Siem Reap, Cambodia: Angkor

Time is still running. So it's about time to write something about my Thailand and Cambodia trip in December. Maybe you heard about the besieging of the Bangkok international airport. I was actually quite lucky that I wasn't affected by that. I was flying to Bangkok only one week after it was reopened. After spending a day in Bangkok (pictures to follow) I made my way to Cambodia.
This was actually the first trip I did on my own. It was an interesting experience and you meet many new people. But I'd say I prefer travelling in a small group with people I know - its more relaxing and you don't always have to be alert about scams and other hassles.
Speaking of scams: Of course I fell for the bus/visa scam on my way to Cambodia. I payed way too much for the bus ticked and they overcharged me for the Cambodian visa. But at least I arrived in Siem Reap before night - I heard much worse stories about that. In the bus I met a Russian guy (Alexander) who spends 9 months a year travelling. He is financing that with a job he can do anywhere just using his laptop - pretty amazing in my opinion. He was accompanying me on the tours around the temples.

To give you an idea of what these temples are all about I will just cite the introduction of the Wikipedia article:

The ruins of Angkor are located amid forests and farmland to the north of the Great Lake (Tonle Sap) and south of the Kulen Hills, near modern day Siem Reap (13°24'N, 103°51'E), and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to the magnificent Angkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument. Many of the temples at Angkor have been restored, and together they comprise the most significant site of Khmer architecture. Visitor numbers approach two million annually. In 2007 an international team of researchers using satellite photographs and other modern techniques concluded that Angkor had been the largest preindustrial city in the world with an urban sprawl of 3000 square kilometres. The closest rival to Angkor, the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, was between 100 and 150 square kilometres in total size. Angkor could have supported a population of up to one million people.

So you can imagine that the whole thing is damn big! The outer wall of the most known temple Angkor Wat alone is 3.6 km long. In addition to that the temple is very well preserved / restored so that it is definitely the most impressive one. If been there three times in total. Once in the early morning, once around noon and once in the evening. It is amazing how the colors and the atmosphere changes with the time of day. Its incredible how a building as sophisticated and huge as this could be built in the 12th century. Especially all the carvings in the walls are very impressive. The bas relief - total length of more than 100m - is incredibly detailed and tells a lot of stories of the Hindu mythology (On the left you can see the churning of the milk sea).

Another very famous temple is the Bayon. Its huge faces carved into the stones are very impressive - interestingly archaeologists couldn't determine for sure who's face it is meant to be.

The temple Ta Phrom is famous for the massive trees growing on and in between its walls. I really liked the atmosphere of this temple - you could feel this kind of struggle nature against man. It is amazing to see how the huge trees are growing on top of the temple walls. The roots are literally interweaved with the stones of the temple - in fact the temple is partly hold together by those trees. In the beginning of the restoration they tried to cut the trees and the affected parts of the temple collapsed.

One day we had to see the sunset on Phnom Bakheng of course. The sunset over the plains of Cambodia is definitely impressive. But it is not exactly lonely on this rather small hill temple...

As I already said the whole Angkor site is incredibly huge. The two days I have been there were just enough to get a rough idea about the place and to see the most important temples. I think if you really want to have time to explore them you should stay three days. And if you are keen on archeology than probably even a week is not enough! Anyways I enjoyed that place very much - on of the most impressive places I ever visited for sure. (I think I use this sentence quite often in my Blog - but seriously it's true!)
I just realized that I didn't include any pictures from the town Siem Reap itself. It is actually a nice small town, but incredibly touristy. Because of the popularity of Angkor Wat tourism was really boosted there. The have even a small airport now and a lot of hotels and restaurants. The prices have of course adjusted to the number of tourists. But at the street hawkers you can still get a meal for 1 USD - I won't complain about that. On the whole the town has everything to make your stay in Cambodia nice and comfortable.

Bali in December, Pt.3

After our gorgeous round trip through Bali we finally came back to our hotel again. We were greeted with a nice flower necklace - almost like in Hawaii. We spent one day in our hotel to relax and recover. The round trip was actually quite exhausting because we always had to get up very early. (I think I never got up as early to go to lectures here in Singapore...).
You can see some pictures of our nice hotel garden by night here. Again we were experimenting with slow shutter and flash. I really like the effects you can achieve with that.

Our last highlight of the Bali holiday was a mountain biking tour from the rim of the Batur volcano all the way down to Ubud. Actually it was rather mountain rolling than mountain biking because 99% of the tour was downhill. We were a small group of maybe 8 people and we really enjoyed it. Our tour guide did a great job in selecting the small roads through tiny villages. Only a little part of the tour was on busy main roads. So we came again very close to the friendly Balinese people.
The tour included as well a visit at a typical Balinese house. There are a lot of constraints in terms of how the house has to be build according to their religious beliefs. The floors of the different rooms have a different elevation depending on the usage of those. And it is always aligned to the compass directions in the same way. It was very interesting to see how an average Balinese family lives in a village.
The tour was concluded with a nice lunch and we got back to our hotel in Sanur passing all the little art shops in the area of Ubud.

On our last full day on the island we did a half day trip to Nusa Dua. That is the absolute posh area on the southern peninsula of Bali. There is one fancy hotel next to another. We could take a free shuttle bus to our sister hotel "Grand Hyatt Bali" and we enjoyed the facilities there. The swimming pool (or rather the swimming pools) were really amazing. One of them was winding like a river through the garden with a total lenght of maybe 100m. The other one was enclosed with natural rocks and looked almost like a rocky coast line rather than a pool. And of course both of them were connected with a water slide...
On our tour through the area we were surprised about the number of Russians there. Apparaently they really splurge if the go for holidays.

Back in Sanur we spent the last evening in our favourite restaurant "Lotus Pond". The waitresses there are as courtous as they are beautiful - and the food there is great as well.
It was the perfect conclusion for our Bali trip. I really enjoyed those 12 days and I think I have to come back some time to explore the rest of the island. In the nature reserve in the West of Bali as well as in the North East there is still enough to see and to experience!
Many thanks as well to you, Dad! You were a great travel mate! I can't think of many people with whom I could spend such an awesome, exciting and harmonious time.

Time is spinning away...

Well I don't know how it happened but the first half of my second semester here is already over. It fells like New Year was just a week ago... something must be wrong with the time here in Singapore.

If you read my previous posts you know: Mid-semester means recess week. That is why I will be travelling Vietnam for the next 10 days. We have an ambitious plan, which is going all the way down from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) by train and bus. That is about 1700km in 10 days. I hope we will have enough time to see something of the country and don't spend all the time with transportation. I will report when I'm back.

I promise that I will bring my blog up-to-date as soon as I am back from Vietnam. There are still reports from Bali, Thailand and Cambodia outstanding. But you know there is this strange time issue...

So take care and stay tuned!

Bali in December, Pt.2

After spending the first few days in the hotel in Sanur we did a four day round trip through the island. The round trip was already booked from Germany so we did not have to care about anything - guide, driver, accommodation, ... everything was organized. Normally this round trip is organized for at least 8 people but since it was low season we were the only two who wanted to do it. Since everything was already booked and payed they made an exception and did the tour anyway - with a guide and a driver for just the two of us. You can't have it any better!

The first two days we enjoyed the tour in a VW "bucket car" (Kübelwagen). The feeling was really unique. When the weather was nice (most of the time it actually was) we could ride with open roof and without windows - so we felt really close to the island and the people, much better than looking through a glass pane. Our driver knew all the small roads and villages, so we could see parts of the island that the usual tourists don't see: small villages, remote rice fields, many friendly and cheering people and a lot of jungle.

On the first day we made it from the south of the island to roughly the middle West of the island. There were a lot of small hills between small valleys with small creeks. This is a perfect area for rice terraces and we saw plenty of them. The green of the rice terraces is absolutely incredible - its acutally greener then green, literally as green as green can be. :-) But it is kind of hard to caputure it with a camera - a monitor will probably not be able to display that colour anyway. We made a lot of stops (we could of cours stop whenever we wanted to) and two little hikes/walks in the rice fields and a bit through the jungle. We saw all kinds of tropical fruits (eg. a Jack Fruit, the biggest fruit in the world; you can see it in the picture) - many of them I didn't even know before. We made a short stop at a brick yard as well - the swastika is by the way a religious symbol in Hinduism. Finally having arrived in our nice accommodation we experimented a bit with flash and tripod...

On the second day we made our way up north all the way to Lovina. In this part Bali is very mountainous and we could see some high volcanoes with steep slopes. The roads and the villages got smaller - unfortunately the weather was not optimal. But some of the views were still breathtaking. We could see the traditional way of ploughing the rice fields, more friendly Balinese people and a lot of smaller and bigger temples. Having arrived in Lovina we felt like coming back from nature and wilderness to civilization and tourism. We stayed in a nice bungalow, but it was not as cozy and unique as the last place. Just before sun set we had a bath in the sea... where we lost our key on the beach... Fortunately we could get a spare key at the reception and we found the key in the next morning.

For the next day we booked dolphin watching in the early morning. We had to get up really early to start the trip in the traditional boat before sunrise. Unfortunately in reality it was not as calm and quiet as it seems in the two pictures. It was rather dolphin chasing than dolphin watching. There were at least 30 boats on the sea and whenever somebody spotted a group of the poor dolphins all the boats would race there at full throttle. I think there are better places if you really want to see dolphins... At least we got a really great breakfast when we came back to our guest house.
From that day on we were travelling in a mini bus - it is more convenient for longer distances but the atmosphere is not as nice as in the small VW. At first we went East along the coast, where we stopped at a nice temple. Then we turned South and made our way up in the mountains again. That day the weather was quite cloudy and it rained several times - so we did not have the best view for the Gunung Agung, the highest volcano on Bali.
The accommodation for the night was a very small place in a tiny village. I believe it was the only guest house in the village and we were the only guests there. So there was actually nothing to do after our dinner. We went for a short walk in the village anyway. The streets were quite dark and my father was a bit scared about some youngsters lurking around there - but I assured him that Bali was completely safe. When we finally came back to our place the gate was locked, apparently our host though that we already went to sleep. We were standing a bit helpless in front of the gate when one of the youngsters approached us. He was actually asking if he could help us. We explained him our situation and the young guy would just jump over the wall of the guest house and tell our host to open the gate. I guess we would have managed that by ourselves as well but this perfectly shows how courteous and helpful the Balinese are.

On the last day we made our way back along the coast to our hotel in Sanur, but not before doing some proper river rafting. The rafting was really great. Again we had the raft for us alone, with a guide/instructor of course. Once we found out how to steer and paddle optimally we were overtaking all the other boats. In total it was a 14 km trip which took roughly two hours. In the end our arm felt actually a bit soar...
The last stops were in some small wood and stone carving shops. The area around Ubud is famous for its handicrafts. All along the road you could see shops with carvings, pictures, baskets, pottery and all those things. We bought two nice wood carvings as souvenirs.

The last picture is a portrait of our superb guide Mariarta. He was with us for the for days and he was really great. He could tell us a lot about the Balinese culture and lifestyle. Apart from that I think he knew every single tropical plant or fruit. Especially great were the legends and stories about the ancient Bali he told us from time to time. He made this round trip a unique and unforgettable experience!