Cherishing Cambodia

Wow, it is hard to believe that our time in Cambodia is already through! We only spent one week in this wonderful country and it has definitely captured our hearts! Cambodia has not had an easy past, but the people could not be nicer!! We were always greeted with smiling faces and we had so many genuine interactions.

We arrived in Cambodia via bus. The bus company helped us acquire our tourist visa and cross the border from Thailand. We found it all very overwhelming and a little scary. We had to get off the bus, then walk through Thai departures, then go through Cambodian entry, then get our passport stamp, then find our bus! I was worried we were going to get left behind or denied entry or forget a step of the process, but it all worked out!!

I was elated to finally arrive in Siem Reap. I was last in this wonderful city in April of 2017, and since then it has been one of my favorite places. This is the gateway to Angkor Wat and the famous Cambodian temples. The central tower of Angkor Wat is about 213 feet tall and no Siem Reap buildings can be built taller than the tower. So most hotels, government buildings, museums, etc. are only two or three stories high. It is such a lovely town with a quaint feel to it. The night markets boast a myriad of spices, flashy clothes, and beautiful paintings. And Pub Street is always filled with people, music, and not to mention delicious food and drinks!

On our first full day in Siem Reap we visited Kampong Pluek, otherwise know as the floating village. However, as you can see from the pictures it is not quite floating! The village is nearby to Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in Southeast Asia. The lake rises 10-20 feet in the wet season, so the villagers learned to adapt. Kampong Pluek is largely dependent on the lake for their livelihood. In the dry season, they grow crops such as rice, and in the wet season they fish in the lake.

It was so interesting to see how these people lived. The whole village, like all others in Cambodia, is built around a central temple. People are identified by what temple they belong to, not what town or village they are from.

My favorite part about this day was getting to talk to the school children. There are two schools in the village, one is Cambodian and one is English. Both schools are free to anyone, so most students spend half a day at each school. At just ten years old, these children had wonderful conversational English. This will be a valuable skill for them later in life!! Sadly, in many other places in Cambodia education comes at a cost. Most families cannot afford this so the children turn to begging and selling food and souvenirs to tourists.

After exploring the village we watched a wonderful sunset on a floating restaurant on the lake. It was unforgettable!!

Next up, temple day!! We woke up at 3:30am to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Despite getting there quite early, we were just a few of over a thousand people trying to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. Thankfully we found ourselves a good spot. We spent the morning exploring five different temples. They all had something wonderful and unique to offer! Angkor Wat is by far the largest temple and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Ta Keo is like a mountain! The stairs were so steep that I tied up my long dress so I could climb more easily. And Ta Prohm is the Indiana Jones Temple. These temples are all about 900 – 1,000 years old, and Ta Prohm is built in the heart of the jungle. About 500 years ago trees started growing in the temple. Nature and ancient architecture fused into one is quite a sight! After exploring the temples and logging 13,000 steps, we figured we were due for a nap!!

Next was the day we had been anxiously awaiting since we booked our flights back in July…horseback riding!!! We rode two very spirited Cambodian horses, mine was Sky and Reid’s was Rambo. These two boys were not fans of each other so Reid and I rode far apart the whole morning. Nevertheless, this gave us our ‘horse fix’ until we return to the ranch in May.

We spent our last day in Siem Reap on a 10 mile bike ride through the countryside. It was so beautiful and we stopped along the way to see rice fields, a local market, a mushroom farm, and rice wine distillery, and a lotus farm. Our guide George, and avid mountain biker and runner, told us that he has always wanted to see the Rocky Mountains! We told him to come visit us someday, but that we would not be able to take him mountain biking!! (It is much easier to bike on flat roads at sea level, than at 9,000 feet on hilly terrain!)

We spent our last day in Cambodia in the city of Phnom Penh, to learn about the Cambodian genocide that took place from 1975-1979. This is a tragic event in history that is unknown to most.

After the Vietnam War, Cambodia was in a fragile state. Communist General Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army came into power and managed to kill more than one in every four Cambodians. This happened because Pol Pot decided to take his country back to Year 0, with no technology or outside influence (aside from monetary aide given from China and the United States). He wanted Cambodia to be a simple agrarian society. This meant that anyone with an education (engineers, doctors, teachers, etc.) and their families were enemies of the state and must be tortured and killed. Pol Pot wet as far to say that anyone with glasses or who spoke a second language was an enemy. Innocent Cambodian citizens died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, or execution by the Khmer Rouge.  This was a dark four year period that involved forced labor camps where people worked 17-20 hours a day, prisons where senseless torture took place, and over 23,000 mass graves. This is an incredibly short synopsis of the Cambodian Genocide, there is lots of detailed information on the internet that dives deeper into this topic. This is a great article as well: History of the Khmer Rouge.

We recently passed Holocaust Remembrance Day on Janaury 27th. When reflecting on the heartwrenching history of the Third Reich, the phrase I see most often is “never again”. Never again should we have another genocide, is the claim made by educators, politicians, and other leaders.

It is easy to say ‘never again’, however it much more difficult to enact change and generate action. Since the Holocaust, four genocides come to mind, times where we have failed the promise to never let another genocide happen again. Cambodia from 1975- 1979, the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994,  the ongoing violence in Darfur, Sudan, and most recently, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ violence towards the Rohingya people in northern Myanmar.

I am a huge proponent of being informed and involved in current and historical events. The world needs us to be educated!

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

-George Santayana

Okay, I will get down off by soapbox now!

Thanks for reading! We will be in Vietnam for three weeks, doing our best to evade the coronavirus.

Stay tuned!

Love,

Sorrell

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble, but take heart! I have overcome the world.” -John 16:33