Arriving late in Siem Reap did not give us too many choices. I was a bit hungry so I decided to stop over at the little market across the street and have some dinner. Bad mistake, it seems like the food in Cambodia may not be as clean as it is in Thailand, so I caught a pretty bad diarrhea which I am fighting today with some Imodium. Anyhow, we did meet some friendly guys and sat down and quickly had a few beers. There were many children begging and Ivan got up to help out one mother with her child. She asked for milk for the kid and he went to the supermarket with her. Sure enough she picked out a $7.5 box of milk power and not just a box of milk. When he came back to sit down, there were 4 or 5 children following him crying that they were hungry. It’s quite incredible that they are though, because the land is really rich and there are fruits around everywhere. One girls was crying hard and really had these heart breaking eyes. She kept weeping and crying “One Dolla, One Dolla, Sir, very hungry”. I saw one of the Cambodian guys trying to give the girl around 10c in Cambodian money and she pushed him back because she wanted more. To put that into perspective, 10c is enough to buy some desert on the street. Anyhow, I think they are poor, but they are not begging for food, they are begging for money to buy stuff and they will stop crying immediately once they realize that they can’t get anything from you. I will try to find out how this all works from some locals and hopefully I am right.
We went to one of the clubs to have a few beers and to my surprise, this was almost like the center of Bangkok. Beautiful prostitutes were everywhere and there are a ton of lady boys trying to hit up on men. One thing though is not bad, they are not aggressive and when you say that you are going home to sleep and you are just visiting Angkor Wat, they will leave you alone and may say “see you tomorrow, sir”. Ivan was walking a girl home and well I tried to warn him but it wasn’t a girl. She looked really good, but there was just no way she was a girl. One of the local guys whom we had met on the market had joined us and he could not stop laughing about it. Anyhow, at 1 o’clock he decided to walk her home. He had no intentions with her whatsoever but he just felt like doing her a favor by walking her home. Obviously, she was working and naturally wanted something else. Ivan walked the lady boy home, which was quite a long way. The lady boy wanted to introduce him to her/his parents and asked him to come inside. Apparently, he declined and walked back. He did pay her quite a bit of money according to him, just so she would still make enough that night. Funny … I got back home around 2am as I was waiting for him and then decided to write a little bit and go to sleep. He arrived at around 4am and I was already asleep then. He got lost on the way back home from the transvestite’s home and then he was devastated when I told him that it was a guy and not a girl he walked home.
A fun night, and a good memory. The next day we woke up and booked a Tuc Tuc for the whole day. The people at the hotel recommended going to the lake and seeing the floating village and then come back and watch the sunset at Angkor Wat. We arrived at the lake and they were selling us $20 per person private boat tickets. “Too much”, I said, but they only lowered the price to $30 for the two of us. The guys next to us paid $15 each as well for that boat, but were actually 4 people, I even though this is way too expensive for Cambodia, it was still relatively cheap. The floating village was rather unspectacular, except some nice crocodiles and some interesting shots we were able to take. Also, we met some Japanese girls out on the lake and went swimming with the guides.
On our way back to the hotel, we told the taxi driver to go ahead and drive home and we would just walk. You can see so much more when walking. We were actually walking around in an area where there were no tourists, and children and adults were waving as we walked by their homes. There are many very poor people in those areas, but no beggars. When you are in the center, you are not able to walk more than 5 meters without having 3 kids jumping up and down trying to get a dollar from you. At the market I told Ivan to try Mangosteen , I asked the lady for just one piece, she didn’t understand a word and there were 2 friends immediately next to her advising her. After a brief discussing she said
