We’re in Thailand for about ten days so of course we have to go somewhere, and where better to go than Cambodia, a mere four hour drive from Bangkok.

It’s been on “The List” for a long time, mostly because of wanting to see Angkor Wat, and fortunately Graham and Luis wanted to go as well.

A few months ago, Graham found a tour that included transport from Bangkok to Cambodia, a hotel in Siem Reap and a guided tour of Angkor Wat and associated temples. All for about $400 per person.

We knew that the drive from Bangkok to the Thai-Cambodian border was about four hours, but then everyone seemed to forget or ignore that the drive from the border to Siem Reap was another two to three on top of that. Seven hours in a car…

Fortunately, it was air-conditioned, reasonably spacious with just the five of us (Luis and Graham’s friend Stuart came along too) and I had a book to read.

We were picked up at 6:30am from our hotel, reasonably well rested after travelling the day before from Perth to Bangkok via Singapore, and hurtled off out of Bangkok on a Saturday morning.

The drive was uneventful, apart from Stuart’s bad back. We stopped a couple of times to get fuel and use the bathroom, but otherwise, it was smooth sailing, particularly once out of the city.

I expected the countryside would be wild and covered in jungle, but being the main road, everything on either side was cleared and used for farming. Forest stood in the distance but they were only patches.

I turned my attention to my book and time passed.

Crossing the Border

The driver pulled into a carpark a short distance from the border and swapped us for another group of travellers heading to Bangkok. We waited a few minutes, were joined together with two younger Australians also going to Cambodia, and told to follow a tour guide who directed us where to go.

Photos had been taken of us at each juncture and electronically relayed to the next handler in the process. We joined the foreigner queue to leave Thailand, separated from a mass of people waiting to cross the border for work.

Then we walked across the bridge separating Cambodia from Thailand, with Glen and I thinking of when we had to walk the much scarier border between Israel and Jordan.

On the other side, another guide met us, collected our passports and for an extra fee jumped the queue for us and told us to wait. We suffered separation anxiety immediately, but of course it was all fine.

Once stamped and given our holiday visas, we were escorted through to where another group of people — Brits this time — were waiting to return to Bangkok. Another relay.

We were trundled into another van, driven past the recent devastation where a casino had caught fire and people had jumped to their deaths, and swept into Cambodia. Two and a half hours later, we arrived at the hotel, checked in and lay supine for a while until we were collected at 4pm for a tour of the floating village.

Waterworld: Cambodia

Our guide and driver took us to the floating village, which rests on the largest lake in Cambodia (or is it South-East Asia). It’s 150km long so looks like the ocean, but the guide said that with it being the dry season, the water levels are much lower than normal. Monsoon season sounds epic.

We boarded a small motorboat and took the winding river path towards the floating village, where about a thousand people live. The boat drivers used to be fishermen, but tourism trumped it, so they drive a lot of tourists around. Until Covid hit. Tourism is picking up again slowly, but it’s made an impact.

We got off on the floating tourist house, looked at the small crocodile farm that’s housed on it, and watched the sunset from the roof. Glen and I got delicious young coconuts and greedily drank them down.

After about ten minutes we were ready to go, but we stayed about half an hour and the boat took us back to the landing. We went for dinner — and ordered way too much — then back to the hotel for an earlyish night, despite the guide’s offer to drop us off at Pub Street.

We’d seen a sign above one of the bars that beckoned for “18–30 year-olds” which excluded all of us. Bed beckoned. We were glad.

Angkor Wat and All That

We didn’t do the sunrise thing at Angkor Wat, instead arriving sometime around 8:30 or so, getting dropped off at the exit to walk against the trickle of people who’d already made it that far. It was a nice way of doing it; meant we had large sections of it to ourselves for a while.

The light was also excellent from that vantage point.

The guide talked to us about various aspects of the temple and the construction, but a lot of it I can’t remember. It was occupied for a few hundred years then abandoned due to war, bad soil, etc.

I found myself getting drawn into details (once I put away my phone), my attention drilling down and down from an overview to the tiny marks on walls in a pattern that seemed simple, but was extremely complex.

Everywhere you looked was adorned and embellished.

We scaled the three levels of the main temple, the third up some extremely steep and narrow steps. They were part of a new, wooden staircase, and nothing on the original centimetre wide steps, but still I struggled with the downward ascent, fearing I’d take a tumble. Or someone would tumble down behind me. The things we worry about…

We followed our guide against the flow of traffic and emerged at the much busier entrance, where people were getting everything ready for their New Year celebrations. The heat was getting to is — had already gotten to us — and we were happy to push on and return to the air conditioning in the car.

From Angkor Wat, we went to another temple, this one the Temple of a Thousand Faces, unless I’ve got that wrong. Bayon Temple, I’m pretty sure.

We walked in from one way, across a bridge and a lake…or maybe a moat the size of a lake, and went through the temples. Yes, there are a lot of faces. There are also a lot of carvings on the external walls depicting wars and ways of life. Intricate. Detailed. Extensive.

Again, the heat. We went in and out. I liked this one because the carvings but also the maze of internal corridors inside the main temples. Photos were taken.

Then to Angkor Tom — the Tomb Raider Temple because it was featured in the movie. The crap movie, right? I wonder how Lara Croft avoided all the tourists…

Anyway, this is the one where the trees have taken over the buildings, giant figs shooting up to the sky, their roots like tentacles breaking apart the stone. It’s impressive. It’s also shadier than the others, so that was nice.

But after about four hours of temples, we were done. Lunch locally followed (which was really tasty), then the journey back to the hotel to drop of our guide, before another three and a half hours to the border.

I read another book. We were passed back across the border, given safely to another guide and another driver on the other side, then shot back to Bangkok. I think we arrived around 8pm. It was a long day.

I’m really glad we made the effort to go. I wouldn’t do another seven hour drive day to get there, preferring to fork out the money for flights and less sitting, but it was still an enjoyable experience and stress free.

The one stress was figuring out whether we had to tip and how much. We gave wildly different sums across the 29 hours, a combination of US dollars and Thai baht. (We never touched a Cambodia riel.) Hopefully we didn’t offend anyone.

Four hours over temples was ample, which surprised me as I expected to spend that long at Angkor Wat along — though I’m glad it turned out the way it did.