September 23: Angkor Area

A mixed bag, today, with some real local flavor. Once again, we awoke to rain, and we thought seriously about canceling our plans. We had engaged Khom once more, this time to take us to see a floating village and a floating forest along with a temple or two in the Roulos Group of ruins. We’re all glad we didn’t cancel. All of today’s sites are some way from the city, and by the time we arrived, the rain had stopped. Our first visit, though, was to a Cambodian mechanic.

Khom was having some car trouble yesterday, but being a consummate guide, he never let on. Today, however, there was no denying that there was an issue. His battery was dying because his alternator had failed. Rather than take a chance of stranding us in the countryside an hour from the city, he pulled into his cousin’s car repair shop.

After a about an hour, and $73 dollars, we were back on the road. Fortunately for Khom, he and his cousin are on good terms, so his cousin only charged $23 for the alternator ($22 for the part and $1 for the labor). The other $50 was for the new battery.

We continued on to a floating village, Kompong Phluk, and the floating forest adjacent to it on Tonle Sap lake. For much of the year, the lake is fairly small. The rainy season, though, is also when the snows in the Himalayas melt, and the double inundation swells the Mekong River. The Mekong crosses the Tonle Sap River, which normally flows out of Tonle Sap lake, and the force of the Mekong is so great that it reverses the course of the Tonle Sap, forcing water back into the lake. The lake can rise during the rainy season from a depth of nine feet up to 100 feet. The villages around the perimeter of the lake, which consist of buildings built on stilts, find themselves entirely surrounded by water. Similarly the floating forest floods deeply during the rainy season, and as you boat through it, you realize that you are seeing only the top fifteen to twenty feet of trees that could be more than 100 feet tall. Some of the buildings in Kompong Phluk are truly floating and relocate as the floods recede in order to stay afloat.

We left Tonle Sap behind and proceeded to Bakong, the most impressive temple in the Roulos Group. Bakong is another early structure–this one from the ninth century–build largely from lava rock faced in brick. A working monastery is on the grounds, and this being early in a fifteen-day holiday, it was fairly active.

Khom got us back into Siem Riep around one o’clock, so we stopped for lunch before hitting the Central Market. During lunch, we were treated to the vocal stylings of what we assume was the town’s most brazen “fallen woman”; she was certainly the most indecently dressed person we saw in town. Later that evening, she stripped to the waist in order to adjust the scarf she had donned as a top.

As we ate, she wandered around in the street near the fish foot massage booth (oddly, the only one in this street), finally deciding to serenade the patrons of the restaurant across from ours. Jan caught a few of the words from her song that sounded like, “I want you to do things to me.” Shopkeepers up and down the street were hanging out of windows trying to see what this crazy woman would do next. Fortunately, I didn’t think to take a picture of her. If I’d looked her in the eye, I’m sure she would have sung her song to me, too. I did, however, take some pictures in the Central Market after lunch. The Meijer’s of Cambodia! Food was for sale beside silver and tennis shoes and bookmarks and genie pants and medicine and souvenirs of all kinds. It was just what you would think a market would look like in a Third-World country.

We ended the day having a drink in a bar called The Red Piano, apparently made famous by Angelina Jolie, who visited it in 2000 and for whom one of their popular drinks is named. Here’s to Angelina. Tomorrow, we take a bus back to Phnom Penh.