Cambodia: Feb 18: Floating Village, War Museum, Artisan School, and more

For a change, we spent time on Thursday seeing things besides temples (though we did spend half the day seeing temples too). I took a ton of pictures. Di Yin also took many. The latter link goes to the first picture from this day (picture #325) in her album from our trip to Singapore and Cambodia. When you see a dark, blurry picture of jackfruit (our dinner's dessert) (picture #450), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the later pictures in the following posts.

After our long previous day, we slept 9.5 hours before being woken by my alarm. We had breakfast in our hotel again, which was much less crowded today at 8am than yesterday at 7am. We then ventured out to see a few more temples and other sites. The largest place we visited was Preah Khan (Sacred Sword Temple), which was like Ta Prohm in that both are partially collapsed and somewhat invaded by trees.

For lunch, our tour guide brought us to downtown Siem Reap where we had a good, interesting meal at The Blue Pumpkin, a place so welcoming and with a tempting, eclectic menu that I'd probably visit it regularly if it were in California.

Our tour guide picked us up and brought us to the War Museum, a haunting place with many tanks, assorted artillery, some rocket launchers, guns, and more, supplied by Russia, China, and the United States. We also saw a variety of land mines and their different effects, trigger methods, etc. Our general tour guide handed us off to a specialist guide for the museum. The museum's guide, younger than us, grew up during the war. He can recount many personal, brutal stories: encounters with mines, grenades, etc. We kept needing to stop him from telling us some of the disturbing details and from showing us his eye injury. While I think seeing this museum and hearing these tales is important, I'm glad this will be my only encounter with the brutal recent history of this country. Even this was a little too much.

Next up was a school for artisans, designed to teach disadvantaged young people traditional handicrafts. The public is allowed to tour the school and see people at work. It was neat watching these skilled artists at work; we saw silk painting, wood carving, soap carving, lacquering, varnishing, and stone carving. Some of the pieces went through a process to make them look more antique. (I'm not sure how I feel about that.) Most items produced are high quality and are for sale at the school's shop. Like the museum, we also had a specialist guide here, though this one was in too much of a hurry -- I didn't get to watch the artists as much as I wanted.

Our last outing of the day, and the one that took the longest, was a visit to a floating village outside of town. We took a tuk-tuk there rather than our regular car. Though I think the switch was because our guide was saving gas money, I liked the substitution because the tuk-tuk let me take many pictures of town and rural life at a slower speed and without any obstruction from windows. Our guide had discouraged us from going to the village, claiming it was dirty and smelly this time of year. While it was a bit dirty, it wasn't that dirty and it certainly didn't smell. In fact, I thought the trip was really cool, both the boat ride around the floating village and the tuk-tuk ride.

We returned, ate an early dinner, and retired to our hotel.