The flooded city of Siem Reap

Diana has the photos.

‘We don’t serve dog’

So says an outdoor menu board in Siem Reap.

Waterbirding

At Prek Toal, several species of water birds are back from the brink of extinction.

According to a new report by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), several species of rare waterbirds from Cambodia’s famed Tonle Sap region have staged remarkable comebacks, thanks to a project involving a single team of park rangers to provide 24-hour protection to breeding colonies. The project pioneered a novel approach: employing former hunters and egg collectors to protect and monitor the colonies, thereby guaranteeing the active involvement of local communities in the initiative.

[...]

“This is an amazing success story for the people and wildlife of Cambodia,” said Colin Poole, Wildlife Conservation Society director for Asia Programs. “It also shows how important local people are in the conservation of wildlife in their own backyards.”

Prek Toal is a great place to visit. Andy Brouwer has the details (who else?).

Most romantic destinations

Travel guide Frommer’s picks the top 10 world’s most romantic travel destinations. Number four:

Romantic Adventure, Indy Style: Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Indiana Jones always got the girl. It’s possible it was the chiseled jaw and bullwhip, but I like to think Indy just knew how to show a lady a good time. His romantic getaways were usually bejungled and dangerous, and to a mysterious, ancient place. The ruins of the 12th-century Khmer capital of Angkor, Cambodia, meet all of Indy’s criteria.

The best way to experience Angkor Wat is to fly into Siem Reap, the French-colonial town to the south that acts as a gateway to the ruins. Siem Reap has experienced a spike in tourism lately, so a wide range of hotels and restaurants are present, particularly around the Old Market area. For a truly romantic and luxurious experience, book well ahead at The One Hotel (tel. 012/755-311; www.theonehotelangkor.com); as its name indicates, there’s only one suite, so you’ll get the undivided attention of the staff. Dr. Jones liked to rough it, but he probably never had the option of a private rooftop Jacuzzi, outdoor shower, and private chef. For a more economical stay, try the Auberge Mont Royal D’Angkor (tel. 063/964-044; www.auberge-mont-royal.com), a boutique inn with an excellent restaurant and pool. If you end up venturing out for a meal, you’ll have to decide between French, Vietnamese, Thai, traditional Cambodian, and a whole host of other food choices. I’d check out Madam Butterfly (tel. 016/909-607) for traditional Khmer fare by candlelight.

Of course, the ruins are the main attraction here; plan to spend at least 4 days wandering through the jungle. Watching the sunrise from Angkor Wat, the single largest religious structure in the world, is a popular activity, but the object of your affection won’t even notice the other tourists when the red sun clears the moat. Angkor Thom, the Bayon, and Preah Khan are also staggeringly magnificent, and there are more than a thousand other structures in the forest, so you and your sweetheart can conveniently get lost. There are no velvet ropes, no liability waivers, and no one to see you sneak away for moment here and there. — Emil Ross

The Angelina Jolie cocktail

Khmer Intelligence, the web site dedicated to publishing sensitive information about Cambodia, courageously negotiates the deadly world of international espionage to pass along this bit of highly sensitive SIGINT:

ANGELINA JOLIE has been honoured in Cambodia – by having a cocktail named after her.

A bartender at The Red Piano restaurant in Siem Reap created the drink especially for the actress, when she visited the south east Asian nation to shoot Tomb Raider in 2002. …

The cocktail is a mix of vodka, Malibu rum and pineapple juice, served with an umbrella.

Great work, comrade.

Seventy-four new temples found

Using a combination of satellite technology, radar, and more than a decade of good old fashion hard work, researchers have nearly uncovered the mysteries of the Angkorean Empire.

The famous medieval temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once surrounded by a giant urban sprawl of settlements, according to a new map of the area published by an international team of archaeologists. The experts spent years studying Nasa images of the Angkor region and checking possible sightings on the ground, and found enough ruins to conclude that the site was the largest settlement in the pre-industrial world.

Carpeted with vegetation and obscured by low-lying cloud, the ruins spill over 400 square miles around the distinctive temple, and are linked by a complex irrigation system. [...]

The team found evidence of more than 1,000 new man-made ponds and at least 74 ruined temples. One hydraulic system linked the network and was probably used to provide citizens with a stable water supply. They also discovered two mysterious giant earthen structures. [...]

The experts said: “Even on a conservative estimate, greater Angkor at its peak was the world’s most extensive pre-industrial low-density urban complex.”

Researchers studying the new data also concur that, as posited by Bernard-Phillipe Groslier nearly 30 years ago, over-exploitation of the areas natural resources led to the destruction of the massive waterways that nourished the city, eventually leading to Angkor’s demise.

National Geographic has more, including the images.

Cosmo does Cambodia

The Los Angeles Times finds Michael Richards, better known as Cosmo Kramer from the hit television sit-com “Seinfeld,” kicking it with Swami G and searching for spiritual enlightenment in Siem Reap.

Richards, 57, and actress Beth Skipp traveled to remote temples before visiting Angkor Wat on a tour sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Nithyananda Foundation. The sect adheres to the teachings of 29-year-old Hindu monk Nithyananda — an avowed “enlightened Master and modern mystic” who’s referred to by his followers as “Swami G.” [...]

Richards and Skipp, who appeared in the 2006 L.A. production of “Me, My Guitar &Don Henley,” checked into a $380 per-night deluxe spa suite at Siem Reap’s Hotel De La Paix on June 29. They joined the Nithyananda tour after several days of sightseeing independently at ancient sites including Preah Vihear, a famously difficult-to-reach mountaintop temple overlooking the Thai border.

“We went way out into the country. Preah Vihear was unbelievable. And the way we got there: We went up this crazy road in a funky pickup and when we got to the top there’s this magnificent temple,” Richards said. “We did it all old-school.”

Once the spiritual center of the mighty Angkorean empire, Angkor Wat is now a refuge for down-and-out Hollywood misfits. Take that, seven wonders!

The other Siem Reap

In a rather peculiar juxtaposition to the Smithsonian, Vireak offers his own view of Siem Reap.

Times are changin’

Things in Siem Reap are definitely not what they used to be.

Aside from my daytime scrambling up to the temple-tops, by night i am something of a wingman for a pre-op trannie prostitute named Pon. Pon is a 25 year old ladyboy who escorts older foreign men around town to finance her penchant for glamorous clothes and imported shoes. About 3 years ago boy-Pon (i have no idea what the boy’s name was) began hormone therapy and now sports very femme features along with a whole line of knock-off gucci sunglasses and other ‘designer’ fashions.

Cambodian Y-chromosome binary polymorphisms

A propos of absolutely nothing:

A survey of the genetic ancestry of 125 Cambodian children resident in Siem Reap province was undertaken, based on eight Y-chromosome binary polymorphisms and sequencing of the mtDNA HV1 region. The data indicated a largely East Asian paternal ancestry and a local Southeast Asian maternal ancestry. The presence of Y-chromosomes P* and R1al* was suggestive of a small but significant Indo-European male ancestral component, which probably reflects the history of Indian, and later European, influences on Cambodia.

If you got, flaunt it

From Bloomberg comes this bit of golfing news.

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) — Cambodia, one of the world’s poorest nations, will host a professional golf tournament for the first time next year.

The Cambodian Open will be held Dec. 6-9, 2007, at the Phokeethra Country Club in Siem Reap and will offer prize money of $300,000, the Asian Tour said in a statement. …

Cambodia’s per capita income of $430 in 2005 ranked it 155th of 182 nations, according to International Monetary Fund statistics.

That super-wealthy golfers would go to one of the poorest provinces in one of the poorest countries in the world to play for hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money may strike some as just a wee bit tasteless. But such is progress. And against a backdrop of extreme poverty,  a lot of otherwise innocuous activities appear wantonly gratuitous, too. A golf tournament is just the icing on the cake.

Dancing roads

Via Frisco Dude: If you can manage the bandwidth, this 6-minute video of three friends crossing into Cambodia at Poipet is well worth a laugh.

I’ve edited down to about 5 minutes depicting our overland crossing into Cambodia through the gritty border town of Poi Pet. The place was so rough I had to lay a Black Sabbath track over portions of this video.

The film is well-edited, and, shot way, way back in November 2002, it will make many a traveler wax nostalgic for the days when the road really was really, really bad.

CORRECTION: The second paragraph was not indented to show that it was a quote.

The road to riches

The kids selling deep-fried tarantulas long ago made the town of Skoun almost-famous. A pit stop on the road between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Skoun gets a fair bit of traffic. Of those who actually stop, some will even pick up a greasy spider or three. And according to this itv article at least, a tarantula seller can earn a good wage.

The spiders sell for a few hundred riels each or less than 5p. On a good day Sarath can earn more than £50 which is a good income for a country where nearly a third of the population lives below a poverty line of around 50p a day.

According to the 2006 edition of Cambodian Modern Encyclopedia Having Superlatives, £50 per day, in terms of relative degrees, ranks slightly above good. Unless, of course, you’re a street-side spider-seller in Skoun. Which in that case, it’s off the hook.

But surely that’s a typo.

Don’t tell the tourists

The news that Siem Reap International Airport has just opened a new terminal and runway capable of handling 1.5 million passengers per year seems to have gotten lost in the latest news cycle. According to the World Bank (here), the new additions are part of a larger, $23.9 million project to refurbish the airport.

Twenty-three point nine million is no small upgrade. And the Siem Reap airport is kind of important, too, serving as the country’s sole international gateway to Angkor Wat and all.

Consider this, written April 18:

Arrival in Siem Reap airport is a step back in time. Upon arrival over palm studded but otherwise mostly barren plains, aircraft are forced to turn around on the runway as there are no taxiways. Consistent with other smaller airports there are no jetways; they just park, swing the door open wide, throw down some stairs and set people off across a bubbling tarmac towards the terminal.

The terminal itself is one large open building with a door each for domestic and international arrivals – you must be careful not to choose the wrong one. The airport sees just a few arrivals in a day and so our arrival set about 40 otherwise immobile people into action. One could imagine the terminal floor plan being used for any number of things – a market, shoe warehouse, a manufacturing facility. In this instance, it houses the visa office (they are issued upon arrival), passport control (two booths and a fold up card table) and the baggage claim, a simple circular conveyor belt that pierces the wall in two places to drop luggage inside the building. That said, this “new” airport is a major leap forward for this small town and is one of the reasons the number of tourists has gone up.

Considering that Angkor Wat is Cambodia’s number one tourist destination, and that tourism is Cambodia’s number two source of foreign income, the state of affairs at the Kingdom’s most important airport is a real snafu.
But, as Oriental Compass luckily tells us, those days are now gone:

Siem Reap International Airport has moved into a new stage of its continued development program with a new international terminal and additional runway. These 2 new facilities has been completed and officially inaugurated on June 27 2006 by His Excellency Samdech Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia.

The floor space of the new terminal is 12,000 sqm and there are 18 check-in counters and 6 boarding gates which will significantly enhance the comfort level for all passengers.

What Oriental Compass doesn’t say is where it got that information. A cursory search in Google turns up nothing, nor does a search in Google news. According to the official airport web site, nothing at all has actually happened since December last year. Agence Khmer Press, usually pretty decent at documenting the Prime Minister’s appearances, stays mum too. Recent issues of The Daily or the Post? Nada.

So what’s with all the hush hush?

Kawasaki Bulldog

Having watched Honda pretty much own the Cambodian market for years, Kawasaki recently announced the introduction of two new machines specifically tailored for today's Cambodian driver (photo after the fold).

Welcome to Cambodia

Anyone who has stepped off an airplane and on to Cambodian soil knows the scenario:

As I stepped out of the small airport building into the hot sun, I was greeted by a horde offering accommodation and transport in a frenzy of shrewd, fast bargaining; and up for grabs was the pure-bred tourist stock who had come to witness the wonder of Angkor. "Going, going, gone … and the backpacker in the faded jeans goes to the man with the three-dollar-room."

A single woman traveling on her own, Charmaine Pretorius helps dispel the myth of a dangerous Cambodia. Stories like this really can't get told often enough.