According to the general theme of our trip, for Siem Reap we decided to stay a little way out of town. Obviously, no one knew where the place was so we drove round for an hour looking for it....When we arrived though, we knew we'd made the right choice. Villa Shanti is a lovely little place, away from the centre with only seven rooms and its own pool.
Siem Reap reminded me of Luang Prabang in many ways - almost an illusion created for tourists. That's not to say it's not a nice place - to the contrary. On the drive from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap the roads are barely paved, there is no street lighting and no electricity. People live in very basic huts and cook around an improvised fire.... Siem Reap is like another world.
The central part of the town has dozens of five star hotels, the roads are all very well paved and lit. There are beautiful, well tended gardens and more police than I've ever seen in one place anywhere else in SE Asia. The central street - imaginitively named 'pub street' seemed to us like any street you'd find in a tourist town on a package holiday in Europe. Almost all of the businesses are non-cambodian owned and at night police literally sit at either end to keep out the beggars. It was very nice though....
As we were staying out of town, we noticed that by the time we got to Villa Shanti the street lighting had stopped and so had the paved roads. There are signs all the way up the river that talk about how its been cleaned up.... closer to our end of town, adjacent to the metallic huts on the river banks, we noticed a huge net across the river with tons of rubbish in it. The net alone was preventing it from spreading too far downstream....
The staff at the villa were lovely, young Cambodian guys who talked to us about their lives and the Pol Pot regime. All of them work full time, study full time and cycle for hours between their homes and work / school, just to make enough money to be able to keep studying. Their ultimate goal was to become tour guides at Angkor. In a country where the average wage is less than $1USD a day, tour guiding is a 'well-paid' 'career'. One of the guys talked about trying to get sponsored to go to Australia, he was staggered at how many countries Jane and I have visited and he pointed out that he would never be able to afford to even visit England - even if he saved for the rest of his life. I think that was the main reason I was so cynical about Siem Reap (yes, I'm cynical about everything anyway...), it didn't seem like any of the tourist cash actually went to the people who live there. We were even more shocked when we found out where the money from Angkor Wat goes....
We chose to just see the temples on one day and they were incredible. You could easily spend a week visiting the site as its so huge but at $20 dollars a day entry we decided to cram in as much as possible in one visit. Unsurprisingly, the site was packed (it gets up to seven thousand visits per day in peak season) and absolutely huge. One of the guys from our hotel drove us around in his tuk- tuk and did some improvised guiding!It was hard going in 35 degree heat and what felt like 100% humidity but the whole sight was incredible. As Jane seems jinxed with these things, Angkor Wat was covered in scaffolding for repairs.... it was still amazing though. Our favourite temple was Ta Prohm (aka the one from Tomb Raider), it was a jumble of fallen down temples and rocks with incredible trees everywhere.
After our visit, we wondered where all the cash raised from the entrance fee goes? $20 USD a day times seven thousand = a LOT of money. Cambodia is a very corrupt country - everyone there will tell you that but we were still shocked when a local pointed out that Angkor Wat was "owned by the prime minister". Apparently the prime minister (also a former member of the Khmer Rouge) owns a company called Sokha Hotel group (there are several of these five star hotels across Cambodia and in Siem Reap - officially the group is owned by a 'close friend' of the PM) and sure enough - on the back of our ticket it actually states that the site is operated by APSARA (the government group supposed to preserve Angkor) and SOKHA HOTELS.
After that we noticed that the Sokha hotel was really popular - it won "best Hotel" "best spa" and "best service" awards for the past year - as voted for by the Cambodian Government.... Apparently it's an open secret that the Prime Minister is making a fortune out of the temples.
That'll be why the actual province of Siem Reap is still the third poorest in the whole of Cambodia.
We did enjoy Siem Reap, it's a beautiful place and probably one of the safest towns in Asia. The people we met, as with all Cambodians, were lovely, open and incredibly friendly - which is surprising given their recent and apparently, current history. I'm by no means an expert on Cambodian politics but it's clear that the many millions made at Angkor aren't actually going where they should be and I doubt that many tourists are even interested....
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