A little detour

Siem Reap, 31.5.
I stayed longer in Siem Reap then I had planned. The visit to Angkor took three days, besides that I tried to contact a handful of people to maybe get enough material and photos to make it into a story about the landmines. But it somehow didn't work out...

Siem Reap itself is a town as touristy as one can imagine. With Angkor next to it, you don't have to ask why. It's full of restaurants, boutiques, hotels and guest houses, and whatever tourism demands. I actually was quite tired of it, things with the landmine-story dragged on without a real progress, it was incredibly hot some days, monsoon rains in the afternoon didn't bring much relief, they just flooded the city, but the temperatures didn't really go down...

On the last day I made a very small tour, that compensated for the "hardship". It wasn't difficult at all, I just had to turn left when leaving my guest house, instead of turning right towards the city center. An unpaved street was following the river that flows towards the Tonle Sap lake. It led through the quarters at the outskirts of town, and it was pure Cambodia (you can't say that about a good part of Siem Reap). Every 200 or 300 meters a small bridge was crossing the river, the paved road on the other side leads towards the lake, but I stayed mainly on the unpaved street. There were lots of houses on stilts standing right at the river, canoes everywhere, school children were greeting me, I discovered a small water mill, the river was brown and muddy and full of garbage, and most important of all there wasn't much traffic, just bicycles, some motorcycles and a few pick-ups. Eventually I crossed over to the road and left the city. Driving through wide open land, with lakes and rice paddies on both sides, I didn't care about the sun, which was already hot again (it was maybe 8.30 in the morning). I came to a small village, to the right there was a big temple, to the left the road continued, but without tarmac. It was already now in a bad state, and the rainy season hasn't started yet... I wouldn't like to see it in two or three months...

Eventually I turned around, the bicycle just wasn't made for this kind of dirt road... very slowly I drove back to Siem Reap, following again the dirt street on the other side of the river, after reaching the city. It was one of these insignificant little trips which I will keep longer in my memory than most of the other days spent in Siem Reap. A little bit I felt like having wasted some time there, but that's how it goes sometimes, and as I said before, this little tour compensated for everything that didn't work out in the last days...