages a couple different times – only $3 for 30 minutes!  There are spas all over Siem Reap, in and out of the market, and they were almost all extremely cheap and pretty nice-looking.

As I said, we went to Siem Reap mainly for the purpose of seeing Angkor Wat.  Originally intending to go back a couple times, we ended up spending only one day at the temples, but it was very interesting.  Part of the world’s largest pre-industrial city, Angkor Wat (literally “City Temple”) is a huge complex of Hindu temples built in the twelfth century, during the Khmer Empire.  Though the name Angkor Wat is now used to refer to the complex as a whole, it is actually just the name of the largest and best-known individual temple, which is an iconic image here.  The Cambodian flag features an image of Angkor Wat, and pictures of it are found in many hotels, restaurants, and shops, as well as on most souvenirs.

The complex also includes Angkor Thom (literally “Great City”), the Khmer Empire’s last capital, which is believed to have had a population of as many as 180,000 people.  Within Angkor Thom are two of the complex’s major temples: Bayon, known for the 200+ faces carved into its stone towers, and Bapuon, a “temple mountain,” designed to represent Mt. Meru (considered by Hindus and Buddhists to be the center of all universes).  Located outside Angkor Thom, another of the best-known temples in the complex is Ta Prohm, which has been largely untouched and now has trees growing out of its ruins.

Though the oldest structures in the complex were originally built as Hindu temples, it shifted to Buddhist use during the late-thirteenth century, and is still used by Buddhists today.  In fact, most visitors to Angkor Wat will see monks and nuns, in orange robes and white gowns respectively, all with their heads shaved, while at the temples.  Because Angkor Wat is still in use, visitors must cover their shoulders and knees in order to enter the temple.

On the day we went to the temples, we left town at about 5am and got to see the sun coming up over the temple of Angkor Wat, which was beautiful.  We visited the other main temples, which were interesting but less awe-inspiring, and then went back to more thoroughly explore Angkor Wat in the afternoon.  The sheer size of it, and the intricacy of the detail, is pretty astonishing.

Getting out into the countryside, away from the town and the tourist attractions, was actually my favorite part of our time in the Siem Reap area, but I’ll get to that later!