Sweet Siem Reap

In some ways, Siem Reap is like the Maritimes in the 70s. Dogs and kids run free, lots of smoking, people smile and say hello as they pass you on the street, vehicles go by with kids piled loosely in the back, 75 cent draft beer, people don’t seem to feel the need to police one another, you can sit your bag down and not worry someone will grab it and you probably don’t need to lock your doors. This is a nice, kind, friendly place to live, and people from around the world have found it as as such. It’s packed with foreigners who live here. If you are 55+ and have some pension or source of income, you can get a retirement visa. People who can work remotely bring their kids and raise them here.

Why not? Food is cheap and delicious, the coffee and tea games are strong, really nice apartments are $200-400 US month, the city is set up for bicycling and scootering, every place has good wifi, the weather is steamy perfection and Angkor Wat is on your doorstep. 

The lady at the post office will excitedly cancel your stamped postcard in front of you and show you before putting it in the box to go out. These are the kind of people you want around you. Being considerate is in the culture and it’s notable how good it feels here as opposed to places where people respond with indifference or annoyance. If someone was this earnestly kind in Canada, their co-workers would take the piss or make fun of them behind their back.

There are the subtle reminders that it’s not all sunny happy joy joy. A spa has a sign letting prospective clients know they do not engage in sex tourism, there is a genocide museum and killing field down a road near our homestay, there is a stupa containing bones of some Khmer Rouge victims in the monastery where we are staying, and there are the landmine detecting rats. 

You know I was at the rat charity the very first day here. Apopo is a Belgian charity that trains Gambian giant pouched rats to detect landmines. Cambodia has been heavily land mined by a number of countries that have overrun it and, of course, the Khmer Rouge. These rats are trained to detect TNT and other explosives and are not heavy enough to set off the landmines. They can easily clear a tennis court sized piece of land in a half hour as opposed to the 4 days it takes with a metal detector since, unlike metal detectors that pick up every little piece of metal in the ground, rats are only reacting when actual explosives are present. We learned about the different kinds of landmines and got to see a demonstration with a rat and her two handlers/sweepers. She was harnessed to a string and roved back and forth over the plot of land. When she detected a buried tea ball with some TNT in it, she stopped and scratched the sand. The sweepers noted the coordinates and they continued on. The detonation team would come in after and detonate everything found. They find hundreds of landmines a month doing this, mainly anti-personnel mines.

We were allowed to hold a rat. Our rat was Gertrude, also my mother’s name. As excited as I was to hold Gertrude, she did not care for me at all. She wanted to be in the arms of a man and to nibble them. Just like her namesake.

You can even go on their website and sponsor a rat for a year. It’s an excellent cause but I can’t say I would sponsor Gertrude.

Phare: the Cambodian Circus plays here most nights of the week. It trains young people in circus arts and provides a place for artists to perform. We were lucky enough to score tickets. They open hours early to get you in their artisan gift shop and have a whole street food scene set up. My tofu lok lak was delicious and they had a cocktail happy hour. There is a pre-show of talented young performers before you enter the big top. The main show was about a child who was haunted by the time of the Khmer Rouge and became a teacher. They utilized circus arts, obviously, but with none of the rigging or props of Cirque de Soleil. They had cardboard boxes and a table used to great effect and a painter who painted large canvases during the circus giving us a sense of the changing times. It took us from the joy of childhood friends to the terror of the war and unimaginable loss, to reunions and nightmares And, eventually finding purpose again. The performers and choreography were extraordinarily affecting. I highly recommend it if you find yourself here.

I should go back and mention how we got here. We hired a car to drive us to avoid me getting bus sick. I still took a Dramamine and dazedly watched 6 hours of countryside go by. And what fantastic countryside! The traditional houses are teak and up on stilts. This obviously makes them good for flood plains, but also for cooling. The tall rooms catch the breeze by night and underneath the stilts creates shade by day for people to hang out or nap in their hammocks. Daytime hammock napping is a thing here and it seems so civilized. Our driver told us the taller your house is, the more your wealth and luck increases. Many were painted bright cheerful colour combinations. The roof tiles are rounded clay or something iridescent. All have flared flourishes at the corners like temples. 

We stopped twice. Once along the river to eat and once for a spider market. I don’t think K felt the need to see a spider market but I did. Sadly, I only saw 1 live tarantula and I did pet him. All the others were fried and arranged in piles with chilies. There were also piles of grubs, crickets, beetles and baby birds spiced and ready for snacking. All the tour buses were there and everyone was snapping shots to gross out their beloved people back home. I did try some candied pomelo peel and it was nice. No crispy critters, though. In one of the Siem Reap grocery stores I did see a little snack section that had a packaged tarantula for $5.50, plus some other snack bags of other critters. There are fried crickets carts on the corners here in the evenings. Maybe they are post-pub food? 

Along highway 6 there are chicken “restaurants” that consist of a stand that has a lot of roasted chickens on spits and maybe some fish, too. And lots of shack platforms with grass roofs, a low table and one or two hammocks. You order your chicken, sit on the platform at the table to eat and then lie down in the hammock. How civilized! Our restaurants are trying to get people in and out as quickly as possible to generate revenue and these folks are like, “come, eat some chicken and have a lie down.” I am all in for a post-meal horizontal session.

When we pulled into Siem Reap we couldn’t figure out where our homestay was. It looked like it was down a street, but there was no street there, only a temple. That’s when we discovered we were staying in a Buddhist temple and monastery village. It’s quite lovely. We hear the bells and drums (and dogs) and we hear the monks chanting. Our hostess is really into plants and is contributing a flower garden lining the road through the monastery. Our room is full of plants and she fills it with jasmine blossoms daily after learning how much I love jasmine. Our place is really wonderful and we couldn’t be happier. 

The plant life here, as in Vietnam, makes me delirious with the ever present mingled scents of jasmine, frangipani and something I can’t pinpoint. It feels like I am walking through a natural perfume shop.

The national flower is the rumdoul, a small yellow tree flower with a strong perfume. You will see representations of them in all kinds of jewelry made from bullet casings, carved in leather and painted on silk shawls. 

Siem Reap, like Phnom Penh, anticipated a huge influx of tourism that was jinxed by COVID. There are scores and scores of massive posh hotels that maybe have Angkor Wat tourists stop by for a bus tour night and then leave again. Craftspeople tell us that it hasn’t recovered much. All these white people on the streets are misleading when you consider how many of them live here and only do the tourism thing when people come to visit.

In fact, the morning we left Phnom Penh, the lady next to us at breakfast was horrified to hear we would be here 7 days. She said they did Angkor Wat all in a day and the town was small with nothing here to do. Mind you, she and her husband accidentally ordered two of every single thing off the breakfast menu and were flummoxed when it kept arriving. There were bacon and eggs, pancakes, fruit with yogourt, spaghetti, burgers, club sandwiches, fries, salads, etc. It never occurred to them to tell the server to stop, so they were hardly the brightest crayons in the box.

This tiny town is a city of a million. We are at the end of our 7 days and there are things we still haven’t done. We even joked that maybe we should go look at apartments.