Tuesday 3 February 2009

I'm back (again)

Cambodia was wonderful! For anyone that has not yet been - you must! We spent 1 day in Phnom Penh (not enough) which we spent running between the Royal Palace, Silver Pagoda, the Russian Market, and then on to S21- or Tuol Sleng where about 15,000 prisoners were tortured during the Khmer Rouge regime - and then on to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek - where survivors of S21 were killed and buried in mass graves. Sounds like a nice holiday, hey? It was just as depressing as it sounds, I had to fight back tears, but well worth visiting if you have an interest in history. From there we had 4 days in Siem Reap. We spent 2 full days checking out the temples including Angkor Wat - the biggest, but not necessarily the best. There are literally hundreds of these temples in the area, ranging from 700 to 1,000 years old, you could spend weeks discovering them all. Two days was plenty enough for me! The rest of our time was spent by the fabulous pool at Raffles Hotel (if you've never stayed there, then that's definitely another must!), as well as the floating villages just outside of the town. There are so many great restaurants in Cambodia, I highly recommend Meric at the Hotel de la Paix - in Siem Reap where I discovered the amazing Taittinger champagne - delish! Here are a few pics (in no particular order) and I mean just a few. I stopped counting the photos I took after several hundred...


The weather was fantastic, the people are lovely and so friendly, food is good, everything is cheap (well, everything except Raffles...) so best you get yourself over there before the hordes of tourists get much worse!

3 comments:

Geisslein said...

Amazing pictures!!!!

columnist said...

Glad you enjoyed, and sounds as though the weather wasn't too hot, and the crowds not too large. I agree 2 days is enough of visiting Angkor(s), as fascinating as they are. Angkor is such a great lifeline to the Cambodians, in terms of revenue, and Lord knows they need it after the awfulness of their recent history.

Suzy said...

Thanks Gesslein!

I couldn't agree more Columnist, although I wish they were getting more from the tourist industry than they currently are - the airport and most major hotels are foreign owned, as as a lot of the restaurants and gift shops in the town. It's a shame their government hasn't been more strict about keeping these locally owned so the Cambodian people can start to enjoy some of the financial benefits of being opened up to the world.